Transcription
Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason IO, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said, or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated. And that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners. I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well.
In his piece, *Technologies of the Self*, Michel Foucault is outlining four distinct types of what he's calling technologies, and he's using the word in a very broad sense here. I also want to point out that he's not attempting to provide a theory of technology per se, the essence of technology as such. He's also not attempting to provide an exhaustive, uh, you know, typology of all forms of technology, in part because his listing and distinction is motivated by a set of interests and, and uh, you could call them directions of research on his part. So this comes up in the section, *Context of Study*, and he says, "My objective for more than 25 years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves." So the orientation for technology in this case, and the four types that he's going to distinguish, are motivated by that particular research orientation or project. And he says, "You know, what are these different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves? Economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology."
And if you think about the structure of his his works in general, um, particularly the the earlier and middle books that he's he's publishing, well, those are, you know, focused on on these issues. And he goes on and says, "The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value, but to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific truth games related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves." So there's, you know, what we can call in general, a hermeneutics of suspicion, which doesn't mean that everything is, you know, turned into a prison, or any sort of the nonsense that people bring up with respect to Foucault. He's interested in differentiating out how these different, as he's calling them here in quotes, truth games operate and how they connect up with everything else that we find interesting and valuable. So he says, "As a context, we must understand there's four major types of these," there's the key term, these technologies, right? He's not saying four major types of technology per se; he's saying four major types of these technologies, each as he calls it, a matrix of practical reason. So we should pause on that before we go into the typology. What does it mean to say that something is a matrix of practical reason?
Now there's there's two key terms there, right? Matrix and then practical reason. Practical reason, practical rationality, is when we distinguish it from say pure reason or speculative or theoretical reason. It's about getting things done. And this is this is a notion that goes all the way back in the West to say Aristotle, right? Aristotle distinguished between practical and theoretical. He also talked about poetic, meaning productive activities, and this is a very important distinction for him. He even talks about there being, you know, truth uh, in different senses, right? Uh, truth in—this is the Nicomachean Ethics, Book Six—truth in the practical sense has to do not just with what we would call truth and falsity, but also with what we ought to do and what we ought not to do; what is choice-worthy, what is to be rejected; what is good for us, what's not, you know, what's bad for us—all those sorts of things. So practical reason encompasses this. Jumping ahead, say to somebody like Kant, you know, when he has the Critique of Practical Reason, it's really a critique, a reasoned examination, so reason is examining itself, of how we are motivated to do things and whether they are truly moral or not; what ends we ought to be adapting. It's also providing knowledge about ourselves. All these discourses of practical reason do provide us with knowledge of what what kind of things we are—partial knowledge, right? Because it turns out we're incredibly complex. And so practical reason: how should we do things? What sort of reasoning process should we follow? How do we select between different ends? How do we set up hierarchies of goods or bads? How do we establish lines that we won't cross? What do we do after we've crossed them? All of those are questions for practical reason.
And in talking about matrices, I'm not going to get, you know, very etymological here, you know, matrix means womb or anything like that, but we do want to say it's not just about, you know, matrices and say linear algebra for logistics. We're talking about how complex systems are put together, and in a certain sense, one of the technologies, technologies assign systems, does in fact encompass all of these insofar as we represent them, right? So these matrices interpenetrate with each other. So let's talk about the four different kinds now. Let's run through them very quickly. He says, "Technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power, and technologies of the self." Now what are these? Let's take a look at each of these. Uh, he doesn't he doesn't give us a very long discussion of any of them except for technologies itself, which the entire piece is about, of course, right? But uh, they're all they're all worth thinking about. So what are what are technologies of production? He says, "These permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things." So, you know, generating a book involves technologies of production. Now it also involves sign systems, but let's put that aside for the moment. Think about the physicality of this object. You know, we have a number of wooden pulp pressed things with chemical compounds that have bleached them, and then other chemical compounds overlaid on them—the ink that that goes into this, or perhaps, you know, we could have other things as well. They could be burned into the page, they could be inscribed into the page. We have the whole binding, we have the coloration of this this is a physical object. So just as much as this chalkboard is a physical object that had to be produced, the tie that I'm wearing, I'm sure is mass-produced according to some pattern that a designer picked out and somebody okayed and then said, "All right, we're gonna—what kind of—what is this thing made out of? It's uh, 100% silk, that's why it has to be dry clean only," apparently on the tag. I wonder if the tag is 100% silk or made of—it's probably made of some sort of plasticky material because it feels that way. And all of this goes into technologies of production. Now, you know, we could have an earlier time in which the fabric that this tie was made of was produced by hand, and then it was dyed by hand. You know, cravats have been around for quite a long time before they started being mass-produced. So there's there's other ways of producing, transforming, manipulating things. We might include logistics to some degree in there as well—getting things from place to place. You know, this this tie made its way to the, I believe, Men's Warehouse where we bought it, or maybe we bought it online; I don't really quite remember where we got it from, but all of that would be within the technologies of production.
