Michel Foucault: Technologies of Self

The next few posts will concern those inner technologies that have historically molded a certain western subject. Michel Foucault technologies of self have several different aspects and may serve to either facilitate subjective freedom or impose disciplines and regimes of control upon a docile subject.

Among the promises that these inner technologies have historically made Foucault tells us are to:“permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”

But his study of inner technologies largely focus on how they may be used as self-disciplines by which people police themselves in society or impose controls upon the self that constrain their movements within state, economic or religious systems of power. One such system according to Foucault would be the imposition of the confessional self by the Catholic Church .

Bernard Steigler whose works are also explored on this blogzine, who develops his concepts of relational technologies (R technologies), from Foucault’s inner technologies states “such a meta-struggle is relational, consisting of “R technologies that can focus and expand the mind or operate as what Foucault calls “control technologies” within – to use a phrase both Stiegler and Deleuze borrow from William Burroughs –  “societies of control,” which work diligently to prevent such (“mental”) instruments from having any other result than mind-control”.

The contrast between inner technologies as methods to impose control or facilitate freedom has some rough correspondences with how we have here previously theorized and contrasted the disappearance of the human into technology with the disappearance of technology into the human. The difference being one between subjugation and freedom.

In Steigler’s perspective the issue is one of either the gathering or dispersion of attention visa vie our ubiquitous technological environments that is central to the concerns that confront humanity today. The dispersion of attention through the baiting of ten thousand streaming things and images broadcast by the desiring machine of hyper-capitalism threatens our free agency in the world. The loss of attention and integral being constrains our operations in the world solely in terms of our surplus value for the digital commodity object or as standing reserve for the technological apparatus of neoliberal global markets. While in contrast the appeal to inner technologies that concentrate attention and sublimate desire, that we here have translated into the Sanskrit word tapas, coupled with the mindful use of relational technologies might facilitate new evolutionary forms of human freedom.

While we recognize that this inquiry might yield fruit or may prove barren we hope the process itself by engaging different cross-cultural perspectives on freedom and control may at least provide a few interesting insights. There is precious little research that has been done in attempting to contextualize the inner technologies and care of the self discourse of Foucault in terms of Eastern practices of meditation and yogic sadhana. Similarly, Sri Aurobino’s integral yoga has been for far too long contextualized in the West as solely a metaphysical teaching from the mystic East that its larger social context – which can serve as a future oriented inner technology of the self whose chief concern is individual freedom – has been obscured to the post-metaphysical thinking of the Academy.

The first post in this current series will be the taken from the seminars Michel Foucault gave toward the end of his life at Berkeley on the history of technologies of self in Western discourse. We will follow this by posting works and reviews of works by contemporary theorist that apply Foucault’s ideas to different disciplines from Education, Bio-ethics, Christian Theology or whatever else interesting we find.

Foucault – Technologies of the Self

Link to Technologies of Self