The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” he identiies the speciic character of the

relation to the self that was involved in the ancient Greek ethics discussed in The Use of Pleasure. The ancient Greek self-relation insisted on moderation and self-mastery

in the use of the pleasures so that one acted on the self with the purpose of giving

one’s life certain values: “It was a question of making one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for a techne – for an art” (EEW3, 271). Later in the same interview, he

refers to a broad “technology of the constitution of the self,” which in different ways in different periods of European culture makes use of writing. In the next paragraph, he refers to the “techniques of the self,” such as writing and other spiritual exercises, that can be found in different forms in all cultures (EEW3, 277). Insofar as there is a rule governing his use of these distinct terms, it is that he uses “art” and “technology” to refer to the overall relation to a particular object in pursuit of a given goal, whereas “technique” is reserved for the particular instruments and means employed to produce the desired result. Thus, in a 1982 interview (“Space, Knowledge and Power”), he distinguished the contemporary narrow sense of “technology,” whereby it is limited to certain kinds of material technology such as the technology of wood, ire, or electricity, from the wider sense of the word, in which government is also a form of technology: “the government of individuals, the government of souls, the government of the self by the self, the government of families, the government of

children, and so on” (EEW3, 364). In this context, he glosses the meaning of the Greek techne in a way that covers all four domains of human endeavor mentioned

earlier (technologies of production, signiication, power, and the self) as “a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal” (EEW3, 364).

Foucault’s characterization of particular technologies of power, government, or the constitution of the self in the broad sense of the term follows the schema of the Aristotelian concept of cause. In each case, the features that distinguish a given

technology correspond to each of the four senses in which, according to Aristotle, one thing may be the cause (aition) of another. First is the material cause, or matter of

which the thing is made; in this sense, the stone of which it is carved is the material cause of a statue. Second is the formal cause, or what it is that makes this a certain kind

of thing; an exercise of power, for example, occurs whenever there is action on the actions of others or on the self. Third, the eficient cause is that which produces the

thing in question; the activity of the sculptor or the kinds of action on the material produce the desired object. And, inally, we have the telos, or end of the operation in question. This way of deining a given techne or technology, enabled the description of continuities and changes in whatever technology is being discussed, in a manner

that paralleled the analysis of transformations in discursive formations enabled by the complex concept of discourse outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Consider the example of discipline as a distinct political technology for the

exercise of the sovereign power to punish those convicted of breaking the law. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault refers to discipline as a “technology of power” (EDP,

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23, 131), a “political technology of the body” (EDP 26, 30), and a “subtle, calculated technology of subjection” (EDP, 221). He expands on the idea of discipline as a particular type or technology of power, “a modality for its exercise,” in suggesting that it comprises “a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets” (EDP, 215). Perhaps the clearest way to show that disciplinary power is a technology is to contrast it with the other technologies that could have been adopted in the exercise of the power to punish in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The irst of these was the power of the sovereign that operated in public ceremonies by inlicting marks of its superior force on the body of the condemned,

as described in gruesome detail in the account of the torture and execution of the regicide Damiens that opens Discipline and Punish. The second was the democratic

power of society that operated by means of signs to the population at large of the inevitability and the inconvenience of the punishment that would follow the perpetration of any criminal act. In contrast to both of these technologies of punishment, penal incarceration involved a series of techniques for the coercion and training of individuals convicted of crimes. These were applied behind prison walls and aimed at the transformation of the behavior of the criminals rather than at affecting the

minds of the rest of the population.

This disciplinary technology of power was distinguished irst by the material to which it was applied: the body of the convicted criminal neither as an enemy of the sovereign nor as a representation of illegality but “the body, time, everyday gestures

and activities; the soul too, but insofar as it is the seat of habits” (EDP, 128). Second, the disciplinary technology of power is distinguished by the modality of its exercise:

rather than a display of superior force or an art of representation, punishment should

rest on “a studied manipulation of the individual” (EDP, 128). Third, discipline employed a distinct set of techniques that were neither instruments of torture nor

complexes of representation but rather “forms of coercion, schemata of constraint, applied and repeated. Exercises not signs: time-tables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits” (EDP, 128). Finally, the goal of discipline was neither the demonstration of the sovereign’s overwhelming power nor the restoration to the subject of the fundamental rights and duties established by the social contract but “the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders” (EDP, 128).

