Matrix, Act, Circulation: Foucault and the Problem of the Individual
In June 1966, shortly after the publication of Les Mots et les choses, Michel Foucault was interviewed by Pierre Dumayet for the French television programme Lectures pour tous. The interview is valuable not simply because Foucault explains the argument of his recently published book, but because he states with unusual directness what is at stake in his approach. The question is not what human beings are in themselves, nor how an already constituted subject comes to know the world. It is how the figure of the human being itself became historically available as an object of knowledge.
Foucault begins by challenging the assumption that the human sciences uncover a pre-existing human reality. Their development, he argues, has not brought us closer to some positive, concrete essence of the human. Rather, it has revealed the historical systems within which particular forms of human individuality become possible:
“L’Homme a été […] une figure très particulière, très déterminée, historiquement située…”
My translation: “Man has been […] a very particular, very determinate, historically situated figure.”
The formulation is important. Foucault is not saying merely that different periods have held different opinions about human beings. His claim is more radical. The very figure of “Man” that appears to modern thought as the natural subject and object of knowledge is itself historically constituted. What appears to us as the obvious starting point of inquiry is, from Foucault’s perspective, something that needs to be explained.
This is why he turns from the individual human being to what lies beneath the level at which individual experience normally becomes visible. The human sciences, he says, do not discover “l’Homme dans sa vérité,” “Man in his truth,” or some positive nucleus hidden within individual existence. What they encounter instead are larger formal arrangements:
“Ce qu’on découvre c’est une sorte de grand système de pensée, de grandes organisations formelles, qui sont en quelque sorte comme le sol sur lequel les individualités historiques apparaissent.”
My translation: “What one discovers is a kind of great system of thought, great formal organizations, which are in a sense like the ground upon which historical individualities appear.”
The metaphor of the ground is decisive. An individual does not first exist and then enter a system of thought as an independent consciousness confronting an external structure. The order of explanation is reversed. There is a historical field within which certain kinds of individuality can emerge in the first place. The individual is therefore not abolished, but displaced. Instead of functioning as the unquestioned origin of meaning, it becomes something that appears within conditions that precede it.
Foucault makes the point even more sharply when he describes what is individual, singular, and lived as:
“une sorte de scintillement de surface au-dessus de grands systèmes formels.”
My translation: “a kind of surface scintillation above great formal systems.”
The image is deliberately unsettling. What seems most immediate to us—the lived individual, the singular experience, the conscious person—is no longer necessarily the deepest level of explanation. Beneath it are configurations that are less visible precisely because they make visibility possible. The task of thought is therefore not simply to descend into the individual in search of an authentic human core. It is to reconstruct the historical systems on whose surface individual forms can appear.
The question consequently changes. Instead of asking, What is man?, Foucault asks, in effect: What historical conditions made it possible for “Man” to appear as an object of knowledge at all?
That question is central to Les Mots et les choses. Foucault's concern is not primarily with the accumulation of ideas about humanity but with the deeper organization that determines what can count as an object of knowledge within a particular historical configuration. An episteme, in this sense, is not simply a body of beliefs shared by a period. It designates the historically specific arrangement of relations through which things become knowable, distinguishable, classifiable, and speakable.
The distinction matters because it changes how intellectual history itself must be understood. If knowledge were simply the result of independent minds discovering and organizing facts, history could be written as a succession of thinkers, each adding something to what came before. Foucault reverses that picture. Individual thinkers occupy a field that already establishes certain possibilities and limits. They can formulate new statements, but they do not begin from nowhere. They inherit distinctions, categories, methods, problems, and objects that make some forms of thought possible while rendering others difficult or even unintelligible.
This is also why Foucault's language of “systems” should not be understood in a crude mechanical sense. A system does not determine every individual statement or action in advance. Its function is more fundamental: it establishes a field of intelligibility. It provides a set of relations within which particular objects, identities, and propositions can appear as meaningful.
The individual therefore acquires a different status. If the system is the ground upon which historical individualities appear, individuality cannot be treated as the original explanatory principle. What matters is not only who speaks, thinks, or acts, but the conditions under which a person can occupy a particular position from which speaking, thinking, or acting becomes possible.
This displacement distinguishes Foucault from a more traditional conception of the subject. It also helps clarify, without making Sartre the subject of this article, the tension between existentialism and Foucault. Sartre had already rejected the idea of consciousness as a fixed substance in the Cartesian sense. Yet his philosophy continues to give the subject a privileged role in relation to freedom, choice, project, and self-constitution. The individual is situated and conditioned, but remains the site from which a situation can be assumed, interpreted, and transformed (Sartre, 1956).
Foucault moves the problem one level back. Before asking what a subject can make of its situation, he asks how the subject and its situation have become historically intelligible in the first place. The question is no longer simply how an individual can become free within a given world. It is how particular forms of subjectivity, particular objects of knowledge, and particular relations between the two emerged within a historical configuration.
