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Foucault and individual autonomy
Bert Olivier
Department of Journalism, Media and Philosophy, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan
University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Bert.Olivier@nmmu.ac.za
What does it mean, to be ‘autonomous’, and more specifically, is it still possible to discern a modicum
of ‘autonomy’ on the part of people in contemporary’ carceral’ society to a significant degree – that is,
a degree not limited to a handful of individuals whose autonomy one may discern in their ‘critical’
actions vis-á-vis mainstream discourses and behaviour? Is there indeed evidence, as implied by the
question, above, that the majority of people today function as ‘docile bodies’, in Foucault’s words? In
this paper it is argued that Foucault – especially in his study of ancient sexuality – provides one with a
model for autonomy in a psychical as well as ethical sense, which can be articulated in terms of what
Hellenistic thinkers termed ‘the care of the self’. Further that, for various reasons, this model is worth
emulating, given the disciplinary, ‘panoptical’ structure and functioning of contemporary society,
which tends to reduce individuals to ‘docile bodies’. It is noteworthy that, according to Foucault,
psychology has been historically complicit in this process.
Keywords: ancient sexuality; carceral society; care of the self; docile bodies; individual autonomy;
panopticism; problematization.
‘Being weird is not enough’. Happy Harry Hard-on in Pump up the Volume.
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What does it mean to be ‘autonomous’ (from the ancient Greek words for ‘self’ and
‘law’) – that is, to be able to be one’s own ‘law-giver’? I put the word in scare quotes
because, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as ‘complete’ autonomy on the part
of a person or an institution. At best, one can be ‘relatively’ autonomous, insofar as
everyone, no matter how independently-minded, is to some degree dependent on other
people, on conventions and on things that he or she has not created, such as language.
To this extent, then, one is heteronomous, or subject to the law of the ‘Other’, that is,
in Lacanian terms, to the (moral) Law articulated in the symbolic order as
representative of societal values (Olivier 2005).
When Descartes (1972) believed, in the 17th century, that he had successfully
excluded everything that could be doubted on the slightest grounds, including
conventional beliefs, in this way arriving at the one indubitable proposition, namely
his famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’), he was seriously mistaken.
One could forgive him for his oversight, that the language in which he was writing
(and thinking), whether it was French or Latin, was an unavoidable conventional
system of meaning, without which he could not have arrived at any ‘original’ insight.
After all, it was only in the late 19th century, in the work of Nietzsche, for example,
that the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ started taking shape – the realization that human
beings are thoroughly constituted by and through language, as something that pre-
exists any individual – and that the ‘consciousness-paradigm’ within which Descartes
still worked, gave way to the affirmation of language as the ontological horizon of
human existence (Gadamer 1982).
Once this insight had dawned on human beings, the way was paved to the
realization that no man or woman is an island, as it were, and that one’s (moral,
psychic, cognitive) ‘autonomy’ would always have to be placed in relation to various
ineluctable dependencies or ‘subjections’ to the ‘law of the Other/other’ – whether it
is the laws of language, mathematics, of a specific country, of nature, and so on.
If this is the case, however, does it still make sense to speak of ‘autonomy’? I
believe that it does, as long as one always admits that it means ‘relative autonomy’. In
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his wonderful little essay, ‘Was heisst Aufklärung?’ (‘What is enlightenment?’), Kant
wrote that the motto of enlightenment (with a small ‘e’; the state of being
‘enlightened’, or being able to use one’s own reason; not the historical epoch of the
‘Enlightenment’) is ‘Sapere aude’, or ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ (1959,
p. 85). Here he touched on the core of what it means to be ‘relatively’ autonomous.
After all, to exhort one to ‘think for yourself’ is to imply that others can and do
attempt, all the time, to ‘think’ on one’s behalf, to their own benefit, of course. And
these others comprise the ineluctable discursive field of what one has to negotiate, or
perhaps sometimes resist, in one’s own thinking and acting, to be able to claim
‘relative’ (instead of ‘complete’) autonomy.
From the outset it should be noted that terms such as ‘discursive’ and
‘discourse’ denote the insight, which functions here as a fundamental assumption, that
human beings are unavoidably inserted in a linguistic field where meaning and power
are inseparably conjoined, in other words, where words are never innocent, but are
instead inscribed with values which promote certain interests and practices at the cost
of others. The precise articulation of this ‘discursive constitution’ of human beings
may differ from one theorist to the next – for instance in Foucault’s and in Lacan’s
related, but distinguishable sense(s) of the phrase – but these are ultimately
compatible (Olivier 2003; 2009).
The question of ‘relative’ autonomy
That there is no unanimity on the question of ‘relative’ autonomy is clear from a
glance at some of the recent articles in the South African Journal of Psychology.
While I have defended the position that the subject is capable of such ‘relative’
autonomy from different perspectives (Olivier 2005; 2007a; 2009d), and while others
have done so too, there have also been those authors who have either explicitly or
implicitly denied such relative autonomy.
Among contributions which affirm the ability of the subject to adopt a relatively
autonomous subject position vis-á-vis the discursive environment (which always tends
towards ‘subjecting’ the individual to dominant discursive constructions), one must
count Andrea Hurst’s (2009) elaboration of a Lacanian model of complex
subjectivity. She recognizes that there are pathological instances where the subject
may fail in achieving relative autonomy, and emphasizes just how multifaceted the
so-called ‘self’ is (articulated along the lines of the ‘real’, the ‘imaginary’ and the
‘symbolic’, within each of which specific concerns pull in opposite directions). Yet
this does not prevent her from showing that the ‘self’ may be understood as the
sustained negotiation of ineluctable internal conflicts, instead of a subjectivity
unilaterally ‘constructed’ by its cultural and social milieu.