Then we have technologies of sign systems. He says, "These permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification." So very broad stuff, concerned with communication, concerned with naming, concerned with reference, concerned with uh, telling people, you know, again, practical reason, telling people what to do, setting out checklists. A grocery list is in part a, you know, technology of production—tells you what to do: go get some pineapples, go get some canned beans—but it's also being carried out through the technologies of sign systems, right? And we we could include not just the actual writing itself or the the verbiage or concepts, but the paper again, use the book right now. This book is part of a technology of sign systems, a vast technology as it turns out, and we might consider the video or podcast or webpage to be part of that as as well. I mean, in a certain sense, you are producing something, but it's also significative, right? And we could talk about: what does it mean that I'm wearing a tie? What does it mean that I'm wearing a tie that I don't really know, you know, it's provenance—to even talk about provenances for ties is that an appropriate word? Technologies of sign systems, right? So that's, you know, pretty straightforward. Foucault is not saying anything I think that's particularly controversial in bringing these things up. Then he goes on and says, "Technologies of power." This is one of the things that he's particularly interested in throughout his career, even going back to, you know, "My objective for more than 25 years…" Technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination and objectivizing of the subject—so making you do things, right? When I set up my class sites for my online students, I am setting up, in some respects, something that's a technology of science systems, also technology production, but it's also a technology of power. I'm going to make them, hopefully, read certain texts and respond to them in say discussion forums and then engage with each other's responses and ideally produce some reflection and learning on their their part, right? And I'm using power. If they don't do it, then I give them a bad grade, and you know, some students discover later on that there's an awful lot of work for them that they haven't yet done, and you know, sometimes they get quite a—"Oh, you're using power on me!" Sometimes they're very apologetic. All of that is part of essentially a technology of power, and there's many different ways in which this plays out. Like I said, Foucault's career was largely oriented around showing that power is involved even when we we may not see it.
And then we have technologies of the self. So why bring this up? So it's providing us with something additional here. He says, "Technologies of the self, which permit individuals…bought to effect by their own means or with the help of others"—very important qualification there. It's not just like entirely bootstrapping on your own part, or having illuminations going off and, you know, facing the wall and meditating for 10 years. You do most of this through consulting others, having others involved. The others help you with these technologies of the self to to carry out a number of operations on themselves, on things that belong to them—their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, or we might say lifestyle, relationships also fit in with us. So that's very important here. We're talking about a difference between technology of power—power is used on you to make you do things—technology of the self—you are determining yourself in certain ways to make you do things or change or hold on to what you've you've changed too, and it's to attain a certain state. Now he gives some examples here—these are not the only possible ones—to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. So there's a lot of different possible ends involved with the technologies of the self. I think it's worth dwelling on what he doesn't say: our potential ends, you know, entertainment, being interested in in things, uh, keeping yourself from feeling like you're dead inside. Okay, those could maybe fit into that, but those aren't things that he talks about here. Notice he also doesn't say like, you know, getting ahead in life, being successful, having a lot of social media followers, anything like that. Obviously social media didn't exist when when Foucault was around, but you know, celebrity certainly did. He was a celebrity. So we have these four different technologies, and as he points out, um, these four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although each of them, he says, is associated with a certain type of domination. Now this brings up a really interesting point: aren't technologies of the self like anti-domination, you know, they're good, and technologies of power, they're bad, right? And then the other two are maybe like neutral, depending on how we use them. Foucault does not buy into that at all. Whether they're good or bad really depends on the perspectives that we're taking on them, and technologies of the self do involve a certain domination. You are dominating yourself. Very often it's framed in in, you know, ancient philosophy and medieval philosophy and theology and spiritual practices as a better part of yourself is using the self to dominate the worst parts of yourself, right? You can think about the Platonic rational part and the demonic part aligned against the the unruly appetites in *The Republic* or in other texts, right? We could go on and on from there. So they all do involve domination; they all do involve, we might also say, exploitation or subordination in certain ways. So he says, "Each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills, also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes." And he gives the example in Karl Marx's *Capital*. He says, "The relation between manipulating things and domination appears clearly there where every technique of production requires modification of individual conduct, not just skills like learning how to operate a machine, but also attitudes—looking at the the day as, you know, the the work hours which belong to the employer, and then the little bit of leisure time that you get after you come home and crash, right? To get up to do it again." Every one of these—production, sign systems, power, self—involves domination, involves transformation of people. Think about sign systems—getting people to actually learn a language is involving a lot of domination. You know, the kid points at the cat and says "doggy," and you're like, "No, no, no, that's a kitty cat," right? You are actually changing the kid; you're changing attitudes about it—"Oh, look at the the good kitty, look at the bad kitty"—and we could go on and on from from there. So he says the the couple other things that we want to point out: usually the first two technologies are used in the study of the sciences and linguistics; it's the last two, the technologies of domination itself, which have most kept my attention. "I've attempted a history of the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self. I studied madness not in terms of the criteria of the formal sciences, but to show what type of management of individuals inside and outside of asylums was made possible by this strange discourse." So how does sign systems, like classifications, diagnoses, how do those come together with power, and how does the discourse of power also lead, in some cases at least, to not just—"You're nuts, we're going to lock you up and experiment on you"—but "We we want you to be a better person, we want you to recover your genuine self that has been lost, that has been alienated from you." There's also a technology of the self being brought about there as well. And so he he says that, "I call governmentality the encounter between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self when these are coming together." And he says, "Perhaps I've insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I'm more interested, more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in technologies of individual domination in the mode of action that an individual exercises on himself by means of the technologies of the self." So the technologies of the self are what Foucault comes to realize at the end he's really interested in, and this is part of what he has to offer uh, in this essay and throughout his his later works, uh, looking at models for how people in the past developed these technologies of the self and applied them and what results were, and then thinking about how we might do them the same or differently in the present. The last thing I'll say: you never get technologies of the self without all of these other things being involved, right? So you're never going to have a pure discourse of the technology of the self—self-transformation, self-understanding, care of the self—that doesn't already, you know, involve in multiple ways these other discourses. And from Foucault's perspective, that's okay, because he's not a puritan trying to entirely extricate or liberate the technologies of the self from all of these others. It's not as if the technologies of the self are intrinsically good and technologies of power are intrinsically bad, as we pointed out earlier; they kind of go hand in hand with each other.