Technologies of self pdf

It appears that while Foucault's thoughts on governmentality have been used by some feminists in their research and analysis e. In later writings, Foucault theorizes governmentality in terms of "technologies of the self"5 and. Sharpe, Matthew. In this chapter, I share the lessons I learned while sewing handmade kamiks with my mother-in-law, an Inuvialuk elder.

I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self. Indicates: a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology.

The famous philosopher Foucault has enriched us with his ideas on various topics and an important one among them is his concept of governmentality.

Rabinow ed M. Foucault argues that human beings turn themselves into subjects through what he labels "the technologies of the self. This article uses Foucault's theoretical construct of 'technologies of the self' which he defined as the methods and techniques through which people constitute their identities.

Mitcheson, K. Discipline and Punish, subtitled The Birth of the Prison, is Michel Foucault's reading of the shift in penal technologies from torture to imprisonment that took place in Europe beginning in the eighteenth century.

Foucault dramatizes this transformation by opening the book with two penal schemes separated by 80 years. Alexey S. Bakhirev - manuscript. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. This volume is a wonderful introduction to Foucault [and] a testimony to the deep humanity of the man himself. I When I began to study the rules, duties, and prohibitions of sexuality, the interdictions and restrictions associated 6 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Foucault describes and employs the concept of parrhesia series of lectures techniques through which people governed On various topics and an important one among them is his concept of..

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Technologies of the Self A year before he died Foucault acknowledged, "I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that rather than sex.

The final linking is that of power and technologies , which will be taken up in two aspects: the technologies of self -formation and the technologies of social governance. Within the technologies of self -formation, Foucault distinguishes It dates from the Christian Era and focuses on the notion of the struggle of the soul. If the problems are the same, the solutions and themes are quite different and, in some cases, the opposite of the Platonic meanings.

First, to be concerned with self in the Hellenistic and Roman periods is not exclusively a preparation for political life. Care of the self has become a universal principle. One must leave politics to take better care of the self. Second, the concern with oneself is not just obligatory for young people concerned with their education; it is a way of living for everybody throughout their lives.

Third, even if self-knowledge plays an important role in taking care of oneself, it involves other relationships as well. Permanent medical care is one of the central features of the care of the self. One must become the doctor of oneself. Since we have to take care throughout, the objective is no longer to get prepared for adult, or for another life, or for another life, but to get prepared for a certain complete achievement of life.

This achievement is complete at the moment just prior to death - of old age as completion - is an inversion of the traditional Greek values on youth. Lastly, we have the various practices to which cultivation of self has given rise and the relation of self-knowledge to these. But, from the time of Plato to the Hellenistic age, the relationship between care of the self and knowledge of the self changed.

We may note two perspectives. In the philosophical movements of Stoicism in the imperial period there is a different conception of truth and memory, and another method of examining the self. A culture of silence becomes more and more important. This is the positive condition for acquiring truth. The tradition is picked up during the imperial period, where we see the beginning of the culture of silence and the art of listening rather than the cultivation of dialogue as in Plato.

At the beginning of this treatise, Plutarch says that, following schooling, we have to learn to listen to logos throughout our adult life. The art of listening is crucial so you can tell what is true and what is dissimulation, what is rhetorical truth and what is falsehood in the discourse of the rhetoricans.

You keep silent at the lecture. You think about it afterward. This is the art of listening to the voice of the master and the voice of reason in yourself. In his teatise On the Contemplative Life , Philo of Alexandria describes banquets of silence, not debauched banquets with wine, boys, revelry, and dialogue.

There is instead a teacher who gives a monologue on the interpretation of the Bible and a very precise indication of the way people must listen De Vita Cont. For example, they must always assume the same posture when listening. The morphology of this notion is an interesting theme in monasticism and pedagogy henceforth. In Plato the themes of contemplation of self and care of self are related dialectically through dialogue.

Now in the imperial period we have themes of, on one side, the obligation of listening to truth and, on the other side, of looking and listening to the self for the truth within.

