Walpurgis
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Foucault and "the Self"
« on: 2002-06-22 05:53:02 » |
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How does Foucault understand "the self"? What might Foucault mean by "Practices of the Self"?
"All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence."(1)
One of Foucault’s "hyper-pessimistic" concerns is with the subject: one third of the methodological axis of power, knowledge and subject.(2) The subject is defined as part of this triad. The subject is evaluated according to her/his ability to change the relations of power within her/his political system. This method of definition and evaluation is what I aim to elucidate here.
The political systems to which Foucault refers are multiple dynamic forms of power/knowledge, so called not because "knowledge is power", but because both knowledge and power are enmeshed in various social institutions and practices.(3) The truth or falsity of a knowledge-claim is determined by the relations of power (in the institutions of such and such a political system) between different discourse. These discourses are exchanges of knowledge based in various social practices and institutions.(4) Discourses are always institutional in the sense that they are a part of a social organisation, but the degree of an institution’s legitimacy varies.(5) Foucault seems to equate the legitimisation of institutions with the truth or falsity of their knowledge claims. That said, it is the operation of discourses via the institutions, and around what concepts discourses are formed and develop that is Foucault’s main concern here, not the truth of falsity of their claims.(6) Discourses that are viewed as legitimate and true are characterised by Foucault as a "regime of truth". A regime of truth is to a large degree self-validating. This legitimisation is achieved by valorising some statements and devaluing others within a particular sphere of interest, thus achieving a definition of what is true or false.(7) Knowledge that challenges a regime of truth is suppressed or invalidated.
The notion of the regime of truth is Foucault’s challenge to the idea that knowledge is pre-existent and value-free. This regime is possible because knowledge is produced within the field of power; consequently, it is always used to some end, because power is a purposive activity.( Power is an activity in the sense that it only exists through and in action.(9) This regime of truth defines the rules of the "truth-game" where the truth of knowledge-claims cannot be neutral, cannot be outside power. The truth-game is the method by which humans have constructed knowledge about themselves, related to specific techniques.(10) The truth-game defines for all discourse how knowledge is to be approached, discussed, understood and considered true. Those discourses that do not play the dominant game are not considered true. Here, Foucault is not concerned with epistemology, but with the politics and ethics of truth. Yet despite the discursive struggles and denunciations, truth does indeed exist and operate in the world, but it is not identical to it; truth is of the world. Foucault defines this as a circular process "produced by forms of multiple restraint within the general politics of truth and is an effect of power relations in the way politics of truth is constructed in the social organisation."(11)
The current regime of truth operates in three modes. 1. It categorises, distributes and manipulates. 2. It seeks or claims scientific understanding.(12) 3. It gives meaning to selves. The former two modes are typified by Foucault as practices of power and the latter as practices of the self.(13) Both types of Practice interface to some degree, in the way modes one and two influence mode three. In a sense mode three is also a practice of power, as there is a certain amount of exchange between power and self. This fluidity is expressed in the rule of conduct people subject themselves to, and what their relationship to this subjection is. People may acquiesce to a dominant institutional mode of subjection (say, that of an army camp), or they may form other rules of conduct independent of these encroaching interests (like Plato’s Parrhesia).(14) Foucault calls this, "the mode of subjection" and the double meaning of this word are purposefully implied.(15) This contact between the three modes Foucault names "governmentality". Governmentality is a form of management, "the totality of practices by which one can constitute, define, organise, instrumentalise the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have with regard to each other."(16) This includes management of oneself as well as others. Both managerial practices involve "certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes."(17)
This boundary blurring, this overlap expresses why the third mode of this melee of practices is important as the (admittedly hazy) area of intercourse between both practices. It is evident that "giving meaning to selves" involves the possibility of challenging the regime of truth if a particular form of self-management escapes or distorts the imperatives of the former two modes. Because of this relationship, it is necessary to explore both practices of power and practices of the self to make full sense of the latter concept. This should also allow a greater understanding of Foucault’s aims, his understanding of the self, and how the mode of subjection takes place.(18)
Practices of Power - normalisation
Foucault clearly expresses his vision of power in The History of Sexuality Vol. I. "Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation." Power therefore, is omnipresent because it comes from social activity, which is constant. These are the activities of individual people and institutions. (Foucault uses the term "capillary" to express the circulation of power throughout the society, or, the "social body").(19) Power is therefore not "top-down" from a central institution and is always in constant flux, struggle and entanglement, expressed primarily in these social relations, which are always subject to change. Foucault believes that because social relations are a form of power, nothing is outside of power, because no one is asocial. Therefore power is not an object, it cannot be acquired, and it is ineliminable. Power is not simply an institution, domination or repression, it is the struggle between all people and all institutions who are striving toward their own disparate or united ends, which Foucault calls a "strategical complex".(20) Due to this strategical plasticity, power always involves the possibility of resistance, reversal and change, the other face of power.(21)