This does not mean that Foucault simply replaces the individual with a structure. He changes the direction of explanation. Instead of beginning with an already constituted individual and asking what structures influence that individual, he begins with the historical field and asks how individual positions become possible within it.
The interview itself points toward the difficulty this creates. If our thought is formed within historical systems that we do not consciously construct, how can we ever become aware of those systems? Foucault describes the problem through the striking image of turning reason back upon itself:
“Il faudrait [que la pensée] passe au dehors d’elle-même. En quelque sorte, il faudrait la retourner comme un doigt de gant.”
My translation: “Thought would have to pass outside itself. In a sense, it would have to be turned inside out like a glove.”
The image captures a paradox. We attempt to investigate the conditions that organize our thought, but the investigation itself takes place within those conditions. There is no easy position of absolute exteriority from which the system could be observed without remainder. To think the historical field is therefore also to confront the limits imposed by the very categories through which it is being thought.
Foucault's notion of an “ethnology of our own culture” follows from this difficulty. We must attempt to make our own forms of thought strange enough to become objects of inquiry. Yet the hypothetical outsider—the Chinese person, the Arapesh, the Nambikwara, even the imagined Martian—would still have to encounter our culture through some framework of intelligibility. The problem cannot simply be solved by finding a completely external observer.
Critique therefore begins not with the recovery of an authentic subject hidden beneath historical conditions, but with an attempt to expose those conditions themselves. The individual is no longer the unquestioned beginning of the analysis. The ground comes first.
But once the ground has been placed first, another question becomes unavoidable. If individualities emerge within historical systems, and if the positions available to them are conditioned by those systems, what does it mean for an individual to act?
The answer cannot simply be a return to the autonomous subject that Foucault has displaced. Yet neither is it satisfactory to conclude that action is merely the execution of a pre-existing structure. The problem is whether something can happen within a historical field that is not simply predetermined by it.
This is where the argument must move beyond the first inversion. Foucault has given us the historical ground upon which individualities appear. The next question concerns what happens when an individual occupying a position within that ground acts—and what happens to the ground when that act enters circulation.
The problem is therefore not simply system versus individual. It is the relation between matrix, position, and act.
Part II — From System to Act
If the individual appears within a historical field that precedes it, the next problem is to think action without placing the actor outside the field that makes action possible.
For this purpose, the notion of a matrix is useful, provided it is understood neither as a rigid mechanism nor as a synonym for Foucault's episteme. By “matrix” I mean the historically organized field of distinctions, categories, relations, practices, and possibilities within which things become intelligible and positions become available. The term names, for the purposes of this argument, the structure of possibility implied by Foucault's image of the ground.
A matrix does not prescribe every particular event. It establishes a space in which events can occur and acquire meaning. A language, for example, makes an enormous number of utterances possible without determining which sentence a speaker will produce at a particular moment. A legal system establishes forms within which an act can count as a contract, a crime, a marriage, or a refusal, but it does not mechanically generate each individual decision. A social classification makes certain identities recognizable without dictating every way in which a person will inhabit one of them.
The matrix therefore precedes the individual act without exhausting what can happen within it.
This gives us the first sequence: matrix → position → act
The matrix establishes a field of possible positions. A person occupies one of those positions and acts from within it. The act is consequently neither an entirely free creation nor a simple repetition of an existing rule. It is an actualization of possibilities that precede the particular event.
This is one reason why Foucault's language of the “ground” is more useful here than the language of determination. The systems he describes are “le sol sur lequel les individualités historiques apparaissent”—“the ground upon which historical individualities appear.” A ground supports without dictating the exact form of everything that appears upon it. The metaphor leaves room for variation, conflict, displacement, and emergence.
The point is important because the rejection of the individual as origin does not require the rejection of agency. To say that an act has conditions is not to say that it has no consequences. To say that an individual occupies a position within a field is not to say that everything the individual does was already contained in that field in precisely that form.
The more productive question is therefore not whether an act is free from the matrix, but whether something can happen within it that alters the relations through which subsequent acts become possible.
This is where circulation becomes decisive.
An act does not necessarily remain attached to the individual who performs it. A statement can be repeated. A gesture can be imitated. A classification can be adopted by an institution. A phrase can be quoted in a new context. A practice can spread from one setting to another. A distinction introduced in one context can become a resource for another.
Once an act circulates, it enters a field larger than the intention of the person who initially produced it. It is no longer simply something that someone did. It becomes something that can be repeated, taken up, modified, contested, or incorporated into other practices.
Circulation is therefore not a secondary stage that follows action from the outside. It is part of what gives an act historical efficacy. An event acquires significance through the relations into which it enters. Its consequences depend not only on what the actor intended but on how the act is received, reproduced, transformed, or rejected.
At this point, the relation between matrix and act becomes reciprocal.
The matrix makes the act possible. The act can then reproduce the matrix. But it can also displace something within it. A repetition is never necessarily identical to the rule it repeats, because every repetition takes place in a particular context. A category can be used in an unexpected way. A familiar form can be placed in an unfamiliar relation. A practice can be repeated until its internal tensions become visible.