The difference between the one era and the other is one of the great signs of the disappearance of the dialectical structure. What was an examination of conscience in this culture, and how does one look at oneself? Since sleep was related to death as a kind of encounter with the gods, you had to purify yourself before going to sleep. Remembering the dead was an exercise for the memory. He describes an examination of conscience. The same thing was recommended by the Epicureans, and the practice was rooted in the Pythagorean tradition.

Do good things, have a good examination of the self, and a good sleep follows together with good dreams, which is contact with the gods. Seneca seems to use juridical language, and it seems that the self is both the judge and the accused. Seneca is the judge and prosecutes the self so that the examination is a kind of trial. Seneca uses terms related not to juridical but to administrative practices, as when a comptroller looks at the books or when a building inspector examines a building.

Self-examination is taking stock. Faults are simply good intentions left undone. The rule is a means of doing something correctly, not judging what has happened in the past. Later, Christian confession will look for bad intentions.

It is this administrative view of life much more than the juridical model that is important. He is a permanent administrator of himself, not a judge of his past. He sees that everything has been done correctly following the rule but not he law. It is not real faults for which he reproaches himself but rather his lack of success. His errors are of strategy, not of moral character. He wants to make adjustments between what he wanted to do and what he had done and reactivate the rules of conduct, not excavate his guilt.

In Christian confession, the penitent is obliged to memorize laws but does so in order to discover his sins. Third, the recollection of errors committed in the day measures the distinction between what has been done and what should have been done.

Fourth, the subject is not the operating ground for the process of deciphering but is the point where rules of conduct come together in memory. The subject constitutes the intersection between acts which have to be regulated and rules for what ought to be done. This is quite different from the Platonic conception and from the Christian conception of conscience. A retreat into the country becomes a spiritual retreat into oneself.

It is a general attitude and also a precise act every day; you retire into the self to discover - but not to discover faults and deep feelings, only to remember rules of action, the main laws of behavior.

It is mnemotechnical formula. I have spoken of three Stoic techniques of the self: letters to friends and disclosure of self; examination of self and conscience, including a review of what was done, of what should have been done, and comparison of the two. Now I want to consider the third Stoic technique, askesis , not a disclosure of the secret self but a remembering. For Plato, one must discover the truth that is within one.

For the Stoics, truth is not in oneself but in the logoi , the teaching of the teachers. One memorizes what one has heard, converting the statements one hears into rules of conduct. The subjectivization of truth is the aim of these techniques. There are structural questions underlying the practice of the examination of the self every night.

In Christianity asceticism always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and of reality because most of the time your self is a part of that reality you have to renounce in order to get access to another level of reality. This move to attain the renunciation of the self distinguishes Christian asceticism.

In the philosophical tradition dominated by Stoicism, askesis means not renunciation but the progressive consideration of self, or mastery over oneself, obtained not through the renunciation of reality but through the acquisition and assimilation of truth.

It is a set of practices by which one can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action. Alethia becomes ethos. It is a process of becoming more subjective. What are the principle features of askesis? They include exercises in which the subject puts himself into a situation in which he can verify whether he can confront events and use the discourse with which he is armed.

It is a question of testing the preparation. Is this truth assimilated enough to become ethics so that we can behave as we must when an event presents itself? The Greeks characterized the two poles of those exercises by the terms melete and gymnasia. It has the same root as epimelesthai. It is a rather vague term, a technical term borrowed from rhetoric.

Melete is the work one undertook in order to prepare a discourse or an improvisation by thinking over useful terms and arguments. You had to anticipate the real situation through dialogue in your thoughts. The philosophical meditation is this kind of meditation: It is composed of memorizing responses and reactivating those memories by placing oneself in a situation where one can imagine how one would react. The most famous exercise of meditation is the premeditatio mallorum as practiced by the Stoics.

It is an ethical, imaginary experience. The Stoics developed three eidetic reductions of future misfortune. For example, imagining not that one might be exiled but rather that one is already exiled, subjected to torture, and dying.

Third, one does this not in order to experience inarticulate sufferings but in order to convince oneself that they are not real ills. The reduction of all that is possible, of all the duration and of all the misfortunes, reveals not something bad but what we have to accept.