It is within this confrontational and agoraphobic field of power that the enjoining of power and knowledge takes place, resulting in practices that are employed to discipline subjects. However, only dominant forms of power/knowledge can enforce the practice of power that is discipline, via different institutionalised methods. Foucault examined the institutional methods of the asylum, the prison, the hospital, the school and the forms of power/knowledge that validate them; psychiatry, criminal reform, medicine and pedagogy respectively.(22) This discipline is essentially productive in aim and its raw material is the body, identified by Foucault as the site of "micro-power". "[T]he disciplinary regime separates, divides, hierarchises and examines, as it simultaneously characterises the individual and orders them within a ‘multiplicity’ which both individualises and homogenises at the same time…"(23) This is the first mode of the regime of truth (the practice of dividing) and often works in tandem with the second mode (scientific classification).(24) These means of discipline are expressed in drills and training, standardising actions, and controlling and supervising space. In a factory, this facilitates productivity, in a school, it imposes orderly behaviour, in a town, it reduces dangerous crowds and in a hospital, it reduces epidemics.(25) Discipline is the modern form of power, a different technique from the pre-modern forms of power, which were overtly coercive, unambiguous spectacles of force.(26) Foucault claims that this rise in productive, disciplinary power is an essential development and reinforcement of industrial capitalism. "If economic exploitation separates the force and product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination."(27)
Foucault identifies the body as the site of the "micro-physics of power" because discipline requires a "coercive link with the apparatus of production" involving close surveillance and self-surveillance of individual bodies through various institutionalised methods.(28) This notion of surveillance is an important part of the disciplinary technique, which has implications for the practices of the self. Fraser identifies two types of surveillance, or "gaze". One is the "individualising" gaze, which involves exhaustive case studies and close medical and psychological examinations. Another is the unidirectional "synoptic visibility", made possible by architecture (e.g., Bentham’s Panopticon).(29) People conform to the mode of behaviour that is expected of them to avoid punishment and other forms of correction if they are aware of observation by punitive authority. Other disciplinary technologies, like two-way mirrors and CCTV, make this form of coercive conformity via surveillance prevalent. Yet there are still very many private spaces in which none of these objects are present. However, if a TV or a PC functions like a camera – a kind of obverted Panopticon – then these surveillance mechanisms are near omniscient. A third type of surveillance that is thoroughly saturating falls somewhere between the others as a mundane and common experience. This is Sartre’s "look", a gaze expressing the asymmetry of personal relations and the unknown properties behind the eyes (lenses, mirrors) of the looker (like the latter), and the individualising examination of personal assessment (similar to the former). The "look" goes some way to explain how social responses are enforced and internalised.(30) The sciences of humanity require these disciplinary modes of objectification, which are found covertly or overtly throughout all levels of society, in order to understand, classify and so control.
So this manipulation of the objectified body takes place on both a micro-scale (between individuals and institutions) and on a macro-scale (between institutions and globally). Both areas are embraced by a specific technique of governmentality that characterises this dual objectification. This is bio-power, which developed as a concern with both the human body and the human species.(31) Modern state power is further characterised by this concern and the necessities of the fostering of life, growth and care of the population. There is an increased need to understand human life scientifically on a mass scale (like population, epidemics) and on a micro-scale (resulting in the practices and technologies of disciplines and surveillance discussed above).(32) Bio-power is an umbrella term for the political attention of the sciences of humanity, and the subsequent effects on bodies.
The end to which this coercive truth-game is played and the reason why institutions license and valourised disciplinary knowledge claims is due to the relationship between disciplines and truth. Institutions authorise the practices of discipline, surveillance and bio-power for extracting information.(33)This information is received back into the truth-regime and consequently, human behaviour becomes more carefully defined with increasingly rigorous exactitude resulting in an intensifying demand for compliance to these carefully detailed minutiae. This is normalisation, a mode of subjection that homogenises and a productive process that furthers the ends of the relevant institution.
Ransom identifies three senses of "norm" in Foucault’s work, which gives the above concept of normalisation clarity. There is the disciplinary-surveillance norm of standardisation (through training and such); the average norm of statistics and the like drawn from, or schematising for, the former; and the moral sense of "normative". The former two senses of the term outline what counts as normal and natural for an average, paradigmatic human being. The third sense is a development of this natural-template, using it to measure the truth of all humans and what is right and good for them. Humans are evaluated on this basis, and their value decided upon.(34) However, there is a question of agency here which, though it must remain unexplored, seems to me a problem: who does this evaluation? Dominating and legitimised institutions are the loci of power, which base evaluation on the extent of human normalisation, but decisions about value require individual judgements. Where else can such judgements issue from? Power cannot be wholly nonsubjective as Foucault claims, unless we want to deny individuals responsibility for certain evaluations and actions, nor is it necessary or possible that such judgements are always reached via institutional consensus.