Although Phipps and Vorster’s (2009) article on narrative therapy appears, at
first blush, to affirm a conception of the heteronomous (narrative) constructedness of
the self, matters are not that simple. First, they place narrative therapy within the
historical and theoretical context of postmodernism, constructivism and social
constructionism (which adopts a relativistic stance on the questions of knowledge and
reality). By linking the self-storying by the individual with the priority placed on
communal exchange (discursive exchange) as source of ‘reality’ understood as a
‘construct’, it may seem as if the subject is denied any relative autonomy. But the
very fact that such story-telling by individuals is described by Phipps and Vorster
(2009, pp. 36-37) as ‘a selective or interpretive process shaping his or her life’,
betrays the assumption of a residual ability on the individual’s part to negotiate the
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discursive field within which she or he is situated – in other words, her/his relative
autonomy is affirmed.
Wilbraham’s (2009) piece on ‘Manufacturing willingness’ (‘talking about sex’),
on the other hand, may tacitly assume the psychological and discursive capacity, on
the part of young people, to make decisions regarding their sexual activities
‘independently’ from ‘expert communication techniques’ (supposedly) inculcated in
their parents through media campaigns. I believe that, even if this is the case, the
assumption of such ‘relative autonomy’ is methodologically vitiated by her
understanding of Foucaultian discourse theory as theoretically justifying a conception
of subjects as being irresistibly (in Althusserian terms) ‘interpellated’ by the
discourses that comprise their social milieu. This could partly be because of her
reliance on two of Foucault’s texts (1980; 1995) which – as I shall argue later in this
paper – represent genealogies of modern subjects as discursively constructed ‘docile
bodies’, or variously as subjects of ‘discipline’ and ‘carcerality’, and not noting the
evidence in the rest of Foucault’s oeuvre, of his affirmation of the ‘relative autonomy’
of which subjects are capable. There is also the consideration that, even if the two
texts in question may seem to argue for the exhaustive discursive colonization of
subjects, their author (who is not synonymous with the historical Michel Foucault, as
he himself has argued; 1972) has clearly critically distanced himself from such
discourses. Wilbraham’s subjects are further rendered fragmented and heteronomous
by her appeal (2009, pp. 62-63) to Hall’s relativistic cultural constructionism, which
(through dubious use of Foucault) allows for multiple subject positions being
constructed via media representation. This does not acknowledge an irrepressible
subject-position which has to remain extraneous to all these fluctuating constructions,
lest no comprehension of the elusive ‘source’ of fleeting identification be possible
(Olivier 2009d).
Autonomy, discourse and panopticism in contemporary society
Even at an intuitive level – before venturing into a specific intellectual domain for
evidence – it should not be difficult to understand that the kind of ‘relative autonomy’
in question is difficult to attain in contemporary, media-saturated society. Whether it
is the latest cellular phone advertisement, encouraging one to refrain from being ‘so
last year’ by clinging to your old cell-phone (heaven forbid!), or an exhortation to
show supposedly patriotic support for the FIFA World Cup in 2010 (only two
instances of many that come readily to mind), one is constantly bombarded by
mainstream discourses that enclose one in a veritable ‘panopticon’ (or domain of
optimal visibility) of ‘normalizing’ exhortations, ‘advice’, prescriptions, dependence-
inculcating commodity-promotion and the like. In sum, as Foucault argued at length
in Discipline and punish (1995), we live in a ‘carceral’ society today, where social
subjects are constituted, via various discursive mechanisms, as ‘docile bodies’, with
hardly any capacity to act in a relatively autonomous manner. This paper is an attempt
to show to what extent this is the case, and further to point to a model of (relative)
autonomy encountered elsewhere in Foucault’s work.
As already intimated by the use of ‘panopticon’ and ‘normalizing’ (who can fail
to recognize these Foucaultian concepts?), there is a better idiom than that of
Descartes or Kant, to articulate what such ‘limited’ autonomy amounts to, namely that
of poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault (and Lacan). Their point of
departure is, broadly, that we are ‘discursively constituted’, which is a succinct way to
say that human identity is structured by language in the sense of discourse. What is
discourse? A brief ‘definition’ is that it is language insofar as meaning and power-
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relations come together in it. In other words, talking about discourse as that which
makes humans distinctive, is an acknowledgement that the language we use is not
innocent, but carries the imprint of power-relations, and the discourse that first
structures our psyche configures it one way or another as far as these unavoidable
(albeit revisable) interests or relations of power are concerned.
There is not a day when every human being is not caught in the web of
discourse, that is, in the network of power-relations that the language we speak sets
up. The most ubiquitous discourse, which surpasses national and cultural boundaries,
is probably patriarchy, which we encounter every time someone uses the term
‘mankind’, instead of ‘humankind’, or every time a so-called ‘housewife’ discovers
what Lyotard (1988, p. 9) refers to as the discursive ‘differend’ between her and her
husband – that he is not really all that interested in what happened during her day of
fetching and carrying children to and from school, and still regards his daily work (in
business, or as a professional of various kinds) as the true arena where human worth is
affirmed. And yet, whether it is the discourse of patriarchy, or that of capitalism, as
Foucault (1990, p. 84) has reminded us, we are not exclusively ‘spoken’ or
‘constructed’ by it, which is another way of saying that we are not slaves to it.
Wherever discourse operates, a counter-discourse can be activated (Olivier 2003,
2005), which means that dominant discourses can be discursively opposed from the
position of the speaking subject, as opposed to that of the one that is ‘spoken’ or
constructed.
Why is this important for understanding what it means to be autonomous? If all
human beings are shaped by discourse – which includes not only the language they
use, but the actions they perform, too – the widespread hold that dominant discursive
practices have on people’s actions can be resisted in only one way: A person has to
claim for him- or herself a different discourse, one of what Foucault (in his study of
ancient Hellenistic, that is, Greek and Roman, societies) refers to as ‘self-mastery’.
