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).
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).
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