Such institutions are thus the loci of power/knowledge and the resulting normalisation, though not the sole source of it. Degrees of power are exercised by all and seem based on: the use of, and legitimised influence over discourse; access to, or ownership of resources; and the subjectivisation of the subject, via the practices of power and the self.
Practices of the Self - subjectivisation
Disciplinary power subjectivises, it organises the temperament and mentality of individuals through bodily manipulation, repetition and limitation. Foucault defines subjectivisation as "the process through which results the constitution of a subject, or more exactly, of a subjectivity which is obviously only one of the given possibilities of organising a consciousness of self."(35) This means that against or aside from disciplinary power, subjectivity is also possible as active self-formation. The body is not nothing but a passive, docile automaton under the practices of power. It is a subject, which may have a soul or freedom.(36) In view of the above exploration, the idea of the practices of the self now requires closer scrutiny. First though, it is necessary to explore an example of domination, a system of inaccessibility, which illustrates a certain mode of subjection and the dangers of normalisation. In this way, we might see why Foucault employs the notion of practices of the self more clearly. The humanist notion of sovereignty is one such dominating imperative. Though Foucault is unclear in what he means by "humanism", he claims as part of his critique that this is a problem inherent in the concept.(37) His main concern is the rarefying of a human nature, and of a human sovereign.
The Sovereign Subject - essentialism
Humanism is stagnant and dangerous due to the uncritical acceptance it has gained. Foucault characterises humanism as "…the totality of discourse through which Western man is told: ‘Even though you don’t exercise power, you can still be a ruler. Better yet, the more you deny yourself the exercise of power, the more you submit to those in power, then the more this increases your sovereignty’."(38) This somewhat ascetic notion of the rejection-of-power-so-as-to-empower is foisted upon Westerners as an ahistorical essence of what humans are. This imperative enforces a model on which we must base our values. This supposed universal human nature is unquestionable and unchallengable on its own grounds because of its non-contextual and ahistorical claims. Consequently, it assumes the force of religious and metaphysical imperatives and as such offers no scope for change or alteration via historical or cultural critique, resulting in a form of domination.
The humanist’s sovereign subject is offered an attractive illusion of freedom and power which promises a Cartesian house of absolute foundations. But the house is a prison and the freedom is slavery. The subjection of the humanist’s sovereign is four-fold. The soul rules the body, but is subject to God. Consciousness is sovereign over judgement, but is subject to the necessities of truth. The individual has control over her/his personal rights, but these are subject to the (mutually supporting) laws of nature and society. The humanist’s subject is also basically free, having an inner sovereignty, but this must accept the requirements of an outside, determined, world. The effect of this paradoxically subjected sovereignty is the restriction of the desire for, and seizure of, power.(39) Because of this danger Foucault sees it as necessary to have us actively challenge this modern myth, lest its status becomes an oppressive cannon by which we all must operate. This is what Foucault means when he says: "we need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has still to be done."(40)
This paradoxical give-and-take of the sovereign subject is an expression of "…the fundamental duality of Western consciousness."(41) The duality is reinforced by the modern production of the self which attempts to "turn man into a subject (an individual self and a defined personage in the social order) in order to subject him more completely and inescapably to the traversals and furrowings of power…".(42) This historical process of conformity and (covertly or overtly) enforced cohesion within Western cultural groups reinforces the pervasive dualistic perspective by placing those who do not conform outside the accepted boundaries (through a process of definition and identification), creating a series of Manachean oppositions which complement and support each other. Some of these oppositions are: good and evil, law-abiding and criminal, sane and insane, right and wrong, healthy and ill, "straight" and perverted, normal and abnormal.(43) These dualisms almost always require some degree of professional or qualified adjudication for legitimisation and resulting normalisation. These arbitrators are religious leaders, court judges, psychiatrists, medical doctors, academics, social workers, lifestyle magazines and agony aunts. These dualisms have opened chasms within the individual and depleted her/his own power to make decisions and represent her/himself concerning these, and other, issues. It is important to see how this development in the production of modern subjects has occurred so as to provide a possible solution.
