Abstract
This paper examines one strand of the ‘turn to ethics’ in recent political theory by engaging with Michel Foucault's late work on ‘the care of the self.’ For contemporary thinkers interested in how democratic politics might be guided, informed, or vivified by particular ethical orientations, Foucault's inquiry into ancient ethics has proved intriguing. Might concentrated ‘work on the self’ contribute to efforts to resist and remake present-day power relations? This paper endeavors to raise doubts about the Foucauldian inspired view, which regards a reflexive relation of the self to itself as a privileged site for critically engaging with existing configurations of power. To do so, I offer a close reading of Foucault's scholarship that examines his work on ethics together with his well-known theory of power. I demonstrate that Foucault's distinctive theory of power, if read carefully, alerts us to the limits of the care of the self as a strategy for making power relations more equitable, open, and responsive to democratic constituencies. As I show, disciplinary power and biopower target collectivities by ‘individualizing’ and ‘massifying,’ respectively, and thereby diminishing the potential ‘counter-power’ generated by pluralistic association. If this dimension of Foucault's thought is appreciated, the ‘care of the self’ appears as a very limited resource for challenging these de-politicizing effects. Yet this paper also draws on Foucault's thought in order to stress the importance of re-orienting debates concerning the relationship between ethics and politics toward associative rather than reflexive practices of freedom.
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Notes
One possible way of conceptualizing Foucault's turn to ethics, then, is to think of it as corresponding to one side of the ambivalent structure of subjectification, as theorized by Butler (1997) according to which power both initiates the subject and constitutes the subject's agency such that the subject is ‘neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both)’ (17).
Inquiries into ‘democratic ethos’ partly serve to challenge theories that forward a strongly rationalist understanding of political life. Chantal Mouffe, for example, suggests that the ‘creation of a democratic ethos’ is significant for advancing the pluralist democracy she favors. Identification with democratic values and practices cannot be secured by appealing to rational universality and instead requires that ‘passions’ be ‘mobilized’ for ‘democratic designs’ (1997). Similarly, Connolly suggests that a pluralist political culture is one that focuses not simply on institutional design, but on ‘intercultural virtues that enliven and inform institutional life’ (1999, 153).
It is with reference to ‘government’ in its broadest sense, borrowed from its 16th century usage, that Foucault links the ‘techniques of domination’ he studied in much of his writings to the ‘techniques of the self’ that figure prominently in his later work. He explained in a 1980 lecture that any ‘genealogy of the subject’ must consider how techniques of domination ‘interact’ with techniques of the self, defined as ‘techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves…’ The ‘contact point’ between efforts to direct the conduct of others and the way in which subjects ‘conduct themselves’ is what Foucault calls ‘government’ (1993, 203).
For example, Chicago now boasts the most advanced surveillance system of any city in the US. The system is notable not only for its breadth (2,500 cameras throughout the city) but for its ‘smart’ computers, which alert police whenever a particularly threatening activity is caught by a camera — for example, anytime someone ‘lingers outside a public building.’ See ‘Chicago Moving to “Smart” Surveillance Cameras,’ New York Times, September 21, 2004.
In Foucault (1976) ‘biopower’ is an umbrella term that refers to both ‘disciplinary’ power directed at individual bodies and ‘regulatory’ power directed at the population at large. The era of ‘biopower’ is defined by ‘two poles’: ‘the disciplines of the body and the regulation of the population’ (138–139). In later work, ‘biopower’ becomes the name Foucault uses to describe this second, ‘nondisciplinary power’ (2003, 239–263).
As Foucault explains, ‘Managing the population does not mean just managing the collective mass of phenomena or managing them simply at the level of their overall results; managing the population means managing it in depth, in all its fine points and details’ (2007, 107).
Foucault insists that his investigation into ancient ethics is not a quest for lost foundations — a serious misunderstanding of his genealogical approach — and he repeatedly emphasized that although contact with the past may ‘produce something…it must be emphasized that it would be something new’ (1997b, 294–295).
