Technologies of the Self - Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self.pdf

Section I

Sexuality

• Studying rules duties and prohibitions of sexuality
• Sexual interdictions require truth telling about ones self
• Objections:
  • Sin and confession is not just related to sexuality – but sexuality is most important
  • Sexuality is complex – hidings, decipherings, secrecy, modesty
• Mortification of the flesh
• Max Weber: “What is the ascetic price of reason?”
• Foucault: “How have certain kinds of interdiction required certain kinds of knowledge about oneself?”
• So Foucault’s question is not about what we repress, but what epistemic leaps we must make about ourselves in order to renounce or assert anything?
• “The hermeneutics of technologies of the self in pagan and early Christian practice” are difficult…
  • as Christianity is interested in history of belief, not practice
  • hermeneutics of practice were not organised as textual hermeneutics were
  • hermeneutics of the self are inside culture, so hard to study/isolate/separate

Context of Study

• How do humans develop knowledge about themselves?
• Four types of overlapping technology – each with a matrix of practical reason (as contrasted with theoretical reason)
  • Technologies of Production – manipulation of things (SCIENCE)
  • Technologies of Sign Systems – use of signs, meanings, symbols (LINGUISTICS)
  • Technologies of Power – conduct of individuals, domination (POLITICS)
  • Technologies of the Self – transformative operations on bodies, souls, thoughts, ways of being, in the pursuit of happiness, purity, wisdom, etc. (PSYCHOLOGY)
• Interaction of these technologies, e.g.: Marx’s Capital – where techniques of production requires modification of individual conduct
• Governmentality: describes the contract between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self (e.g.: ‘madness’ studied in terms of the management that these rhetorics allow of people inside and outside asylums)

The Development of Technologies of the Self

• Hermeneutics of the self in Greco-Roman and Christianity
• epimelesthai sautou
  • to take care of yourself
  • the concern with self
  • to be concerned, to take care of yourself
• Philosophic traditions have lost the ‘take care of thyself’ and only concentrate on ‘know thyself’ – Greeks and Romans were a maxim
• The Greco-Romans thought that you had to deal with yourself before you could know yourself (consult the oracle, etc.). Examples
  • Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC): an invitation to occupy yourself with yourself, occupy yourself with the city (polis)
  • Plato (424 BC – 347 BC): “wisdom, truth and the perfection of the soul”
  • Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395):  taking care of oneself as taking care of the soul, renouncing the heart and body – the “drachma within” – Christian asceticism:  ”know thyself”
  • Epicurus:  Letter to Menoeceus – knowing yourself as a task to be carried through life, towards salvation
  • Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD):  Therapeutae a philosopher-people, Jewish sect, concern for oneself

Summary

• “Know yourself” vs. “Take care of yourself”
• Why has the former overtaken the later? 
  • Christianity: care of ourselves is immoral – selfish, escapism.  Self-renunciation and knowledge of self are paradoxically/simultaneously linked to salvation
  • Philosophy: From Descartes to Husserl, knowledge of the self (subject) takes importance as the first step of epistemology
• Inversion has taken place – that in antiquity you had to take care of yourself before you could know yourself, whereas now we think we need to know ourselves before we can take care of ourselves

Section II

Plato’s Alcibiades I

• Considered arch (principle, the span which supports the load) by neoplatonists of 400 and 500 AD.
• Taking care of oneself is its first principle:
  • How is the question introduced? 
    • dialect between politics and erotics – transitioning to care of the self in order to enter into the both politics and love
    • Socrates makes a pact with Alcibiades – to submit to him in a spiritual way
    • Taking care of oneself: The intersection of political ambition and philosophical love
  • Why should Alcibiades be concerned with himself?
    • epimelesthai sautou – an active political and erotic state – tending, prendre soins
    • the concern for the self is directed towards a defective pedagogy (not knowing what the Spartan and Persian princes know)
  • What is the self?
    • What is the self of which one has to take care
      • Auto – the same – identity
      • What is the plateau on which I shall find my identity?
      • Your soul is the principle activity of caring for the self
      • How must we take care of the soul?
    • What does that care consist in?
      • The soul cannot be known unless we look at the divine – as it is a self-similar entity
      • Political and behavioural action comes out of this contemplation of the soul / divine element
      • Being occupied with oneself and political activites are linked
• The early text sets out eternal problems:
  • 1st – relationships between ‘one’ and political activity
  • 2nd – oneself and pedagogy (the duty of the young man, or the duty of a whole life)
  • 3rd – concern for oneself and the knowledge of oneself
  • 4th – care of the self and philosophical love
• “This theme of taking care of oneself was not abstract advice but a widespread activity, a network of obligations and services to the soul.” – MF
• Oral cultures – rhetoric of the self
• Written culture – writing of the self (e.g.: Augustine’s Confessions)
• The writing of a (blog like!) letter from Marcus Aurelius’s of 144-45 A.D. to Fronto (bathing, eating, etc. – taking care of one’s self)