Importantly, self-mastery does not depend on ‘information’ as much as on the
difficult, painstaking development of the ability to distance oneself from those
agencies that constantly tend to ‘infantilize’ people, by treating them as if they are
children, incapable of thinking and acting as (relatively) autonomous beings. Such
agencies are all around one today, given the ‘bio-power’ that governments, schools,
the media, economic institutions like corporations and churches wield over people’s
lives. Already in his genealogy of disciplinary and punitive practices, Discipline and
punish (1995), Foucault elaborates on the various ways in which individuals, as
objects of modern, ‘panoptical’ disciplinary control, are subtly influenced to the point
of controlling their own behaviour, rendering them ‘docile bodies’ that perform
precisely what is required of them (1995, p. 138). Provisionally one could say that the
mutually reinforcing practices he identifies in this study have the overall effect of
imposing on contemporary society the character of an extended prison. The logic that
Foucault lays bare in ‘Discipline and punish’ is, in short, that prisons exist to hide the
fact that we live in a carceral society. Talking about the ‘delinquent’, he says (1995, p.
301):
The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there
is no outside…The prison is merely the natural consequence, no more than a
higher degree, of that hierarchy laid down step by step…(p. 304): We are in the
society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social
worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based;
and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his
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gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral network, in
its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution,
surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the
normalizing power.
It is interesting to note that, in an analogous manner, Bret Easton Ellis, in his novel,
American Psycho (1991), describes a yuppie consumerist society where sheer ennui in
the face of the monodimensional materialistic desert of designer clothes, designer
cosmetics, designer drugs and ‘designer murders’ – apparently committed to relieve
the boredom on the part of the protagonist, Patrick Bateman (an anti-Batman?) –
comprises a similar carceral domain from which there is no escape. Significantly,
Ellis ends the novel with the words: ‘This is not an exit’. In other words, whether we
like it or not, we cannot escape to an ‘outside’ – unless we try and ‘change the system
from within’ (as Leonard Cohen sings), we shall remain imprisoned in this kind of
society. And the way to change it, I would submit, is to regain the capacity for acting
in a relatively autonomous manner (with a view to modifying or influencing
unacceptable developments in extant society), as indicated by Foucault’s investigation
into Hellenistic-Roman conceptions of the conditions for such autonomy.
Such a recuperation of (relative) autonomy is imperative in the face of the
encompassing, interlinked and reciprocally reinforcing networks and practices of
oppression within which people live today, of which Outcomes Based Education
(OBE, and similar systems at universities; Olivier 2009a) is just one. As I shall
attempt to show, this is not the kind of oppression or social control that can be traced
back to a person, or a group of people, but an impersonal system of suffocating
‘normalization’, to use Foucault’s term. As he says (1995), most people have still not
learned to ‘cut off the head of the king’ – that is, people tend to look for conspiracy
theories, trying to match a face or faces to whatever they perceive as being irresistible
social forces.
Individual autonomy and the ‘care of the self’ in the ancient world
It is indeed significant that, in his articulation of the profile of subjects capable of
‘self-mastery’, Foucault draws on conceptions of the self dating back to the ancient
world (keeping in mind that what is at stake here is ‘relative’, instead of ‘complete’
autonomy, in other words, a difficult negotiation of the tensional field between
heteronomy and autonomy). This is the case, firstly, because (as intimated earlier) he
regards the contemporary world as being in the grip of ‘carcerality’, a condition
brought about through various forms of ‘panopticism’. That is, he believes that
society, today, is subject to numerous, mutually reinforcing practices which
systematically prevent the vast majority of individuals from achieving the relative
psychic and ethical-political autonomy that one can, at best, hope to achieve through
the constant cultivation of what the ancient Greeks and Roman thought of as
epimeleia heautou, or the ‘care of the self’. Instead, contemporary individuals are
constituted as ‘docile bodies’ who lack the wherewithal to act in a manner that is not
primarily the outcome of the pervasive disciplinary practices so characteristic of
extant society. What would this ‘wherewithal’ be? That is, what are the techniques of
self-mastery conducive to the production of relatively autonomous subjects capable of
decisions and actions that surpass the strictures of modern (and postmodern),
passivity-inducing ‘discipline’? Secondly, how does Foucault characterize this
disciplinary, carceral society, and what are its mechanisms which constitute
individuals as ‘docile bodies’?
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I will address the first question first, in order to highlight the vast distance
separating the ancient Hellenistic (Roman) world, with its conception of individual
autonomy, from our own ‘carceral’ society (which will receive more attention later),
where, arguably, very few individuals ever achieve the level of ‘self-mastery’ or
relative autonomy that an ethic of ‘care for the self’ brought within reach of
individuals in Antiquity.
The Hellenistic-Roman world, it is often argued, differed from the preceding
world of (by themselves) tightly knit Greek city-states, where there was greater social
and political cohesion (Foucault 1988, p. 41), at least partly because of the
comparative imperial geographical extensiveness of the Roman domain. Given the
alienation concomitant with the experience of the almost incomprehensibly vast
social-political domain under the Pax Romana, people tended to be more aware of
individuals’ obligations to themselves, as opposed to the (admittedly still promoted)
civic duties on the part of citizens.
Interestingly, at a certain level, the geographically extensive nature of the
Roman imperial political domain corresponds with the geographically even more
extensive globalized space of the contemporary world, dubbed ‘Empire’ by Hardt and
Negri (2001). It is all the more surprising, therefore, that, apart from a superficial
emphasis, today, on ‘lifestyle’ and on ‘personal fulfillment’ of a popularly
understood, fashion-aware kind (encountered in especially the glossy magazines),
which corresponds with the ancient interest in individuals’ relations with themselves,
there is hardly any sign in the contemporary world of a comparably strong interest in
the cultivation of personal autonomy and independence from political and other
institutional agencies (for instance the media), as will become clearer later.
