The extraordinary achievement of Foucault and those who thought like him was, given their analysis of the workings of power, to go on to make one of the most influential of postmodernist claims – the claim that such discourses entailed, imposed, demanded (the many possibilities here constitute the interest of the claim) a particular kind of identity for all those who were affected by them. In postmodernist jargon, they ‘constitute the subject’. Of course, the fact that institutions and their discourses demand that you be a particular sort of person, to ‘fit in’, was hardly unknown.