In his work from the 1980s, Foucault distinguishes between power relations which are ‘mobile, reversible, and unstable’ and what he calls ‘states of domination in which power relations, instead of being mobile…remain blocked, frozen.’ Domination refers to power relations that are ‘fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical.’ Foucault's entire approach to the question of power insists that we cannot get ‘outside’ power relations altogether and directs attention to a different aim: how to ‘play these games of power with as little domination as possible’ (1997b).
Charles Taylor (1984) argues that Foucault's understanding of power ‘does not make sense without at least the idea of liberation.’ See Patton (1989) for an illuminating reading that demonstrates the extent to which Taylor retains a view of power as ‘imposition,’ which sets negative limits to freedom.
Foucault (1985) also contrasts the central imperative of ancient ethics, ‘Take care of yourself’ with the later Christian focus on renunciation of the self as the means to salvation. Part of what fascinates Foucault about ancient ethics seems to be its treatment of the self as an object of development and transformation rather than disavowal.
For a discussion of the difficulties posed by this suggestion, see Grimshaw (1993). Grimshaw notes that Foucault suggests that practices of self-discipline may serve to counter the effects wrought by power in disciplinary society, yet he gives us no reason to believe this distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ discipline can hold, since one of the characteristic features of disciplinary power is that it is ‘taken up’ and internalized by the subject. In other words, Foucault's work poses, without answering, the following question: When is ascetic self-care a practice of freedom and when is it the quiet, light operation of disciplinary power?
Foucault (1997b) explains, ‘If I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, society, and his social group’ (291).
For a discussion of Foucault's statement and the political events that occasioned it, see Keenan (1997), which offers an elegant reading of this text as the source of a ‘radical theory of rights,’ in which ‘intervention creates the right to intervene, enacts the right to act, initiates the right to initiate’ (171, 160).
This understanding of cooperative political action as world-building is influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt. She also famously distinguishes politics from morality in part by claiming that politics is oriented toward the world which we share whereas morality is concerned primarily with the individual self's relation to itself, in the form of conscience.
This is especially evident when Connolly offers an example meant to illustrate the relevance that ‘working on yourself’ has for democratic engagement. In one scenario concerning euthanasia that he returns to often — ‘you’ allow ‘one part of your subjectivity…to work on other parts’ in such a way that what was previously ‘nonnegotiable’ — a belief in death as purely religious or natural — is called into question. Connolly uses this lengthy example to make the point that ‘tactics of the self’ can produce changes that in turn influence the politics in which one participates. Yet his example willfully conceals the extent to which the personal transformation he delineates is made possible by democratic world-building activities. That is, according to his own account, the self in this example who engages in reflexive struggle concerning end-of-life issues was prompted to do so by political activity that made public a claim — the right to die — that was not previously legible. In other words, Connolly's example reveals the extent to which purportedly individual ‘arts of the self’ are parasitic on the world-building activities of democratic life (1999, 146–147).
Moreover, even if, as Foucault argues, one of our tasks today is the development of ‘new forms of subjectivity,’ (2000a, 336) because it is also the case that the ‘subject can constitute itself in an active fashion’ only in accordance with ‘models’ available in ‘his culture, society, and his social group,’ (1997b, 291) then the creation of these subjectivities cannot occur absent collective supports that challenge dominant forms of behavior. In other words, even if the elaboration of new subjectivities is an important aim, might it be pursued not through focused ascetic practices of the self, but somewhat indirectly — through efforts to collaboratively create the shared conditions and common cultures that could nurture the emergence of these new subjectivities?
In his 1978 lectures on the development of the modern state, Foucault notes that the idea of ‘the public’ emerges together with that of the population in the 18th century: ‘The public, which is a crucial notion in the eighteenth century, is the population seen under the aspect of its opinions, ways of doing things, forms of behavior, customs, fears, prejudices, and requirements; it is what one gets a hold on through education, campaigns, and convictions’ (2007, 75).
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Myers, E. Resisting Foucauldian Ethics: Associative Politics and the Limits of the Care of the Self. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 125–146 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.2007.25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.2007.25