Post-structuralist theories of power have fundamentally challenged the classical humanistic conception of the subject as a self-transparent, rational, and autonomous origin of meaning and action. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault (1982, 1991) reconceptualized subjectivity not as a pre-given essence but as an effect of historically specific power–knowledge relations. Power is therefore not simply repressive or external to the subject but productive: it constitutes subjects by shaping what can be thought, said, and done within particular regimes of facts and truth. The subject thus appears not as the foundation of social order or critique but as one of its contingent outcomes. This move toward a post-humanist, de-subjectivised understanding of power (Rose, 1999; Butler, 1997) situates human agency within broader assemblages of discourse, practice, and material relations. New Materialism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Barad, 2007) and Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 2004) further emphasize that power emerges through heterogeneous human and non-human networks that co-constitute action and meaning. These decentered perspectives offer valuable insights but also generate dilemmas for critical social psychology. From a posthuman standpoint, agency is both expanded (to non-human entities and material environments) and reduced, as the idea of a sovereign human subject is replaced by relational, centreless agency constituted through networks of power (Foucault, 1977, 1982). If subjectivity itself is produced through power, notions of emancipation and critique become difficult to sustain: emancipation and critique of what, and for whom? (Allen, 2016). To deny human agency altogether risks rendering analyses of power either incoherent or pointless. Post-human theories therefore raise fundamental questions about the status of agency and subjectivity, particularly whether and how a first-person perspective can be accommodated within these frameworks.

Subject-scientific approaches highlight that any notion of power presupposes meaningful and effective possibilities for action from a first-person perspective (Holzkamp, 2013; Schraube, 2013; Højholt & Schraube, 2016; Nissen, 2012; Parietti, 2022; Busch-Jensen, 2025). Even if a person’s actions affect millions, it makes little sense to describe them as powerful if they neither choose nor endorse those actions. In other words, power cannot be adequately identified without attention to people’s first-person perspectives. Subject-science and post-humanist theory resonate insofar as both recognize the emergent and relational character of action: power is not a fixed possession but arises through alignments, translations, and stabilizations in networks. Yet they differ substantially, as subject-scientific approaches foreground lived, first-person experiences of power, whereas post-human theories tend to describe power from a third-person perspective of assemblages, discourses, and material relations. Reconciling these views remains a challenge that invites debate.