Oct 26, "Hermeneutics of the Self" lecture

Discussion of “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Subject” 1980 lectures

We began, as per usual, with questions… Five question areas…

MF discusses four technologies (domination, production, signification, and self). What is the best metaphor for conceptualizing the relations between these? Overlap? Interweaving? Interdigitation? A separate but related questions: Are these analytical categories? Or are they direct objects of inquiry?
What is the relationship b/w exomologesis and discipline? Is the one beyond the other? Or are they inter-related?
What is the role of rationality for the self that exercises the techniques MF is describing in the article? Is this a rational process? Or is this something beyond rationality?
Self as a form of self-fashioning without a biological account. MF says “the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history” (222). Is MF dispensing with an account of human nature? What kinds of constraints would our biological body operationalize?
Truth and sacrifice as technologies of the self, presented by MF as a specifically Christian formation rather than a product of the logos in general. Does this fit a religious history? A related question concerns the attempt to keep verbalization but drop self-sacrifice from it, “the deep desire to to substitute the positive figure of man for the sacrifice which for Christianity was the condition for the opening of the self as a field of indefinite interpretation” (222).

Discussion ensued…

We began with the two related but nonidentical questions of the extent to which Foucault can untie the self or the subject from such constraints of rationality or biology.
Two distinctions were offered with relation to the biology question, which was first elaborated in terms of the example of a man who after many years of monogamous marriage developed a proclivity for pedophilia, and it was then later discovered that this was caused by a brain tumor. This seems to be an example of a hard material constraint operating independently of technologies of the self, &c..
Let’s distinguish two questions. Is Foucault giving a theory of the self? Or is he situating a problematics of the self for us today? “Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self” (222).
Let’s distinguish two kinds of accounts that might be given to the latter question. Is he giving an account of technologies of the self? Or is he giving an account that contradicts biology and an account that leaves biology out? If there is an issue it is with the “nothing else than” in “the self is nothing else than the historical correlation [yada yada]” (222).
Is Foucault positioning history (“our history”) as a catechresis that points outside the text and the operation, but cannot be accounted for within the text?
Where does Foucault locate the conditions of possibility of the present? Where should he? Are there material conditions? Or only historical conditions, which Foucault is calling ‘technological’?
Also, do we need to distinguish between the category of the self and the category of the human being? The concept of the self is a specification of a field of analysis.
It was suggested that there may be an important distinction between self-reflectiveness and its lack in the context of technologies of the self. The point about reflectiveness brought us to the question about constraints and possibilities where the self comes into contact with forms of rationality.
What makes a self happen? (A wonderful question.) Is rationality part of that which facilitates elaboration of the self? If so, in what sense? Certainly there is reflectiveness at the heart of the self. This then raises the question of ways in which certain forms of reflectiveness get elaborated as true or false, rational or mad, &c., &c..
Rationality for MF is a set of constraints. The constraints are rational in the sense that there is a logic or coherence. So this is not a classical notion of reason but rather a methodological conception of rationality. (Is it that rationality is here a technology or techniques of signification?)
What is the difference that reflectiveness makes? Is reflectiveness that which makes a self happen? What emerges when reflectiveness happens? Foucault suggests at one point that “ethics… [is] the reflective practice of freedom” (EW1.284).
So how would we schematize or analyze the relations between the techniques?
Discussion concerned terminological slippage: technologies of domination (1980 lectures) v. technologies of power (1982 lectures).
To what extent do we need the idea or analytical category of a techniques of the self?
The technologies are heading for different logics. All four logics are copresent in any significant human practice.
We ended with discussion of MF’s counterposing of self-sacrifice to self-truth (cf. 222).

Notes for 10.19.11: History of Sexuality, Volume I

This week we are discussing History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (HSV1), pp. 81-102 and 151-159

We began, as usual, with our list of questions:

-relation of HSV1 to previous weeks (i.e., regarding 'the self')

-102: distinction between tactical productivity and strategical integration

-94-5: power relations as intentional but nonsubjective: rationality without 'headquarters', the anti-conspiracy-theorist model

-94: his analysis of power seems to replace this force of domination, cf. DP (Foucault seems to be uncutting his analysis; power seems to take the place of the 'cunning of history')

-on the contrary, if his analysis holds, then: what is resistance? how is it not totalizing?