Foucault defines the practices of the self as methods that "…permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."(44) This is a particular mode of subjection (or subjectivisation) that involves more than just the practices of power. It is now necessary to briefly touch upon historical practices of the self to ground Foucault’s rather abstract notions of subjectivisation and all that this entails. Without some (however short) reference to historical examples it would be difficult to illustrate Foucault’s ideas as concrete and convincing, not just a self-supporting abstraction.(45) For the Greeks of Plato’s Alcibiades practices of the self are a political and erotic activity concerning wealth and health. Reflection and meditation on oneself were important to self-care, and later in the Hellenistic age writing was used to help pay attention to oneself. The Stoics also practised self-care through writing, remembering and examining the conscience. They used imaginative exercises, similar in purpose and use to philosophical thought-experiment. Self-examination became permanent occupation with Cassian, not just an occasional exercise. As Christianity took hold the practice of self-knowledge became ascendant. The purification of the self was impossible unless it was known as opposed to simply cared for. What was private for the Stoics became public for the Christians. Monks had to verify that their thoughts were good by telling others. Hence, it became necessary for the monastic Christians to verbalise their thoughts continually to their Abbot. They had to tell him all that they thought and ask permission to do anything. This was obedience: the sacrifice of the will, an important development in the subjectivisation of the modern subject.
Foucault’s examination of the practices of the Ancient Greeks and Early Christians has highlighted the historical development of our current practices. He exposes our practices of the self as contingent, not necessary, fluid and transient, not concrete and eternal, thus challenging universalism of the humanist type. In Foucault’s antiquarian examples, practices were based on two principles: concern with the self and knowledge of the self. The primary principle in the past was the former, though Western history came to emphasise the latter. This was due to a transformation in Western morality. "We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give ourselves more care than anything else in the world." Moreover "social morality seeks the rules of acceptable behaviour in relations with others". Self-care became equated with egoism; this was the inheritance of Christian self-renunciation as a condition for salvation. The modern inversion of old principles is further identified by Foucault as due to the recent tradition in epistemology (from Descartes to Husserl) where knowledge of the self is the first step to a theory of knowledge.(46) The consequences appear to be the intermediary figure discussed above, the disciplinarian that stands between the divided self. This intermediary was present during the examined period and tentative parallels can be drawn here over the ages between the listening, ordering Abbots, and the careful attentions and instructions of our intermediaries, our new confessors who reinforce the dualisms discussed above. Importantly, the verbalisation of the monks discussed above was "reinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences in order to use [it] without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self."(47)
This then, highlights the close conceptual and practical relation to the subjected sovereign and its problems and the dangers involved in modern practices of the self. Foucault’s genealogical method thus reveals the Christian miasma of recent and present practices of the self, lingering from monastic practices dating back to the Fourth Century AD. It must be noted though that Foucault does not deny that human nature (or God, immortal souls, healing crystals, Vishnu, Cthulhu, or whatever) exists in the lives of people who act as if such concepts were a reality through the mode in which they subject themselves. But when such concepts are genealogically examined, they are revealed as the product of power/knowledge and the cultural threads of historical struggle are contained therein. However, the practices of the self are not solely a mode of subjection because of the interference of an intermediary; subjectivity is possible by other means.
The Virtue of Critique - thinking differently
When one comes to the limit of the modern subject as formed by the Christian morality and the humanist notion of the sovereign subject through Foucault’s methods, one can see four major dangers: the danger of the intermediary, the danger of rights, the danger of utopianism and the danger of domination.
The intermediary is dangerous because s/he practices normalisation through representing another. This is the "indignity of speaking for others" of which Deleuze speaks.(48) It is dangerous because normalisation is "…a practice of defining what is normal in a group and attempting to hold people to that norm." May calls this the "antirepresentationalist principle" which is a response to humanist essentialism—an attempt to avoid telling people who they are, so that they can subjectivise themselves as needs must.(49) The second danger is "rights" as part of the natural imperative that constitutes the sovereign subject. Though Foucault has no interest in denying our rights, his writing has exposed two weaknesses that this essentialism denies and perpetuates. Foucault shows that our psychology is not apolitical and that rights do not defend one against disciplinary power. Humanist liberalism focuses "on consent as the privileged site of political and social legitimacy", but this notion is undermined by discipline which is non-consensual, working on an entirely different level of influence.(50) The notion of "human rights" also inheres in the third danger, universalism and utopianism. The universality of rights creates a generality that is to open to dismissal (for example, the right to free speech). There is the opposite problem of a lack of specificity for certain difficulties on a local level of power. But paradoxically when rights are specific, they quickly become outdated (like the American Third Amendment right to refuse quartering of soldiers during peacetime). The notion of rights includes implicit teleological assumptions about human essence and has, in consequence, proven to be too restrictive. These dangers have supported forms of domination. Domination results when systems of power become inaccessible, assuming the guise of imperatives, creating problems that arise in the form of stagnation and solidification of power relations, as illustrated by the example of humanism above. Domination is a system of constraint that becomes intolerable when individuals have no means of modifying it.(51) Here a strategy of flexibility becomes necessary.(52) This flexibility is a central notion concerning practices of the self that we have briefly understood as a part of power relations above.