Section III

Themes:

• first, the relation between care for oneself and care for the political life
• second, the relation between taking care of the self and defective education
• third, the relation between taking care of oneself and knowing oneself

Listening as a method of self-care:

• On the Contemplative Life, Philo of Alexandria describes banquets of silence

For Plato – looking and listening to the self for the truth within.  The disappearance of the dialectical structure – when listening to others and listening to the self are juxtaposed.

For Seneca – through De Ira (On anger) – A study on the consequences and the control of anger.  ”For Seneca it isn’t a question of discovering truth in the subject but of remembering truth, recovering a truth which has been forgotten.”  This is an administrative care of the self.

Section IV

Stoic techniques of the self:

• Letters to friends and disclosure of self (external, outward)
• Examination of self and conscience (internal)
• There is also “askesis,” a disclosure of the secret:
  • Logoi is where the truth lies for the stoics – memorisation, conduct
  • subjectivisation of truth is the aim
  • we assimilate truth, we do not master it
  • “It is a set of practices by which one can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action”
  • Exercises through medete (meditiation on problems that may arise so you are prepared, ready) and gymnasia (physical exercise to prepare you for battle, etc.)
• medete
  • premeditatio mallorum – an imaginary experience – akin to Murphy’s law or a risk assessment!   The Worst That Can Happen
• gymnasia
  • presenting yourself with a real experience – a practical challenge (e.g.: sexual abstinence, temptation)

Section V

Creativity, Technology and The Arts – John Cohen (1971)
from Cybernetics, Art and Ideas Edited by Jasia Reichard

• clockwork as a dominant metaphor for Leibniz / Newton – the big argument was not wether or not the universe was a clockwork, but whether or not god needed to intervene (Newton – yes; Leibniz – no)
• Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
  • The Earth says, “I spin beneath my pyramid of night, Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight, Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep; As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing, Under the shadow of his beauty lying, Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.”
  • Could only be written by someone with (Whitehead) ‘a definite geometrical diagram before his inward eye’
• Dostoevsky’s influence on Einstein – ‘experimental’ heroes willing to risk everything for knowledge
• Creativity, intution and chance:
  • William Blake – thought he was an antenna to god
  • Nealcles and the horse foam – throws his painter sponge on the painting and gets the right effect
  • Soto – valued what he found by pure chance
  • Cezanne – movement of the eye – “I could keep myself busy for months, without moving from one spot, just be leaning now to the right , now to the left”
  • Do we find the sculpture in the stone?
  • Babbage and the story of coming up with mechanical tables of calculation in a daze
• Dante’s disease – “The chief symptom is a presumptuousness which makes the patient suppose that he knows everything and so he affirms uncertain thingsas certain; what he approves is true and everything else is false. The result is that he cannot questinos, and insists that others should ask questions of him, but before a quation is well out he gives the wrong answer”
• Schiller’s rotting apples – the smell allowed him to write
• The input output myticism of creativity: We admire most that which brings much from nothing – i.e.: with fewer inputs we ascribe more to the individual. “The smaller the part played by the input and the bigger the part played by the individual as transducer, the more creative we regard the output. In the limit – when the input is zero, achieved only by the gods – we have creatio ex nihilo“

mother’s call – the maternalising call

the most open organ the ear

spiegel interview

heideggers call from the SS

technology as having nothing to do with tools – the earth pulled out of its socket (seeing the earth from space)

accounting for heidegger’s guilt in taking the SA phone call: “He takes the phone in hand and, covering the mouthpiece, says to Speigel: the essential thing about technology is that man of himself cannot control it.”