-93-97 (esp. 93 and 95): "power is a moving substrate of force relations..."; is resistance just a form of power? why call it resistance?

-90: distinction between law and 'technology' as forms of governance

-152: bodies as central to the element of selfhood; what is the order of materiality that is 'the body'? (refer to passage on 155-6; sex and the body, similar to the body and the soul in DP)

There is a way in which MF uses very structuralist language (93: "If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded…”); we're just talking about force relations; 'war' and 'politics' are just two different strategies on this model. There may be tensions within this field of force relations, but there is no subjective control over the results of one's 'reform' efforts. Reform efforts, e.g., for prison reformers in DP, had unpredictably dominating effects. So, how can we say then that resistance is really possible? When you're talking about strategies and aims that are operating at the systemic level, doesn't it seem that any individual intervention is non-efficacious? What is the potential for the efficacy of the individual resistor?

Foucault's answer might be that to the extent that we operate within the juridico-discursive theory of power, we are unable to effect resistance, except by accident. In other words, the consolidation of the juridico-discursive theory of power after monarchical rule covers up the power mechanisms that can be more accurately described as constituting our contemporary subjectivity, i.e., disciplinary power and biopower. So resistance will proceed by finding nodes of tactical response, e.g., 'we are the 99%' is resisting, yet is proceeding by not formulating a coherent set of strategies (95-6: “…there is no single locus of great Refusal... there is a plurality of resistances…).

These questions arise: what is the status of theory as a result of MF's analysis? if there is no one to tell us what is the right way to resist, then how might we resist? Yet, at the same time, MF tells us that revolution occurs via 'the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible...' (96). This is the same way that state power is consolidated (96). So power relations in resistance operate in the same way as those that we would consider oppressive or dominating; what is similar to both is the fact that these are different strategies or tactics. Yet, Foucault will not tell us how to resist, i.e., will not give us a model for resistance as such; he will not give us a categorical imperative, only a 'conditional imperative' (as in STP, i.e., Security, Territory, and Population). This is a weakness. MF is not a normative theorist. Or is this a weakness? He continues to resist 'theory': so that we cannot, once and for all, give an account of 'resistance', or 'power', or 'sex.' He is moving away from the critique of ideology and the juridico-discursive theory of power. The Foucaultian analysis of power then gives us a general account of power relations without prescribing, once and for all, the ways in which we ought to proceed. Yet, he does offer this in HSV1: “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures’’ (157); and ‘’…we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality… were able to subject us... (159). This is still only a gesture. He says a bit more regarding this later (HSV2 and later works), but still doesn't develop a robust normative project. The upshot might be that the theorist is not going to be able to work in a way that is divorced from practitioners, i.e., the theorist is going to need to be engaged with the processes of resistance for the sake of noting nodes or resistance where they are already in process. The theorist cannot pronounce from on high where resistance ought to take place.

What does Foucault mean by 'desire' and 'pleasure'? For MF, 'desire' is bound up in Christian practices of self-renunciation, whereas to define 'pleasure,' he returns to the Greeks' notion of 'aphrodisia,' which is a concept in which there is no distinction made between desire and pleasure. The appeal that pleasure has for MF—which desire doesn't have—is that it leaves room for self-transformation: when one experiments with and multiplies practices of pleasure, then one might... what? 'Pleasure' as 'pre-discursive,' as in Freud? Not within the matrices of desire; not bound within juridico-discursive power? What if pleasure corresponds to the diffusion of power as in disciplinary power and biopower, whereas as desire corresponds to jurdico-discursive models of power? E.g., Butler's description of heteronormativity as performance precisely outlines the pleasure-discipline correspondence.