Now let us examine governmentality as a technology. Foucault’s initial presentation of the concept of governmentality in his lecture of February 1, 1978 referred to the sixteenth-century literature on the art of government rather than to the technology or techniques of state power. However, his subsequent development of the concept made it clear that what was at issue were the different technologies deployed in the exercise of sovereign or state power. His lecture of February 8, 1978 presented his general approach to power as one that sought to go behind the institutions in which power was exercised, such as armies, hospitals, schools, and prisons, in order

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to discover “what we can broadly call a technology of power” (ECF-STP, 117). The aim of the studies of governmentality that followed was to adopt this same methodological principle in order to resituate the modern state “in a general technology of power that assured its mutations, development and functioning” (ECF-STP, 120).

In fact, as the remaining 1978 lectures make clear, Foucault’s studies of governmentality sought to identify the historical series of technologies of state power

that have produced the institutions, techniques, and aims of modern political government. Thus, the Tanner lectures (“‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of

Political Reason”) delivered in 1979 retrace the origins and some of the mutations of the technology of pastoral power in order to suggest that problems associated with the postwar “welfare state” may be seen as one of many reappearances of “the tricky adjustment between political power wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power wielded over live individuals” (EEW3, 307). In a similar manner, “The Subject and Power” describes contemporary state power as a unique combination of totalizing and individualizing power because of the degree to which it has integrated and transformed the techniques of Christian pastoral power. The contemporary state, Foucault suggests, can be seen as “a modern matrix of individualization, or a new form of pastoral power” (EEW3, 334).

The lecture delivered at the University of Vermont in 1982 gives a different account of the sources of what Foucault here referred to as the “political technology of individuals” (EEW3, 404). In this lecture, as in the Tanner lectures, he refers to the postwar welfare state in suggesting that the coexistence of massive destruction of human lives alongside institutions oriented toward the care of individual life remains one of the “central antinomies” of modern political reason (EEW3, 405). The focus of his inquiry in the Vermont lecture is to identify the particular

techniques and technology of government that were taken up within the context of reason of state (raison d’État) “in order to make of the individual a signiicant element

for the state” (EEW3, 409–410). His answer is that it was the science of police that was developed in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that provided the rationale for individual lives becoming a focus of concern for the state. It was theorists of police science such as Louis Turquet de Mayerne (1550–1615), N. Delamare (1639–1723), and Johan H. G. von Justi (1720–1771) who “recognized the necessity of deining, describing, and organizing very explicitly this new technology of power, the new techniques by which the individual could be integrated into the social entity” (EEW3, 410).

Although he does not explicitly refer to the Aristotelian schema in connection with the analysis of governmentality, it is clear that this schema continues to provide an intellectual framework for his survey of the different technologies of government that have contributed to the formation of the modern state. The differences between sovereign and pastoral power, between reason of state, police, and liberal government are identiied with reference to the material object or substance

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of government (territories, locks, populations, societies), the form of relationship to the governed (absolute rule, concern for spiritual or biological well-being, constant monitoring, respect for natural operation), the techniques employed (laws, apparatuses of security), and the aims of government (preservation of sovereign power, strength of the state, well-being of the population, happiness and freedom of individuals, and so on).

Finally, we shall look at ethics as a technology. The same Aristotelian schema informs Foucault’s study in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality.

These volumes describe “technologies of the self” that are found irst in texts relating to classical Greek sexual ethics and second in texts from around the third century

BCE to around the third century CE that discuss Greek and Roman practices of care for the self (epimelia heautou). Foucault presents these practices as a contribu-

tion to the genealogy of morality but one that focuses on the ethical relationship of the self to the self. As he suggests in the introduction to volume two of The History of Sexuality, subtitled The Use of Pleasure, “there is a whole rich and complex ield of

historicity in the way the individual is summoned to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct” (EHS2, 32). More generally, he suggests, the different historical forms of this relationship of the self to the self may be deined as distinct tech-

nologies of the self, in accordance with the four dimensions of the causal relationship identiied by Aristotle. First, there is the part of the self or ethical substance that is the

object of ethical concern. For the ancient Greek ethics discussed in volume two of The History of Sexuality, this was the aphrodisia or acts linked to pleasure and desire.