Nevertheless, Foucault cautions against a superficial understanding of the
putative ‘individualism’ encountered in Hellenistic-Roman society, distinguishing
among three interconnected things: the ‘absolute value attributed to the individual in
his singularity’, the ‘positive valuation of private life’, and (most importantly; 1988,
p. 42):
…the intensity of the relations to self, that is, of the forms in which one is called
upon to take oneself as an object of knowledge and a field of action, so as to
transform, correct, and purify oneself, and find salvation.
It is in this context that Foucault (1988, p. 43) alludes to the development of a
‘cultivation of the self’, which reached its zenith at this time in Antiquity, and which
was guided by the precept, that one should ‘take care of oneself’. Although a very old
idea in Greek culture – among the Spartans, and above all perhaps associated with
Socrates’s putative role, to remind humans of the priority to be given to the condition
of their selves, their souls (Foucault 1988, p. 44) – this topic of cultivating the self
was resurrected by Hellenistic philosophy, still conceived of as the ‘art of existence’.
It culminated in what Foucault (1988, p. 45) calls ‘a kind of golden age in the
cultivation of the self’.
It should be emphasized, however, that such ‘cultivation of the self’ in antiquity
was light-years removed from the kind of preoccupation with the self encountered in
popular media such as the glossy magazines of today, which assumes the form of sex-
advice columns (with a demonstrable ‘disciplinary’ function in contemporary society;
Olivier 1997), and of articles on the latest fashion in self-enjoyment, ranging from
aromatherapy and reflexology to Reiki for the leisurely rich. On the contrary, it was
austere and demanding by comparison, in so far as it was aimed at a kind of autonomy
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characterized by mastery of the self in the face of any of the eventualities, no matter
how disruptive or painful, that may befall one in the course of one’s life. With this in
mind, it should be clear that the ‘care of the self’ as systematic practice in the
Hellenistic-Roman era, was predicated on human finitude and comparative
powerlessness regarding forces that vastly exceeded one’s own power, while
simultaneously signalling a belief in the capacity of individuals to develop one’s own
‘power’ in the form of self-mastery. This would enable one to endure whatever
sufferings the vagaries of life might inflict on you, and presumably to resist or thwart
overwhelming forces to a certain degree.
The imperative, epimeleia heautou, is encountered in many of the philosophical
teachings of the time. So, for example, Seneca (quoted in Foucault 1988, p. 46)
demands of one to dispense with other occupations, and through ‘varied activity’
‘develop oneself’, ‘transform oneself’ and ‘return to oneself’ in the quest for the sort
of autonomy at stake here. And Epictetus – who represents, for Foucault (1988, p.
47), the zenith in the philosophical unfolding of this theme – stresses that such care of
the self is a ‘privilege-duty, a gift-obligation that ensures our freedom while forcing
us to take ourselves as the object of all our diligence’.
Lest it be suspected that no trace remains, today, of this ancient ethical
preoccupation with the self, however, I should point out, in passing, that both
Seneca’s and Epictetus’s observations resonate with similar insights on the part of
Gadamer (‘transform oneself’), Heidegger and Kristeva (‘return to oneself’) and
Derrida (‘gift-obligation’). One could even make out a strong case, I believe, that
these thinkers take up the theme of ‘care of the self’ in different ways, given their
refusal to remain at the epistemic level, instead promoting an ethical praxis in
distinctive ways – Gadamer (1982) in his hermeneutics of self-transformation via
understanding, interpretation and application; Heidegger (1978) in his insistence on
the singularizing effect of the (silent) ‘call of conscience’ to ‘return to oneself’;
through Kristeva’s (2000) exhortation to ‘return to oneself’ by way of (intimate)
‘revolt’; and via Derrida’s deconstruction of the difference between theory and praxis
(1986).
In Foucault’s (1988, pp. 50-54) discussion of the concept, epimeleia, it becomes
clear why such an ethical, psychological and social practice (in so far as these
activities focused on the self are communicated to others) is foreign to most
contemporary ways of living. In each of its applications (regarding a household, a
ruler’s subjects, a patient, or oneself), it implies a ‘labour’ that is time-consuming,
devoted to various exercises, memorizations, self-examinations and practical tasks,
including those centring on the care of the body, and on the attainment of peace of
mind or tranquillity, regardless of what pain or provocation others or things that
cannot be controlled may inflict on one (Foucault 1988, p. 51).
Just how powerful the ethos of ‘care of the self’ was during this time, is
apparent from the priority that it was accorded – as care for the soul – over the
significant amount of attention that was bestowed on the body in medical as well as
athletic and military terms, as long as one remembers that the emphasis was on the
‘communication’ between the distresses of the body and those of the soul (Foucault
1988, p. 56). From Foucault’s discussion it appears that the concern behind this focus
on the reciprocal influence of matters physical and matters psychical had to do with
the necessity, to attend to the needs of both (lest weakness in one undermine the
strength of the other), but also to ensure that the source of self-mastery – the soul – is
kept intact and thus able to exercise its mastery over the self in the encompassing
sense of the term.
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It is not surprising that, together with the theoretical and practical elaboration on
the care of the self, the acknowledgement of one’s finitude (one’s proneness to
disease, etc.) was encouraged (Foucault 1988, p. 57). After all, such an ethos, aimed
at self-mastery, would make no sense unless it presupposed a recognition of one’s
limited prowess. It should hardly be necessary to point out that this candid admission
of finitude and vulnerability by Hellenistic thinkers contrasts sharply with the
arguably arrogant, technocratic ethos of the 20th and 21st centuries – so aptly
articulated by Heidegger in his ‘Essay concerning technology’ (1977) – which is
predicated on the assumption that nature, including humanity, can be endlessly,
violently and effectively harnessed for purposes of utilization.