This leads us to the question of the body. If pleasure is not constituted by a lack, as in desire, then what status does pleasure have? Where is it located? Is it located in the 'brute body'? The brute body, though, would imply that in seeking or cultivating pleasure, we are seeking to discover our 'true selves.' This cannot be the case. Pleasure is, on the one hand, more expansive than 'sex,' and, on the other hand, Foucault's example of the Greeks is one in which practices of pleasure are thoroughly enculturated: pleasure as a set of practices. We are not 'liberating' ourselves, we are transforming ourselves. Thus, the Foucaultian inquiry into sexuality is a destabilization of our most dearly held tenets of self-identification. The upshot is that the exploration of our sexuality is not going to tell us about our true selves, will not liberate us. Instead, we can move to an economy of techniques, of acts in which, by moving from pleasure to pleasure, we can transform ourselves outside of a model of 'coming to know ourselves.' '[T]hrough a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality' (157), we can locate opportunities for resistance with respect to the ways in which we are constituted: sex is an example of a hidden truth of the self, whereas pleasures are acts, i.e., practices that constitute who we are rather than a gateway to the deep truth of the self.

Human beings don't seem to have an internal life, on this model. The soul is produced from the outside-in. In terms of an anthropology, there seems to be something left out. Perhaps there is an outside to discourse, one that is not a cognitive reality. This project cannot fully account for the human being; it is too superficial. Discussion regarding how discourse constitutes reality does not do justice to the fact that there might be things pertinent to selfhood that lie outside of rationality. He wants to say that he's not just doing ideology critique, not just giving a 'history of mentalities'; rather, he is trying to give a ‘‘'history of bodies' and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested” (151-2). This is not a merely ephemeral, specular, socially constituted body. In other words, he’s attempting to give us an account that includes human materiality, but does so in a way that does not relegate any aspect of the self or body to a hidden or pre-discursive space. But it seems that he would have to do something more methodologically innovative than frame this in terms of various rationalities of the body, i.e., a 'history of bodies' (152). This brings us to the question of rationality: MF claims that discourse is always tactical and rational (distinguishes between what makes sense and what doesn't make sense). To the extent that the material body is discursively constituted, this seems an impoverished notion of the self, one which doesn't allow for other forms of thinking. MF seems to want to get there, but a self within discourse is a merely speaking/knowing self.

Notes for 10/12/11: Panopticism

Today the group discussed the Panopticism chapter in Discipline and Punish, pp. 195-228.

What does it mean to say that disciplinary techniques are polyvalent? At the end of the chapter, Foucault offers a memorable quote: "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" But what are the core features of discipline that allow one to speak of its recurrence from one context to the next? With this question in mind, the group discussed the interrelation of two quotes from the text.

First, on page 202 Foucault writes: "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw of its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal..." This quote demonstrates that in addition to efforts to monitor and coerce the body from without, an essential characteristic of discipline is the participation of the subject in processes of his own subjection. In fact, the complicity of the subject is a necessary feature to the workings of disciplinary power.

Second, on page 215 Foucault writes: "Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology." Thus, discipline is not identified with the prison itself, nor with the panopticon. Discipline is not an object or set of rules: it is best conceived as a mode of power, a way of operating.

Discipline is a mode of power that is best characterized as the intersection of coercive practices that monitor, or micromanage the behavior of the subject, and the internalization of these coercive practices by the participating subject. Or something like that. At any rate, in a particular historical period, 'the individual' was crafted through endless immersion in disciplinary practices.

The discussion then shifted to a comparison between disciplinary practices and practices of care of the self. How does one distinguish between these two types of practices if both contain the interworkings of both techniques of power and techniques of the self. It was posited that perhaps the distinction between discipline and care of the self hinges of the ethics embedded in each practice. Discipline carries an ethics of self-decipherment or self-discovery. Notice on page 198 Foucault writes that discipline does not operate through "masks that were put on and taken off, but [through] the assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body, his 'true' disease." In contrast, care of the self has as its telos an ethics of self-transformation. It was then suggested that in order for this distinction between self-discovery and self-transformation to hold, Foucault must grant some kind of agency, capacity for self-reflection, or autonomy to the subject. For how can a subject self-transform if it is either unaware of its situation or incapable of working toward self-transformation. Perhaps self-transformation requires self-awareness and autonomy. As we discussed last week, ethics is the conscious practice of freedom (Essential Works, Vol. 1, pp. 284). Or perhaps we should ditch concepts such as autonomy altogether and focus strictly on practices altogether. Disciplinary practices. Self-transformative practices.

Oh, and we debated the ethics of Self Magazine (great title!) and Cosmopolitan Magazine in relation to the distinction between discipline and care of the self.