Because of these dangers Foucault demanded "a more accurate and up-to-date assessment of power formations, and we need to develop tactics that provide a more effective response to the world as it is."(53) Practices of the self were the answer to his latter demand and critique was his answer to the former. Practices of the self are the mode suggested by Foucault for achieving a defence against these dangers and against domination where rights are outdated, too general, too specific, or irrelevant. As such, practices of the self must involve three elements: it should expose practices of power and their effects; it should assess the practices of the self of others; and it should allow one to create ones own practices through purging/building oneself as a subject. (However, this latter element sounds strangely humanistic—like bildung.) This process must be an examination of the possibilities of the self today that challenges the regime of truth, the system of domination that forms us, represents us and perhaps even mutilates us. The main tool of this scrutiny is critique. In What is Critique, Foucault describes critique as a virtue. For Foucault, critique is an end unto itself and so valuable in its own right.(54) If "everything is dangerous" then anyway of questioning and uncovering that danger is valuable, and could perhaps provide a foundation for an ethics.(55) Critique is "the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth… the art of voluntary insubordination."(56) Foucault’s emphasis on the critique of the present was the reason why he would not offer a vision or blueprint for a future society, and why the dreams of utopia were considered a distraction at best and a vain hope at worst.(57) Critique is then, that constant attention to today, the raising of subversive, uncomfortable questions, the genealogical analysis of the given, and the struggle to keep open new possibilities, new ways of thinking and living. It is an exit from domination.(58)
Critique is the tool suggested by Foucault by which the self should chose its meaning. His notion of the self does not concern consciousness or individuality; his concern is ethical and political practice. Foucault’s formulation of the self non-essentialist, it is a complex of social influences, a notion that seems to be shared by other philosophers. Williams is especially useful here, because both thinkers note that a process of social and psychological construction constitutes the self, which has and requires no metaphysical underpinning.(59) Furthermore, Williams helps to clarify this notion here by urging us to understand this notion not as a Kantian suggestion to return to an apriori self, a characterless moral self who existed before our socialisation and enculturation.(60) This self can never be "properly understood and enacted" nor can we "realise a harmonious identity that involved no real loss" in the relations the self has with others in society. Williams, like Foucault, recognises that this is the "afterworld" hope of utopia.(61) Thus far, this is an almost entirely negative definition of what the self is; it defines itself by saying what that humanist self is not.
This self as a complex of social influences excepts or rejects practices using critique as an aid. This then, is a conception of a non-unitary individual (or dividual), a challenge to the liberal notion of the unified self tied to rights. As a result, it is the major site of constant political struggle: "…if the individual is plastic and can be shaped, then the productive and creative force that the individual represents will be contended for."(62) The dividual is formed of various identities from this struggle, some are formed by various disciplines and some are self-formed, "individuals are not unitary, single psychic structures."(63) A dividual maybe a professor, a father, a communist, a schizophrenic, and a son with different attitudes, clothes, actions, social, political and personal responsibilities etc., in different situations at different times, who is at the same time and place all of these to some degree. This dividual is in this way an amalgam self subject to change and to the different practices of power and the self. There does seem some difficulty here as to how critique is possible without an individual to make effective judgements, and how the dividual is active in its separate roles. If a complex is active here, the concept of unity seems to be creeping back into Foucault’s account of selfhood. Unfortunately, such difficulties can only be raised as a note of caution here.
It is important to note that practices of the self are themselves culturally determined and do not spring forth from outside power or the hegemony of normalisation. To some degree, which is always unclear in Foucault’s work but involves the fluidity of the third mode of the regime of truth, these self practices are informed by the practices of power. Now that these practices are clearly defined and the self understood as non-unitary, this vague area becomes less opaque via Deleuze. He articulates subjectivity as an interiorisation of power/knowledge and practices of power from the outside, but one that does not involve determinism or total dependence. "The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside."(64) Though the subject does not apply meaning to her/himself or the world ex nihilo, meaning can be synthesised from the limited forms of power/knowledge that present themselves to the subject.(65) Again, the questions "who or what does the synthesising?" can be raised here, and the problem of a hidden unity or infinitely regressing self become a possibility. To avoid these issues, we have to be clear that Foucault’s concept of self allows for a historical development of the self over time from birth. Tentatively, I would like to suggest that the younger a self is, the more subject s/he is to the practices of power. The older a dividual becomes, the more able s/he is able to utilise these imposing practices for her/himself as a self-practice. Age however, would not be the key. The use of critique would determine this "moral maturity", that would allow a self to synthesise the outside as s/he learned and understood the difficulties Foucault and others have explored.