In the case of the Christian ethics that came later, it was the lesh. Sexuality in the

modern sense, Foucault suggests, “is a third kind of ethical substance” (EEW1, 264). Second, there is the mode of subjectii cation or subjectivation (mode d’assujettisement),

which refers to the manner in which individuals are supposed to relate to themselves as ethical subjects. For example, they can consider themselves subjects of an art or aesthetics of existence, of divine or natural law, or of universal laws imposed by rea-

son. Third, there are the kinds of activities undertaken, the kinds of ethical work of the self on the self, or the practices or techniques (techne) employed that correspond

to an asceticism in the broad sense of the term. Finally, there is the goal or type of being the self aspires to become; that is, the telos of the particular form of ethical conduct.

Foucault makes use of this complex concept of technologies of the self in order to show that what might appear to be the same ethical prescription in different cultures or periods, such as the requirement of sexual idelity between marital partners, is in fact different along one or another of these dimensions (EHS2, 26–28). Further, changes may occur in a given epoch at different rates along some or all of these levels. For example, while ancient Greek and Stoic forms of care of the self retained a similar ethical substance, there were changes in the mode of subjectivation, in the kinds of techniques employed, and in the goal. Christian ethics involved a series of

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further changes: the ethical substance was no longer aphrodisia but concupiscence or lesh; the mode of subjectivation is that of subjection to divine law, the forms of asceticism change and the goal becomes a matter of purity of the soul and the attainment of immortality (EEW1, 267–268). It is perhaps in this area of care of the self that we see best how Foucault’s use of the idea of technologies or techniques its in with his archaeological and genealogical approach to history. As Nietzsche would have said, there is no univocal meaning of a practice; there are only interpretations.

Paul Patton

See Also

Discipline

Ethics

Governmentality

Power

Self

Suggested Reading

Martin, Luther H., Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Revel, Judith. 2008. Dictionnaire Foucault. Paris: Ellipses.

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positive results: nonreproductive sexuality and the wantonly destructive expenditure of economic rituals like potlatch, as well as laughter, poetry, and so on. Bataille’s point is that the relation between interdiction and transgression is precisely not dialectical: transgression is not simply subordinated to interdiction in order to facilitate a constructive, progressive historical movement, just as negativity is not always fully recoverable within a coherent historical movement. In L’Erotisme (Death and Sensuality), Bataille writes:

[T]ransgression has nothing to do with the primal liberty of animal life: it opens the way beyond the usually observed limits, but it retains these limits. Transgression exceeds without destroying a profane world, of which it is the complement. Human society is not only the world of work. Simultaneously – or successively – the profane and sacred worlds make it up, which are its two complementary forms. The profane world is the world of interdiction. The sacred world opens onto limited transgressions. It’s the world of festivals, sovereigns and gods. (Bataille 1987, 67–68, translation modiied)

Without interdiction, transgression would be only “natural,” sex as mere organic activity, death as something undergone without foresight: the world of animals. The human world is the world of awareness and anguish before death, the world of useless play and dangerous sexual exuberance – but this is only possible so long as interdiction and utility are established against transgression. Transgression by itself is nothing; it “needs” interdiction to “function” (not that it is comprehensible as a simple function).

For Bataille, interdiction in the end inds its supreme meaning in intensifying transgression: we conserve, so to speak, only in order to spend, we live and establish barriers to activity that violates rules only to engage in activity that fundamentally transgresses those rules. Thus, nihilistic religions that seem only to provide barriers – that establish a terrifying interdiction as the highest value – ultimately serve to intensify the “experience” of transgression. Again, in the chapter on transgression in Death and Sensuality, Bataille writes: “In Christianity and Buddhism ecstasy is founded on the going-beyond of horror. The accord with excess that carries everything before it is even more intense in religions in which fear and nausea have more profoundly eaten at the heart. There is no feeling more forcefully productive of exuberance than that of nothingness” (Bataille 1987, 69, translation modiied).