It consists of having at the same time the future and the present event. The Epicureans were hostile to it because they thought it was useless. They thought it better to recollect and memorize past pleasures in order to derive pleasure from present events. In the culture of the Stoics, their function is to establish and test the independence of the individual with regard to the external world. Or one temps oneself by placing oneself in front of many tantalizing dishes and then renouncing these appetizing dishes.

Then you call your slaves and give them the dishes, and you take the meal prepared for the slaves. Between these poles of training in thought and training in reality, melete and gymnasia , there are a whole series of intermediate possibilities. Epictetus provides the best example of the middle ground between these poles.

He wants to watch perpetually over representations, a technique which culminates in Freud. The same metaphor of the money changer is found in the Stoics and in early Christian literature but with different meanings. When Epictetus says you have to be a money changer, he means as soon as an idea comes to mind you have to think of the rules you must apply to evaluate.

For John Cassian, being a money changer and looking at your thoughts means something very different: It means you must try to decipher it, at the root of the movement which brings you the representations, there is or is not concupiscence or desire - if your innocent thought has evil origins; if you have something underlying which is the great seducer, which is perhaps hidden, the money of your thought.

In Epictetus there are two exercises: sophistic and ethical. This must be an ethical game; that is, it must teach a moral lesson. The second are more ambulatory exercises. In the morning you go for a walk, and you test your reactions to that walk. The purpose of both exercises is control of representations, not the deciphering of truth. They are reminders about conforming to the rules in the face of adversity. A pre-Freudian machine of censorship is described word for word in the tests of Epictetus and Cassian.

The fire altar is another element in the identification chain; it stands for the spatial dimension and symbolizes the whole universe. It also operates on the other levels of the identification. But how exactly is the agnicayana supposed to make the patron immortal? It is useful to attend briefly to the vocabulary qualifying the ways in which immortality is attained. Thus, the agnicayana can been regarded as a complex ritual of reintegration enabling the patron to gradually and painstakingly construct his immortal self.

The idea would seem to be this: by ritually reconstructing the universe one encompasses space and time within the ritually constructed fire-altar, becomes lord over the universe, and thereby reaches immortality. Immortality is accessible to the patron of the sacrifice only by means of the fire altar, which becomes his ritually constituted self.

Some comparative considerations The comparison of the Greek and Indian evidence allows us to ask some intriguing cross- cultural questions about immortality.

What is the relation between the immortal being and the person that once lived? Is there any continuation of a personal identity? The ritual performance through which immortality is attained is not regarded as the operation of a particular subject, but derives its efficacy from nothing other than itself.

In Timaeus, immortality is in essence a process of depersonalization. After death, the individual who has perfected himself by following his immortal soul and living a philosophical life will return to the star with which it was originally associated 42b. Immortality is represented differently in the two texts under scrutiny. In stark contrast to some Upanishad passages portraying the self as inhabiting the innermost core of ourselves 41 See Silburn Nonetheless, it can be attained precisely because is already there.

Being mortal by definition, man can obtain immortality not by centralising all his efforts on his immortal core - such a thing is in fact absent - but through ritually fashioning a substitute body.

Even though both kinds of immortality can be fully realised only postmortem, they differ as to the degree to which they inform the present life.

For the ancient Indian practitioners, the pursuit of immortality happens entirely through and within the highly technical domain of ritual. Once he has built a divine body for himself, 44 See BU 1. We must however avoid reading the above observations through the conventional lens magnifying a reified view of the Greek and the Indian traditions.

While the differences identified above are, in my opinion, real, they do not readily fit that old-fashioned yet still partly dominant model. Graham eds. Funktionen und Gehalt, Munich: C. Cooper, M. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dasti Bryant and Bryant Edwin eds. Eggeling, Julius transl. Hutton, Patrick H. University of Massachusetts Press, pp. Frede, Dorothea and Burkhard, Reis eds. Oxford: Oxford University. Jamison, Stephanie and Brereton, Joel transl. Wien: Sammlung De Nobili.

Olivelle, Patrick transl. Pinault, G. LVIII , pp.