Perhaps most important for the present theme of autonomy, is the place
accorded to ‘self-knowledge’ in this practice of, and ‘problematizing’ reflection on,
the care of the self, which, according to Foucault (Foucault 1988, p. 58), amounted to
a ‘whole art of self-knowledge developed, with precise recipes, specific forms of
examination, and codified exercises’. These included ‘testing procedures’ such as
‘exercises in abstinence’, ‘self-examination’ such as the ‘evening review’ of the day’s
events, and a ‘labour of thought’ directed at itself (Foucault 1988, pp. 58-64). From a
psychological point of view it is significant that a thread running through these
instances of furthering self-knowledge, is that of a division or split in the self
(Foucault 1988, pp. 58, 61), reminiscent of the modern (Cartesian/Kantian)
conception of the subject (which, in psychoanalysis, assumes that of a split between
conscious and unconscious) where a ‘judging’ (or alternatively, ‘inspecting’) self is
distinguished from an ‘accused’ (or ‘labouring’) self (Olivier 2009d). Without such a
division the ‘testing procedures’, for example, would not enable the subject to gauge
‘the independence one is capable of with regard to everything that is not indispensable
and essential’. By drawing one’s attention to the ‘basic needs’, these ‘tests’ highlight
whatever is ‘superfluous and the possibility of doing without it’ (Foucault 1988, p.
59), in the process developing one’s autonomy – or ‘supremacy over oneself’ – in
relation to these.
The example that Foucault (1988, p. 59) adduces from Plutarch, which tests
one’s ability to resist the most tempting of meals, opting instead for the austerity of
slaves’ food, is a stark reminder of the temptations of what one knows, today, as
consumerism. The latter is continually maintained and reinforced by the employment
of both the coarsest and the most subtle means of psychological coercion on the part
of the agencies of capitalist production and consumption, whose informational means
of addressing consumers enclose them in a veritable closed (behaviourist) universe of
stimulus and response. This does not mean that there are no available ways in which
the pervasiveness of consumerist temptations may be effectively resisted and
overcome (Olivier 2006), or that other exposés of such practices are not accessible.
David Icke’s (1997) account of the way that the vast majority of people on earth are
manipulated by, among other things, educational agencies and the media into
unquestioning ‘herd-behaviour’ (1997, p. 3) is one of these. Although Icke’s account
smacks too much of an untenable conspiracy theory, his claim concerning the docility
with which people, generally, conform to behavioural patterns suggested to them by
major institutions, is compatible with Foucault’s position.
All of these practices in the care of the self, Foucault observes, are governed, in
principle, by the goal of ‘conversion to self’ (Foucault 1988, p. 64), which entails the
subordination of all other activities in one’s life to the principal activity of cultivating
a relationship with oneself. The extent to which this amounts to an ongoing quest for
optimal (albeit never complete) autonomy, is reflected in the following long passage
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from Foucault’s reconstruction of the ‘problematized’ practice in question (Foucault
1988, pp. 65-66):
This relation to self that constitutes the end of the conversion and the final goal
of all the practices of the self still belongs to an ethics of control. Yet, in order to
characterize it, moralists are not content with invoking the agonistic form of a
victory over forces difficult to subdue and of a dominion over them that can be
established beyond question. This relation is often conceived in terms of the
juridical model of possession: one ‘belongs to himself’, one is ‘his own
master’…; one is answerable only to oneself, one is sui juris; one exercises over
oneself an authority that nothing limits or threatens; one holds the potestas sui.
But apart from this rather political and judicial form, the relation to self is also
defined as a concrete relationship enabling one to delight in oneself, as a thing
one both possesses and has before one’s eyes. If to convert to oneself is to turn
away from the preoccupations of the external world, from the concerns of
ambition, from fear of the future, then one can turn back to one’s own past,
recall it to mind, have it unfold as one pleases before one’s eyes, and have a
relationship with it that nothing can disturb…
Autonomy, ‘problematization’ and practices of the self
But is it the case that one may develop a measure of autonomy that enables one to free
oneself from what really represents the constraints of mainstream power relations,
which are unavoidably assimilated (discursively) by individuals in the course of
becoming subjects (Olivier 2003; 2009)? Gary Gutting formulates this problem
clearly where he says of Foucault’s study of ancient practices of self-mastery (2005,
p. 101):
His topic, the ethical formation of the self, emerged, of course, from his analysis
of modern power relations, which he saw penetrating even the interiority of our
personal identity. No doubt the reason he so resisted any fixed identity was his
realization that even what might seem to be his own autonomous choice of
identity would be just an internalization of social norms.
What Gutting refers to here is elaborated on in, among other books, the first volume
of Foucault’s History of sexuality (1980), where he argues that even so-called sexual
liberation is such an internalization of prevailing power relations as articulated in
subjectivity-producing discourses. We are less free than we think. And yet, through
what Foucault (1992, pp. 10-24; 1988, p. 39) calls ‘problematization’ – a concept that
Gutting (2005, p. 103) regards as being very significant as far as the possibility of
‘defining’ oneself is concerned – one is able to confront and question the fundamental
aspects of one’s existence. By ‘problematization’ Foucault (1992, pp. 10-11) seems to
mean the critical (‘sifting’) thought that grows out of, and refers back to, certain
‘practices’ of the self, or ‘arts of existence’ such as those discussed earlier under the
rubric of the ‘care of the self’. In his ‘history of sexuality’, he says (Foucault 1992, p.
11):
It was a matter of analyzing, not behaviours or ideas, nor societies and their
‘ideologies,’ but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be,
necessarily, thought – and the practices on the basis of which these
problematizations are formed.