This notion of the self echoes Heidegger’s concept of "throwness", which in turn was elaborated by Merleau-Ponty. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tackles the Sartrean problem of original choice and foundationlessness, which Foucault had seemed in danger of here. "While ‘I can no longer pretend… to chose myself continually from… nothing at all,’ I do possess the power of ‘general refusal’ and the power to ‘begin something else.’ "(66) Though we cannot simply choose a self and cast off the straitjacket of discipline, we can perform certain actions to break partially with present conditions that are exposed as intolerable and oppressive through the three modes of critique. It is in this sense that the practices of the self are articulated and the governmental "mode of subjection" becomes clear.
It appears, then, that Foucault’s thought implies an ultimatum – we must subjectivise ourselves through reflective, transgressive and transformative actions, or we become normalised by disciplinary power and internalise the gaze.(67) The practices of the self are then, either a mode of resistance against present forms of power, or acquiescence to those forms through ignorance or political alliance. For those who want to resist, new forms of subjectivity are required via this method of a critique-mode of subjection to escape present power structures.(68) Domination appears to be the primary reason why we should resist certain forms of power.
The major concern here then, is a battle between multiplication (issuing forth from transformative self-practice) and homogeneity (caused by domination and compliance). Domination and normalisation must be challenged, not out of whim, but because power is a struggle with its own form of impetus. Again, Williams helps to clarify the point by considering an important and useful influence shared with Foucault: namely Kant. Regarding Kant’s thought, Williams asks, "is there anything rational agents necessarily want?" There is a general want for freedom (though not limitless freedom) and a general want is not to be frustrated, especially by others. Purposive action within the realms of this freedom is not good in a foundational or metaphysical sense, but it maybe good for the agent. A rejection of this view in the present age would be pragmatic self-conflict.(69) To lack freedom is not to lack choice, but to be subject to the will of another.(70) It is possible that this general want for freedom is due to the present structures of society, rather than an essential, imperative want. Though it is possible that this want is generally felt in the present, this does not suggest that it is anything more than a constant in human activity up to, and no doubt beyond, this point in time. With this in mind, it is not controversial to suggest that this wanting-freedom and consequently wanting-not-to-be-frustrated will result in the impetus that provides the kinds of struggle that Foucault identifies as relations of power. This is why domination will be challenged, rather than why it must be. There is no moral imperative here of course, nor a certain method for choosing what type of power relation that ought to be challenged; challenge is more a matter of fact.
Of course, this is not enough on which to base our values, there are still too many people that acquiesce to relations of domination that Foucault wants to challenge, like capitalism for example. The Foucauldian must be able to judge unacceptable forms of power relation to make ethical decisions. Though Foucault does not define power in the thoroughgoing way Weber does (a potential problem identified by Fraser(71)), and is open to the charge of pancratism,(72) he does make it clear that domination is the measure by which we make decisions to act ethically. "Relations of power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free oneself… The problem is… to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games to be played with a minimum of domination."(73) Foucault is not so much an advocate of freedom (because such a notion is only useful within a field of control), but of less government.(74) This ability to change oneself (the very exercise of freedom) and so challenge those structures that want to mould us for their own ends is the basis of the ethical life that Foucault identifies.(75)
Foucault does not explicitly offer norms by which we must assess domination or moral dilemmas (as Fraser, Habermas and others have demanded). This would demand yet another stagnant universalism in the style of, and with the same problems as, the sovereign subject. However, he does point out reasons why some forms of domination (but not all) are problematic. His proposed genealogy of war illustrates his concerns. Bio-power, the state interest with human existence reduced to manipulable biology, is directly related with Nazi experiments, with eugenics and with the training of soldiers as a medium of mass-slaughter. This war-machine state with its bloody racism and fascism is one form of domination identified as immoral by Foucault.(76)
Foucault’s proposed solution of self-transformation allows for comparison, a form of evaluation that suggests how one might act in the future, and illuminates who one was. This is not an optimistic step from worse to better, but from different to different. Correct political/ethical choices cannot be determined in advance, only the extent to which ones own subjectivisation can be assessed, and with that, the possibilities for further action.(77) To avoid such transformations resulting in discord and confusion, successful elements of prior incarnations are retained. Success is measured by the present achievement in other struggles against domination. If this type of transformation is dismissed the danger of stagnation, short-sightedness and narrow-mindedness arise, increasing the possibility of domination over one’s self and the consequent loss of the possibility of struggle against further domination. Any "chicken and egg" objection that ask how one might measure the success of previous struggles is too individualistic in its concerns and asocial in its conception. It ignores the wider community Foucault has always appealed to (mainly through his critique of Manachean boundaries). It might also be argued that this form of assessment is just a neutral contrasting with no moral evaluation, but the objection demands an objective "view from no-where". This great philosophical problem, that only a god or a Platonist can hope to solve, may rest on a mistaken notion of what morality is.