The resulting sequence is therefore:
matrix → position → act → circulation → reproduction or displacement → transformation
Not every individual action transforms the system. Most acts probably do not. Many simply reproduce existing arrangements. The point is more precise: reproduction and transformation belong to the same field of practice. The system persists because it is repeatedly enacted, but precisely because it must be enacted, its continuation is never entirely independent of what happens in those enactments.
The individual consequently occupies a more complicated position than either humanism or determinism allows. The individual is not the sovereign source of the order in which action takes place, yet neither is the individual merely the passive endpoint of structural causation. Individual action is one of the places where a historical arrangement is actualized. Through such acts, rules are repeated, distinctions are maintained, meanings are circulated, and, under certain conditions, possibilities are opened that were not previously recognized in the same way.
This offers another way of reading Foucault's description of individual existence as “une sorte de scintillement de surface”—“a kind of surface scintillation”—above “de grands systèmes formels,” “great formal systems.” The metaphor might initially suggest that the individual is superficial and therefore philosophically secondary. But a surface is also where something becomes visible. The “scintillation” may be brief, contingent, and dependent upon deeper conditions, yet it is also one of the places where those conditions become actual.
The individual act can therefore be understood as an event of actualization. It does not create the field from nothing. It selects, combines, repeats, and sometimes alters possibilities that the field makes available. Its historical importance depends in part on what happens after the moment of action—whether it disappears, becomes a repetition, enters circulation, acquires institutional form, or provides a new way of organizing subsequent practices.
This also changes the meaning of transformation. Transformation does not require an agent who steps outside history and introduces an entirely new order. Such an image would merely reinstall the sovereign subject in another form. Change can occur through a modification internal to an existing arrangement: something is repeated differently; a position is occupied in an unexpected way; a distinction is challenged from within the vocabulary that established it; a practice is redirected toward another end; a form that belonged to one context begins to function differently in another.
The matrix is therefore not a static container. It exists through its ongoing actualization. Its apparent stability depends upon repetition, and repetition creates the possibility of variation. The same processes that maintain an order can also become the means by which that order changes.
This is where Foucault's metaphor of turning reason inside out becomes relevant again. In the interview, he describes the difficulty of knowing the very categories through which we know:
“Il faut toute une torsion de notre raison sur elle-même pour qu’elle arrive à se ressaisir ainsi comme un phénomène qui lui serait étranger. Il faut qu’elle passe au dehors d’elle-même. En quelque sorte, il faudrait la retourner comme un doigt de gant.”
My translation: “It requires a whole torsion of our reason upon itself for it to grasp itself as a phenomenon that would be foreign to it. It has to pass outside itself. In a sense, it would have to be turned inside out like a glove.”
The metaphor can now be read not only as a description of philosophical reflection but as a model of transformation. To turn a glove inside out is not to replace it with something external. The same material is reorganized through an inversion of its relations. Nothing has to arrive from an absolute outside; the alteration occurs through a reconfiguration of what is already there.
Something similar can be said of historical action. If the individual cannot occupy a position completely outside the matrix, transformation must occur through possibilities available within it. Critique is therefore not the achievement of a perfectly autonomous consciousness standing beyond its historical conditions. It is a reflexive movement within those conditions: a moment in which an arrangement becomes capable of being perceived differently and, consequently, of being used differently.
This also clarifies what is at stake in Foucault's “ethnology of our own culture.” The task is not to discover a position from which our categories can simply be abandoned. Foucault recognizes the difficulty: we can know ourselves only through the “cadres mentaux” and “catégories de savoir” that already belong to us. The critical movement consequently has to be internal. We make our own forms of thought strange without ever becoming completely foreign to them.
The same logic applies to action. We do not first become autonomous subjects and then enter a system. We become capable of acting through positions, languages, practices, and distinctions that precede us. Yet once these inherited forms are used, repeated, and circulated, they can acquire effects that exceed their original configuration.
The question with which Part I ended can now be answered without returning to the sovereign subject. If the individual does not begin the system, action begins at a position within it. If the act does not stand outside the matrix, its transformative possibility lies in what happens when that act enters circulation.
The resulting picture is neither individualism nor determinism. It is a circuit:
matrix → position → act → circulation → transformation → new matrix
The last term is important. Once transformed, the field becomes the condition for further positions and further actions. The process therefore has no final point at which the system is replaced by a completely free subject. What changes is the field of possibilities itself.
The individual does not stand at the beginning of this movement. But neither does the system stand immobile at the end of it.
The individual is where a historical order becomes an act. And the act, once it circulates, is one of the ways in which that order can become something else.
Video and archival source
The interview discussed here is the 15 June 1966 broadcast of Lectures pour tous, in which Pierre Dumayet interviewed Michel Foucault about Les Mots et les choses. The INA catalogue identifies the programme, date, interviewer, participant, and subject.
Quand l’homme devient objet de savoir, la réflexion de Michel Foucault | INA Culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNZqfM3LVoA
Watch / consult the INA archival record for the interview
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