Interdiction and transgression are inseparable, but for Bataille transgression seems in the end logically if not chronologically prior. Just as certain kinds of clothing exist primarily to intensify sexual pleasure, for Bataille interdiction serves to intensify the movement of “exuberance.” The horror of the void, the fear of risk, incites one to move in the opposite direction, just as suspension over an abyss invites one to jump. Transgression is the moment of passing over the limit, but, paradoxically,

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its limitlessness is itself founded on the necessity of the limit. Transgression is contained in, and contains, the limits set by interdiction, and yet the very movement of social life, the very thing that makes life worth living and makes it something other than animal life, lies in the passage over those limits.

With all this said, one should note that Bataille’s theory is one of society. It attempts to explain social phenomena: the ultimate workings, and meaning, of religion. It is therefore in a sense also a religious theory: it justiies and afirms the “experience” of the sacred and provides meaning only in the more profound meaninglessness of transgression (unbridled sexuality, play, spending without return, uncontrolled artistic and ludic activity). Bataille is concerned with telling us why we live and what our ultimate motivations are, whether we recognize them (or can recognize them, since they operate against limits) or not. He is, in other words, at least in his arguments on the sacred, a social commentator.

Foucault, in “Preface to Transgression,” is up to something else. His concerns ultimately turn on textuality and the role of language in it. In his presentation/revision of Bataille, Foucault asserts that sexuality, like God, is no longer capable of setting the outer limits of humanity or the limits of the individual. Sexuality for Foucault appears to be something like what Bataille called eroticism; since God has died, sexuality “points to nothing beyond itself” (ELCP, 30). (Although Foucault uses the term “sexuality,” “eroticism” in Bataille’s sense would probably be preferable, since Bataille is not discussing the phenomenon of sexuality examined by the contemporary medical or social sciences, which clearly have little concern for transgression or interdiction.)

As conveyed by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, sexuality now is a profanation that “links, for its own ends, an overcoming of limits to the death of God” (ELCP, 33). Through the endless permutations of Sade’s novels, written in the mode of blasphemy, directed precisely against a God who does not exist, we come to recognize that sexuality, rather than something outside us (as biological or cultural imperative), setting our personal limits, even authorized by theology (in its repro- duction-afirming mode), instead “marks the limit within ourselves and designates us as limit” (ELCP, 30). Endlessly written sexuality is now internal, referring back to no animal (“natural”) state; it cannot be incorporated in a benign reproduction under the aegis of an ininite, and ininitely limiting, God. Rather, it turns on itself, always generating new permutations, new senseless variants: “Not that it [sexuality] proffers any new content for our age-old acts; rather, it permits a profanation without object, a profanation that is empty and turned inward upon itself and whose instruments are brought to bear on nothing but each other” (ELCP, 30).

The interdiction previously provided by God, and by a naturalizing sexuality, is now situated in us: it is a constituting line crossed and recrossed by an endless language. Transgression is an empty profanation, the sacred devoid of God, devoid

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even of the sacred, an endless movement in us that accomplishes nothing, guarantees nothing; it “is neither violence in a divided world (an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); ... its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit” (ELCP, 35).

One has the sense, nevertheless, that there is something positive in all this. Perhaps in a Heideggerian mode (iltered through Blanchot), Foucault argues for a transgression that “contains nothing negative, but afirms limited being – afirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the irst time” (ELCP, 35) (on Foucault on Blanchot, see EFB). What is this afirmation? “Perhaps it is simply an afirmation of division, but only insofar as division is not understood to mean a cutting gesture, or the establishment of a separation or the measuring of a distance, only retaining that in it which may designate the existence of difference” (ELCP, 36).

Transgression is an afirmative movement, opening the possibility of difference, but only in and at the limit, not outside; it does not provide a stabilizing boundary, even in the ininite. It is not scandalous; there is nothing “demonic” about it (ELCP, 37). Transgressive difference is instead the movement not of a productive negativity making possible revolutionary action, but only an “afirmation that afirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity” (ELCP, 36) – what Blanchot calls “contestation.”