10
But if Foucault found plenty of evidence of such essentially ethical
problematization(s) of personal practices among the ancient Greeks and Hellenistic
Romans, today the question is how many individuals in society are in a position to
practice such ‘problematization’, especially when one considers – as Gutting suggests
(2005, p. 103) – the way it differs from ‘marginalization’ (which several of Foucault’s
earlier books deal with). Marginalized people such as the insane, prisoners, slaves and
(in most societies) women, do not have the opportunity to engage readily in acts of
problematization, but (as Gutting rightly observes; 2005, p. 104) others, such as those
who can read Foucault’s books and present papers or courses on them, do. Those
individuals in the Hellenistic era who practised an ethic of self-mastery as a way of
caring for the self, also belonged to this privileged group who, although not able to
step outside social power relations altogether, were in a position to engage in a
significant degree of self-formation or cultivation of relative autonomy (Gutting 2005,
p. 104).
‘Problematization’ therefore appears to be related to autonomy. After all, it
should be clear from what has already been said that Foucault’s reading of the
relevant ancient texts enables one to arrive at a conception of self-mastery or
autonomy which, although not possible outside of existing power-relations, equips the
subject to adopt a critical stance towards the latter by means of such problematization
– that is, via the articulation of (in Gutting’s words; 2005, p. 103) ‘…the fundamental
issues and choices through which individuals confront their existence’. In the idiom of
discourse theory, one might say that problematization consists in the discursive self-
positioning of the subject vis-á-vis the dominant discourses of his or her social
context, which would unilaterally ‘construct’ their selves unless resisted or
problematized. And lest anyone should think that this is easy, let them take note of
what I have said above concerning the severity of the ‘care of the self’ in the course of
which such problematizations occur.
Producing ‘docile bodies’ through contemporary disciplinary mechanisms
The question that confronts one today, has to do with the possibility of
problematization of human existence in the 21st century. What are the dominant
discourses and social practices which tend to structure in advance the power-relations
in which one is embedded, and is a problematization of these, with a view to gaining a
measure of autonomy and self-mastery a viable project? To address this issue, one has
to return to the question concerning the disciplinary mechanisms which render
contemporary subjects ‘docile’, referred to at the outset – something that contrasts
starkly with the kind of active ‘care of the self’ practised by some individuals during
the Hellenistic-Roman era.
To elaborate on the means by which modern subjects were (and still are being)
‘produced’ as ‘docile bodies’, Foucault (1995, p. 135) contrasts the ‘ideal figure’ of
the premodern soldier (recognizable by certain ‘natural signs’, like courage and
strength) with that of the late 18th century, which he compares with a ‘machine to be
constructed’. This functions as a paradigm for the way that subjects are constituted as
‘docile’ or heteronomous across a wide social spectrum. ‘A body is docile’, says
Foucault (1995, p. 136), ‘that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’.
This may not in itself have been new, but the ‘techniques’ that comprised this modern
‘project of docility’ included new elements (1995, pp. 136-137), such as the ‘scale of
the control’ (which focused on individual bodies instead of the collective), the ‘object
of control’ (the ‘economy, the efficiency of movements’), and ‘the modality’ (an
‘uninterrupted, constant coercion’ through exercise, supervision and surveillance).
11
Moreover, Foucault (1995, p. 137) points out, in the 17th and 18th centuries these
‘methods’, or ‘disciplines’ (as he calls them) for the ‘meticulous control’ of bodies,
provided the ‘general formulas of domination’. The degree to which this process has
laid the basis for what one witnesses in society generally today in forms of docility
ranging from political to economic conformism on an overwhelming scale, may be
gathered from Joel Bakan’s trenchant indictment of the role of corporations in the
current era. Bakan focuses on one aspect of such docility in the (encompassing or
inescapable) socio-economic sphere where he remarks (2004, p. 5; see also Olivier
2009c for an elaboration on such ‘docility’ as manifestation of ‘conventional
morality’):
Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to
become the world’s dominant economic institution. Today, corporations govern
our lives. They determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we
work, and what we do. We are inescapably surrounded by their culture,
iconography, and ideology. And, like the church and monarchy in other times,
they posture as infallible and omnipotent, glorifying themselves in imposing
buildings and elaborate displays. Increasingly, corporations dictate the decisions
of their supposed overseers in government and control domains of society once
firmly embedded within the public sphere.
Although Bakan uses a different idiom from Foucault’s, I believe his description is
compatible with the following characterization by Foucault (1995, p. 138):
Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.
Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and
diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it
dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a
‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of
the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of
strict subjection…disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting
link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.
What Foucault sets out to characterize in ‘Discipline and punish’ is therefore the
peculiarly modern form of social control, which is not – like the premodern form –
aimed at making a public spectacle of the punishment of criminals (such as the bloody
affair of drawing and quartering; Foucault 1995, pp. 3-6), designed to frighten citizens
into submission. Instead, it consists of many, varied micro-mechanisms of
disciplining citizens, from ‘the gentle way of punishment’ (that is, the surprisingly
rapidly implemented prison-incarceration, with its carefully calculated categories of
socially useful and morally efficient penalties) as a generalized punishment for a
variety of crimes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe (Foucault 1995, pp.
115-117); the ‘instrumental coding of the body’, as observable in the discipline of
rifle-training (Foucault 1995, p. 153); the ‘analytic’ of learning to read according to
different stages (Foucault 1995, pp. 159-160); teaching children a kind of uniform
‘penmanship’ (Foucault 1995, p. 176); to organizing available space in hospitals in an
increasingly ‘efficient’ manner, and the ‘panoptical’ surveillance of prisoners in
prisons designed (according to Bentham’s paradigmatic model) to yield maximum
visibility of inmates in their cells (Foucault 1995, pp. 200-201).
12
In passing, it should be noted that, in the first volume of Foucault’s History of
sexuality (1980), he goes further with this project of uncovering modern varieties of
social control, via a genealogy of modern forms of sexuality, exposing ‘bio-power’ as
a means of social and political control of people by means of various kinds of
biological knowledge. In brief: he shows how the production of discourses about
different kinds of sexualities – which has simultaneously served to constitute the
distinctive sexual identities of different individuals – has served to control the
behaviour of individuals belonging to these groups. This will not be pursued further at
present, but it should be noted that it confirms what is argued here, namely that, by
and large, contemporary individuals lack (relative) autonomy comparable to that
developed by ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture.