Notes for 10-5-11

10-5-11 Foucault Reading Group with Vincent Colapietro

Housekeeping: History of Sexuality reading—p [optional 17-49], 81-102, 150-159

Questions:

Colapietro’s piece

—please explain the distinction b/w social and socialized and why it is useful in talking about Dewey and Foucault. Are they necessary for one another, or is the relation found within the work of either philosopher independently? P 33

--Mf’s agonism and polemics p 36

Foucault “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”

286—“a slave has no ethics”? (in MF’s sense)

--why does MF not address patriarchy?

287—ontological priority of self-relation

300—freedom and control of conduct—dodging question

--power in MF a methodology or theory of human nature?

Discussion:

Hermeneutical suspicion is more prominent in MF than Dewey. Foucault is more critical of the normalized subject in which the internalized norms—in a way we’ve ‘been had’ (normalization of sexual desire, etc). Dewey is relatively innocent of ‘being had.’

MF is a more thickly descriptive account with a critical edge. It is not lacking in Dewey, it just not as pronounced. He was a white protestant heterosexual male. He was there for the founding of the NAACP, but he’s not at odds with his society in the ways Foucault was. There is a very different subject position. They are close, but the way it is enacted is somewhat different.

Do you have to be uncomfortable in society in order to have a critical eye? Yes. Dewey was ill at ease and at odds, but not to the extent and in the forms Foucault was.

P 26 of Colapietro—I wonder the extent to which there’s room in profession philosophy for a sort of confluence of transfomation and theory (?). Is a biography like Foucault’s possible in academia today? Need to remember that MF was working in a psychiatric hospital. Also, we are secluded. We are committed—to a cause, to a way of life. Being committed to the madness of professional philosophy and being committed to transformative and emancipatory cause? The unlived life is not worth examining. Dewey is interesting on the other side—what are we going to do with these immigrants? His phil of ed is not abstract. We can’t exploit their labor, we must do something transformative. What are the sites of our everyday lives? Perhaps our interest in MF is only academic.

To turn it back on MF—p 286—maybe this explains the dissatisfaction of the work of the 80s. Maybe the things on the Greeks is somewhat informative as contrast to the Christian tradition, though it doesn’t seem grounded in the ways History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish are. But perhaps this is the way of reconstituting an ethos. MF is a profoundly Nietzschean thinker—MF is recovering these practices for a purpose. He’s trying to open space for a critical conversation without providing a precise code or method. Method is subordinate to the cultivation of sensibility.

Re-asking the question: why go to the Greeks when he’s talking about ethics? Is this truly not the project. This is for a very distinctly French audience. How are these practices still with us? Perhaps they’ve just be transformed throughout history and are still with us in the asceticism of science, for example. Perhaps MF is excavating on two levels. The general level (284)and the particularized Greek techniques of the Hellenistic period. Maybe the larger project can still be with us. These are deeply ingrained habits, and the process of uprooting them is arduous.

“Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (p 284)—unpack this. Why is freedom ontological? Ethos as a mode of being and behavior and not simply a practice. Is this circular? Brings in the distinction between freedom and liberation.

Decolonization seems to be the paradigm case of liberation. What are we to do with this in relation to what he says about liberation and freedom and the example of sexuality on p 283.

Let’s read MF against MF regarding slaves and ethics. Perhaps slave is more of a conception which lacks a taking up of freedom. Absolutely domination is not the negation of power, so the subject has some modicum of freedom.

The end of Colapietro’s article reminds some of Arendt. She’s been a part of VC’s work for 30 years, though not explicitly written. Docility of body and docility of mind.

P 282-83—liberation from domination v freedom in relations of power. Domination may not be the problem, but there still is a problem. Perhaps on 284, MF is using nondomination and freedom as synonyms.

Freedom in its broadest sense, which may include and require liberation, is the ontological condition for ethics. It is once liberation has been achieved, the work of ethics begins. Cautionary note: freedom may be exercised prior to liberation (e.g. poetry, etc prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall).

Why not put the emphasis on reflective practices as reversing into practices of domination? Might be a historical answer that we have to give about how practices yield, but why haven’t we been talking about this when we were talking analytically?

There may be a strain of humanism implicit in MF, that human nature is rebellious. This may be a historical claim and not an ontological one.