Division “is” the nonorigin of difference, the “existence of difference” as afirmation not afirming any “thing.” Heideggerian Being here morphs into a protoDerridean différance, with the difference being that Foucault can still write of the “existence” of difference. And that difference with Derrida is, I think, signiicant. The paradox of Foucault’s transgression is that, in the end, its difference from Hegelian contradiction is not really transgressive in Foucault’s own terms. After all, it exists, through the difference it afirms.... What then is the status of this existence? How can it be transgressive?

Foucault’s larger goal in his essay on transgression is to dispute the primacy of the authorial subject and, from there, the role of a constructive or constitutive negativity. The “experience” is that of the space where experience’s language fails, “from precisely the place where words escape it, where the subject who speaks has just vanished” (ELCP, 40). With transgression in and against the internal limit, initude is lodged in, and transgresses, the space of the absent autonomous subject. Once again, a Heideggerian note, but the result is quite un-Heideggerian, and indeed unBataillean: transgression entails the sheer proliferation of language, language repeating and transgressing itself “to ininity,” inding its “uninterrupted domain” (ELCP, 48), permuting endlessly in the void of an authorial, and authoritative, subjectivity (“transgressing the one who speaks” [ELCP, 44]). This language doubling and differing from itself, autotransgressing, is a movement that, in Foucault’s view, renders obsolete the earlier model of Hegelian (and Kojèvian) negation (for a Derridean

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critique of this endless mirroring and replication, see Gasché 1986). The dialectic proposed a productive negativity, the uptake of destruction in the creative elaboration of spirit, ending in, literally, the end, a steady-state of Spirit at the close of history (this was Kojève’s rewriting of Hegel, which had an enormous inluence in France between the wars, as well as after World War II; see Kojève 1947). But by 1963 the dialectic, especially as espoused in the version put forward by French Marxist intellectuals (including Sartre), not to mention the French Communist Party, was starting to show its age. The problem was in the question of replacement. Foucault poses the rhetorical question: “[Must we] ind a language for the transgressive which would be what dialectics was, in an earlier time, for contradiction?” (ELCP, 40). He seems to want it both ways: no to a simple replacement of dialectical-philosophical discourse, but yes to some other model of philosophy as transgressive discourse. But is “some other model” not merely a version of replacement?

That is the central problem: is contradiction to be replaced by another philosophical discourse? Are we really that far from negation, and from the Aufhebung? The answer is not at all clear: philosophy only “regains its speech and inds itself again only in the marginal region which borders its limits” (ELCP, 43), coming from the impossible space between “a puriied metalanguage” and “the thickness of words enclosed by their darkness” (ibid.). A philosophy will appear, in other words, that transgresses the space between a coherent technical discourse and the madness of proliferating language.

The answer to the question of replacement, then, is both yes and no. Foucault’s transgressive duality (the line and its crossing) seems to anticipate much of the later Tel Quel project – the paradoxical effort to establish a rigorous theory of a prelogical “chora sémiotique,” as Kristeva called it (Kristeva 1984) – and therefore there could be no simple replacement of Hegelian dialectics but only a repetition, with a difference, the endless turning of philosophical discourse around its internal limit, the necessary but unassimilable space of transgression. But the important thing to note here is that Foucault is nevertheless attempting to work out the logic of a philosophical discourse that would come after, in one way or another, the coherent philosophical language of dialectics. It seems, then, that he wants it both ways: on the one hand, transgressive discourse is an ininite murmuring, a differential afirmation, reminiscent of Sade’s endless permutations or Borges’s library of Babel. This avant-garde ideal is doubled by the suggestion (posed as a question) that dialectics (contradiction) will ind its successor in a transgressive language that would, we can easily conclude, destroy the legitimacy of dialectical philosophies, not least Marxism, and lead to some sort of (rigorously marginal) philosophical discourse, founded not on contradiction but on transgressive language (which is in fact yet to be found, and perhaps cannot be found: “must we ind?”). Discrediting Hegelianism (read, in the 1963 French context: Marxism) and putting forward some conjunction of Bataille/ Nietzsche would thus ultimately have to be seen as a political gesture, as well as a