Technologies of the Self
What are technologies of the self in Foucault’s work? This was a theme he was working on from about say 1978 or so. Broadly speaking it means:
1. A set of techniques and practices that can be deployed to modify or affect the self.
2. These techniques are historically situated within power relations.
3. They can mix one’s own knowledge with that of the rule.
4. As with other writing in F. about power, it has a very productive side (producing the self after all) as well as a constraining side.
F. has found that these techniques vary at different times. In one general distinction that he worked on during the early 1980s (including his 1980 Cours on “The Government of the Living”) he contrasted the Greek work of Stoics such as Seneca and Epictetus who urged that one perform regular stock–takings of oneself, and that of the early Christians who developed a series of confessional techniques where one is only authenticated by revealing oneself to a master or superior. Another part of this same contrast was that the Christians tended to believe that one was reaching a true self hidden inside oneself, while the Greeks were more interested in techniques which could transform yourself. You had autonomy even if you were a pupil to the master; you sought him out not be constantly confessing your sins, but to help you develop yourself. F. did not hesitate to see this Christian style confession as resulting in a renouncement of oneself (at its height to be truly repentent the matyrdom advocated by writers such as Tertullian)
A set of reader’s contributions on ToS can be found at: http://theory.org.uk/ctr-fou6.htm
The ToS article has been republished several times, including the book edited by Martin, Gutman, & Hutton (1988) Technologies of the Self, a Seminar with Michel Foucault.
Genealogy of the Subject
Confession was a highly problematic area for F. and he spent much time in different books tracing out its contours (the genealogy)—orders of knowledge in Order of Things (truth), torture and confession in D&P (power), sexuality, religion and confession in Hist. Of Sex. (ethics) and finally within technologies of the self. In our modern times it is confession which dominates as a problem. But, it is not what is bad that is the problem, but what is dangerous (“On The Genealogy of Ethics” interview, p. 231). In this interview he strongly characterizes genealogy as “historical ontology”:
Domains of geneaology: 1. “Historical ontology” of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge 2. Historical ontology of how we constitute ourselves in a relation of power, 3. Historical ontology in relation to ethics of how we constitute ourselves as moral agents. So, truth, power, ethics. (p. 237).
He goes on that the relationship to oneself has four areas: 1. Which aspect of oneself is concerned with morality (eg., feelings, intention, desires) 2. Subjectification or how moral obligation is produced 3. How we can change (work) on ourselves to become ethical, or practices of self 4. To what do we aspire, morally, or the teleology.