To Foucault’s many concrete examples we could add practices such as using
gatsometers and radar devices (even speed bumps) for traffic control, as well as
closed circuit television surveillance in city streets and shopping centres (see Olivier
1997), bringing about a subtle but effective imposition of uniform behaviour on
individuals, so that one may legitimately speak of them being turned into ‘docile
bodies’. (A helpful critic has suggested that one could add ‘…how one is defined by
your credit record, held by various anonymous financial institutions [a remark that
validates my earlier observation regarding Bakan’s description of corporate power
over our way of living; B.O.], or how modern airports are installing a new generation
of X-ray equipment which literally strips you naked…’) In fact, what Foucault
observes regarding a certain kind of architecture that emerged during this time, neatly
captures, metaphorically, the overall societal function of the wide array of disciplinary
techniques that has developed since then (Foucault 1995, p. 172):
A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built
simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external
space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and
detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it; in more general
terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on
those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power
right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. Stones can make
people docile and knowable.
Here one should make no mistake – Foucault’s genealogy of the prison, or rather, of
modes of imprisonment – is carried out with critical intent from a position of relative
autonomy. It is no accident that he accords the emergence of the soul-transforming
modern prison, as replacement of spectacularly horrific premodern modes of
punishment, such a prominent place in a book that is ultimately much more than a
history of the prison, to wit, a genealogical account of the development of a
thoroughly ‘carceral’ society. In other words, he shows that the ‘disciplinary
coercion’ referred to earlier, instead of being confined to military quarters, has
become pervasive in the contemporary era.
In this respect contemporary psychologists could easily underestimate the
degree to which the network of disciplinary operations, rooted in the practices
described by Foucault, but no less constitutive of the fabric of early 21st century
global society, comprises the psychic mainstay of the docile subjects of today. Lest
anyone should think that this is an exaggeration, I will focus in greater detail on those
kinds of social mechanisms which represent, in generalized form, the multiple
operations by which individuals are turned into docile, economically useful bodies. In
13
the course of outlining these, the contrast between the heteronomy of contemporary
subjects (as characterized by Foucault) and the desired self-mastery of those of
Hellenistic-Roman times, discussed earlier, will become increasingly apparent.
There are especially three distinctive modern ways of producing such ‘docile
bodies’, according to Foucault in Discipline and punish. The first is what he calls
‘hierarchical observation’, or ‘a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an
apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power’
(Foucault 1995, pp. 170-171). Foucault mentions several examples of the
‘observatories’ that were the spatial embodiments of such ‘hierarchical observation’,
and were constructed in the course of the ‘classical age’ (approximately from 1650 to
1800 in Europe): the military camp as ‘almost ideal model’ – ‘…the diagram of a
power that acts by means of general visibility’, ‘…hospitals, asylums, prisons,
schools’ (1995, p. 171), ‘workshops and factories’ (1995, p. 174). Normatively
speaking, what these had in common, however imperfectly actualised, was that the
‘…perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see
everything constantly’ (1995, p. 173).
There are many other varieties of such hierarchical observation, with its
concomitant effect of control, of turning people into docile bodies. Gutting (2005, p.
82) adduces the architectural examples of ‘the tiered rows of seats in a lecture hall, or
well-lit classrooms with large windows and wide aisles’, which facilitate both optimal
learning and visibility of students, which, in turn, promote discipline. Or consider the
educational system known as Outcomes-Based Education (OBE), and all the ‘audits’
regularly enforced regarding all kinds of institutions in South Africa. These
operations, too, tend to constitute people as ‘docile bodies’. OBE participates in this,
in so far as it provides the information to be able to establish a hierarchically
structured list of students’ and teachers’, ranked in terms of stated ‘outcomes’.
The second way of producing docile bodies is termed ‘normalizing judgment’ by
Foucault (1995, pp. 177-184). It concerns the ‘power of the norm’. ‘Like surveillance
and with it’, says Foucault (1995, p.184), ‘normalization becomes one of the great
instruments of power at the end of the classical age’. He elaborates (1995, p. 184):
In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it
individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix
specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It
is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of
formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces,
as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of
individual differences.
In a previous age, then, individuals may have been judged according to the intrinsic
moral value (their ‘virtue’) or the reprehensibility of their actions, but today the
tendency is to place them, through judgment, on a differentiating scale or continuum
which ranks them in relation to everyone else. It is not difficult to understand how
widespread this practice is, not merely where one might expect to find it, namely in
schools and universities, but across the board. Just as a student is expected to be
ranked in the top 20% of their class, and not merely to pass, so, too, car rental
companies, hotels, restaurants, airlines and educational institutions are subjected to
ranking, in this way establishing a ‘norm’ by which they are judged (Gutting 2005, p.
84). And it should be noted that, importantly, such social practices do not tolerate
difference – everyone should conform to the same standards. Yet, paradoxically,
14
individuals are encouraged to think ‘outside of the box’, but when they really do, they
soon find themselves in trouble. The reason for this is obvious: the kind of ‘lateral
thinking’ that is encouraged is supposed to serve the optimization of the system, in the
end, but radically lateral thinking, which questions the system, is rejected.
The third disciplinary practice of reducing bodies to docility is familiar to
everyone who has been to school: the examination (Foucault 1995, pp. 184-194;
Gutting 2005, pp. 84-86). The introduction of the examination made possible the
connection of knowledge of individuals with a specific exercise of power. In fact,
according to Foucault (1995, p. 187), the ‘examination transformed the economy of
visibility into the exercise of power’. He remarks on the ironic reversal, namely that
traditional (premodern) power was visible, while the subjects of power were largely
invisible, whereas modern, disciplinary power turned out to operate through its
invisibility, while simultaneously enforcing an obligatory visibility on disciplinary
(disciplined) subjects, in the course of which they are drawn into a ‘mechanism of
objectification’ (1995, p. 187).