These transformative experiments in thinking differently will no doubt result in error and tragedy, but they will also avoid the legitimisation of what is already known, which may be just as problematic. Only through error can understanding (of any kind) be gleaned, and only through confrontation can we question the ends for which we are employed by those who themselves have no higher moral ground or objectively justified reasons as to why we should do what they want, be as they are, and think as they think. This battle as outlined above is the essence of the ongoing struggle between humans, the "war by other means" which people like Merquior find so repulsive.(78) The alternative of a "form of morality that would be acceptable to everyone-in the sense that everyone would have to submit to it" is equally repulsive for people like Foucault.(79)
(1) Foucault – Truth, Power, Self an interview in Technologies of the Self p9
(2) Sometimes Foucault calls his tri-axis other things like "government, truth and the self", depending on the stage of self-revision in which he finds himself.
(3) Power/knowledge seems to be a reformulation of the episteme found in Foucault’s earlier work "The Order of Things". Both terms are about a relation to reality that produces knowledge and that is historically transient.
(4) Discourse follows three rules; surfaces of emergence, are cultural and social areas, groups and communities; grids of specification, describe discourses relation to and within itself, maintaining coherence and internal exchange; delimiting authorities, are the institutions of authority that maintain regimes of truth. (see The Archaeology of Knowledge)
(5) E.g. Foucault’s discussion on the valourisation of literature within academia as "high" culture, which is widely ignored by the rest of society, and that which falls outside these texts as "low" culture. – See "On Literature" in Foucault Live p151
(6) Rabinow – The Foucault Reader p12
(7) " ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it. A ‘regime’ of truth." – Rabinow - p74
( The intentionality of power has no sole subjective location however; power is nonsubjective. Power is formed of a complex of relations, rules and discourse with no obvious individual instigator. Power "cannot act either in a uniform way, or in a single direction. In what precise way power is going to modify the actions of others is never clear, precisely because of its relational structure." Barker - Michel Foucault – An Introduction p39.
(9) West – An Introduction to Continental Philosophy p172
(10) Foucault – The Development of Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self p18. I.e. what is the truth-game a person is playing who is regarded and regards him/herself as a criminal, or a homosexual?
(11) Barker – op cit. p30
(12) This particular aspiration exposes a major dominating discourse in recent history and the present.
(13) Foucault seems to use the terms "Practice" and "Technology" interchangeably. Because of Rabinow’s characterisation of "disciplinary technologies" and "disciplinary control" (see Rabinow – op cit. p17) I have chosen to talk of them in terms of Practices to avoid confusion.
(14) "Parrhesia takes place when some one in authority is confronted with an unpleasant or even dangerous truth and where the safety of the individual who speaks or writes is not assured." Ransome – Foucault’s Discipline – the politics of subjectivity p163
(15) Gutting – The Cambridge Companion to Foucault p144
(16) Scott - Ethics is the Question p87.
(17) Foucault – The Development of Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self p18
(18) Here it is worth noting that Foucault identifies two other Practices, which he gave less attention to, those Practices of Production and of Sign Systems in The Development of Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self p18
(19) One might stretch this metaphor, viewing institutions as organs (necessary, useful or otherwise) and people as blood cells, processed through these organs, or perhaps growing cancerous.
(20) Foucault – The History of Sexuality Vol. I p92-95
(21) Foucault – What is Critique? p59
(22) S.L. Bartky has undertaken a more unfamiliar examination of disciplinary power, which involves the surveillance and methods of bodily manipulation and repetition characterising disciplinary power in the areas Foucault has studied. Bartky has noted that no modern institutions of disciplinary power (like the prison or asylum) exist when the disciplinary practices that produce the so-called "feminine" subject (as opposed to "insane" or "rehabilitated") are considered. See Diamond, I. and Quimby, L. (eds.) - Feminism and Foucault
(23) Barker – op cit. p57
(24) As described by Foucault in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics p208
(25) Rabinow – op cit. p17
(26) The public torture of poor Damiens is one of Foucault’s striking examples of pre-modern power in Discipline and Punish.
(27) Foucault – Discipline and Punish p138
(28) Bartky in Feminism and Foucault
p62
(29) Fraser in Critical Thought Series:2 Critical Essays on Michel Foucault – p223
(30) Sartre – Being and Nothingness p252-303
(31) Rabinow – op cit. p17
(32) Foucault notes the sinister paradox of the modern state with its wars of mass slaughter and its interest in medicine and the body in "The Political Technology of Individuals" in Technologies of the Self p160 and Foucault Live p299
(33) Ransom – op cit. p47-53
(34) Ransom – op cit. p171-178
(35) Foucault – Foucault Live p472
(36) In a socio-historical, rather than a metaphysical sense.