the death of philosophy coincides with the ‘arrival’ of technology: “The prevalence of Ge-Stell assures that man is placed, gestellt, assigned tasks, and called to order by a power which is revealved in the nature of technoology and which he himself does not control”

local call

SuZ  = Sein und Zeit, 1927 = Being and Time

dial b for being

Heidegger as mega tool - Die Frage nach der Technik – The question after technology – presupposes the enframing of technology, Speigel’s ‘retooling’ of thought

phony – phone

The Conference Call

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

Samuel Webber – The Debts of Deconstruction – Culture Machine discussion

Derrida – The Post Card -

Discussion here in preparation for the taking up of the technologized call of the “call of the Other” and the call of the self (Dasein) in Heidegger

The deaf as posing a problem to Heideggarian orality of the call (in language, the word). Alexander Graham Bell struggling with the metaphysics of primary orality (his mother and wife were both deaf).

Guilt and the call of conscience – “Ecoute” – Heidegger and Freud.  Finitude – ‘you’ never measure up to your finitude.

Alva Noe Experience and Experiment in Art

• The phenomenology of experience we have is insufficient
• Art can make needed contributions to the study of perceptual consciousness

1. The problem of the transparency of experience
2. Alternative conception of experience as engagement with the environment
3. The work of the sculptors Richard Serra and Tony Smith.

The Transparency of Experience

• The REALIST hopes to represent the world ‘just as it is’, art as a way of investigating the world.  But this view is limited to what we know about the world.
• The EXPERIENTIALIST says we should present how the world presents itself to us in experience – not how it ‘actually’ is.  But this is, of course, still depend on an actual world outside of us that is being experienced – “art must direct itself to the world.” To describe experience is to describe the experienced world.
• “An oscillation ensues between realism and experientialism”
• Mach (1886/1959) The visual field.
  • Attempt to describe the experience of seeing
  • Unsuccesful as it doesn’t capture the visual field as an experience (we focus only on one point when we see, the ‘fade to white’ in the image does really capture the way the visual field dissolved as in experience)
  • Here is the oscillation – in attempting to capture the experience of seeing, Mach captures a description of the world itself.

Experience as a Temporally Extended Pattern of Exploratory Activity

• Experience is not ‘an inner picture’
• For Mach’s drawing – the experience of the visual is misrepresented as we don’t have all the details of a visual field in out consciousness at once
• This idea – that we collect detail about a scene in the visual field and build up an internal model is becoming countered by the “world as it’s own model” view
• We don’t notice things (miss the fry missing when stolen from our plate by a friend) because we don’t actually build up detailed models of scenes – we rely a great deal on the actual world to support subsequent thought / actions
• Perceptual “world as it’s own model” views don’t presume that you create artificial of virtual experiences of scenes or objects in your head, but that you project the ability (as you have awareness of your own sensory-motor skills) to learn more about the object as needed.
• You do not have detail in your head (e.g.: in a visual scene), but you have confidence in your ability to gather this deatil.
• Temporally extended pattern of exploration activity (the eye is not a camera)

Toward an Art of Experience

• What is it we do when we see, then
• “To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception.” – Robert Irwin (1972)
• “Catch ourselves in the act of perceiving and can allow us thus to catch hold of the fact that experience is not a passive interior state, but a mode of active engagement with the world… bring[ing] to rest the troubling oscillation between experimentalism and realism”
• Serra
  • environmental / site specificity
  • complexity – can’t be taken in at a glance, need to be explored, temporally
  • overwhelming and disorientating, sometimes frightening
  • introduces us to our “strictly non-visual (e.g. vestibular, kinesthetic) components of our ‘visual’ experience.”
  • Art as an opportunity to attend to the quality of experience
• Tony Smith
  • geometrical and mathematical – hence somehow immaterial – multiply realisable – “solely defined by its internal relationships” (Serra)