(37) Foucault – Truth, Power and Self in Technologies of the Self, p15 See also Fraser’s discussion "Michel Foucault – A Young Conservative?" in Ethics.
(38) Foucault – Revolutionary Action: "Until Now" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice p221
(39) Foucault – Language, Counter-Memory, Practice p221
(40) Rabinow – op cit. p63
(41) Foucault – Language, Counter-Memory, Practice p230
(42) Huck Gutman – Rousseau’s Confessions in Technologies of the Self p103 my emphasis.
(43) Roughly, these correspond to the binary boundaries of the religious, legal, psychiatric, moral, medical, sexual and social respectively.
(44) Foucault – The Development of Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self p18
(45) It would be interesting to analyse the modern practices of the self of groups like feminists, anarchists or philosophers.
(46) Foucault – The Development of Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self p22
(47) Foucault – The Development of Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self p41-49
(48) Foucault – Language, Counter-Memory and Practise p209
(49) May – The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism p131-132
(50) Ransom – op cit. p159
(51) Foucault – Foucault Live, p327
(52) Ransom – op cit. p160-165
(53) Ransom – ibid. p9
(54) Ransom – ibid. p3
(55) Rabinow – op cit. p343
(56) Foucault – What is Critique? p32
(57) See Foucault Live, p380 for one example of many regarding Foucault’s "anti-blueprint" stance.
(58) Ransom – op cit. p4-8 Foucault’s debt to Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant respectively can be seen here.
(59) Kroker offers a fascinating Freudian/Marcusian essence in which the self is based, though not in a transcendent realm. This essential self is the unsocialised baby, universal and timeless in its similarity to all humans in that stage of life, in which all types of subjectivisation will take place. See Critical Assesments:2 p109-121
(60) Williams – Shame and Necessity p159
(61) Williams – Shame and Necessity p162
(62) Ransom – op cit. p168
(63) Ransom – ibid. p49. This explains the meaning of principle "e" in footnote 55 below.
(64) Deleuze – Foucault p96
(65) Barker – op cit. p70-74. Here Barker discusses Foucault’s denial of personal creativity (along with a human nature) because it is disciplines that create possibilities and negate others according to a dividuals resistance to it. In this way, creativity comes from the outside. "There is no value or conceptualisation that is outside this non-subjective process of knowledge production."
(66) Cooper – Existentialism p155
(67) Barker identifies Foucault’s principle of self-transformation as:-
a. writing – not to affirm what one ‘knows’ but to discover what one thinks
b. desubjectification of the will to power
c. attack on culture
d. destruction of the subject as pseudo-sovereign by:
1. experimenting with oneself
2. engaging with cultural taboo (drugs, communes, dissolution of sex divisions) Foucault mentions these possibilities in Revolutionary Action: "Until Now" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice p222
e. making oneself permanently capable of detaching oneself from oneself
f. addressing the question: what are we today? Barker – Michel Foucault: An Introduction p83.
What these principles might mean and how they could be practically applied should indicate the key strategies regarding the practices of the self and resistance against compliance and domination.
(68) Ransom – op cit. p144
(69) See Williams – Chapter Four: Foundations: Practical Reason in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
(70) Williams – Shame and Necessity p154. Here Williams does seem to be claiming that "rational agents want freedom" is analytic. This though is inconsistent with Foucauldian relativism. Unless, that is, the relativism quantifies over freedom and not agents, in which case the assertion is meaningless: an agents desire for freedom could be infinitesimal or absolute.
(71) In Critical Though Series: 2 p218-233
(72) Merquior’s criticism that Foucault’s notion of power is "a systematic reduction of all social processes to largely unspecified patterns of domination" resulting in a loss of depth and specificity. See Merquior – Foucault p115-6
(73) May – The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism p123
(74) A notion that he identifies as "a very first definition of critique" in What is Critique? p29
(75) Here Foucault is not concerned with moral codes, those relations of the self to imposed rules of conduct, but self ethics, the practice of judgement and action by which we create our-selves. See The Uses of Pleasure p25-32
(76) Foucault’s critique of Freud’s necrophiliac theories and the relations of bio-power to racism and sexism are part of this understanding of certain modes of domination as immoral. Deleuze’s and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus can be read as clarifying Foucault on these points. Gutting – p154
(77) Ransom – op cit. p175
(78) Merquior – op cit. p143
(79) Foucault – Foucault Live, p473
Bibliography
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