The examination ‘also introduces individuality into the field of documentation’
(Foucault 1995, p. 189). This involves the archiving through which individuals are
placed within ‘a network of writing’, and one is struck by the discursive violence
reflected in Foucault’s choice of words, where he alludes to the ‘mass of documents
that capture and fix them’ (1995, p. 189).
Further, examination as a mechanism of disciplinary power, ‘surrounded by all
its documentary techniques, makes each individual a ‘case’’ (1995, p. 191). In this
way the examination has contributed significantly to lifting ‘ordinary individuality’,
which used to be in the shadows of imperceptibility, into the kind of visibility that
goes hand in hand with disciplinary control, which turns the individual into an ‘effect
and object of power’ (1995, p. 192), that is, into a ‘docile body’. Here one should note
Foucault’s (1995, p. 193) observation, that all those sciences ‘…employing the root
‘psycho-’ have their origin in this historical reversal of the procedures of
individualization’, which is particularly noteworthy for psychologists. That is, the
change from greater individualization at the level of the ‘higher echelons of power’, to
optimal, visible individualization of those over whom power is exercised
anonymously, through documentary and other kinds of surveillance, is something in
which the psychological disciplines have been complicit since their inception. This
makes of psychology at large one of the instruments of panoptical discipline, and
reinforces the need for a self-reflective, ‘critical’ psychology which would promote
patients’ relative autonomy.
Examination is probably the most invidious and effective form of disciplinary
domestication, in that it combines the previous two, hierarchical observation and
normalizing judgment, and is a privileged locus of the modern nexus of power and
knowledge. At one and the same time, the examination provides ‘truth’ about
individuals examined, and lays the basis for their control through the norms that are
established in this way. In other words, examination as a social practice is a subtle
way of exercising power.
In virtually every school system ‘examination’ plays a crucial role in producing
information on subjects’ skills and abilities to perform according to the norms set by
the prevailing economic system. But just how much psychology is implicated in this
(contrary to what one might expect) is evident where Foucault remarks, a propos the
examination (1995, pp. 226-227):
15
…the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that
shaped it. It has always been and still is an intrinsic element of the disciplines.
Of course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by integrating
itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And, in effect, its
appearance in the form of tests, interviews, interrogations and consultations is
apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms of discipline: educational
psychology is supposed to correct the rigours of the school, just as the medical
or psychiatric interview is supposed to rectify the effects of the discipline of
work. But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals
from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated
or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline…
In other words, the disciplinary procedures that function under the apparently benign
aegis of ‘examination’ (which combines hierarchical observation and normalizing
judgement) are not restricted to schools, universities and other training institutions;
they are widespread, and mutually reinforce one another in the shaping of subjects
into ‘docile bodies’. And psychology is no exception to this.
What Foucault (1995, pp. 195-228) calls ‘panopticism’ serves well as a
metaphor for the kind of disciplinary society in which we live, given the fundamental
role played in it by techniques of observation that function across the board to turn
people into economically productive, but politically impotent, ‘docile bodies’. The
‘panoptical’ prison is probably the best concrete representative of such panopticism,
where merely being optimally observable (not in fact, but in principle) by warders,
exercises control over prisoners (or rather, causes them to monitor their own
behaviour). The architectural design of schools, lecture halls, factory floors and
hospital wards, too, ensures maximum visibility of those who are overseen by those
doing the overseeing, whatever the functional reason. Small wonder that Foucault
remarks wryly (1995, pp. 227-228):
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced
labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality,
who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the
modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories,
schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Conclusion: Problematizing panoptical practices and gaining autonomy
For those people who work in the ostensibly liberal and open atmosphere of
universities, it may come as a surprise that this space is anything but free from the
disciplinary effects of panopticism. This is apparent from Mary Schmelzer’s (1993)
revealing analysis of the administrative institutional operations at a university, which
exposes their panoptical workings. From the controlled imposition of budgetary
constraints on the use of photocopying facilities for students’ benefit, to the manner in
which students are evaluated and promoted, she shows, a subtle panoptical force
asserts itself, manifesting itself in academic staff’s and students’ docile adherence to
these regulations, which are therefore anything but innocent. By contrast, Schmelzer’s
own pedagogic practice displays a canny double strategy that amounts to working
within the system, but simultaneously against it, by (for instance) disguising her
actual mode of evaluating students’ ability to work collaboratively and critically
(which she encourages) in the grades that she provides in the prescribed terms. In so
doing, she mitigates the effective disciplinary operation of these panoptical
16
procedures, all of which fall under the three modes of social control discussed above
(hierarchical observation, etc.), and simultaneously alerts students to the panoptical
scrutiny to which they are exposed, and which they can resist in similar fashion.
One may even go as far as saying that, by ‘problematizing’ certain institutional
procedures of micro-management, Schmelzer appears to be cultivating her own and
students’ (relative) autonomy in the face of the tendency of panopticism to become
all-encompassing. In my own judgement, such a cultivation of relative autonomy is
very healthy, psychologically speaking, in so far as it goes a long way towards
subverting the veritable automatism on the part of individuals living under conditions
of panopticism and its concomitant carcerality. For those among us who teach in
universities, her pedagogical practice – which is simultaneously a critical
psychological practice in its discursive effects on students – is exemplary regarding
the development of relative autonomy, and deserves to be emulated.
But one should not make the mistake of thinking that it is easy to problematize
the disciplinary practices, discussed above, with a view to cultivating a sense of self-
mastery or autonomy, that is, to adopt a radically different discursive stance in the
face of the dominant discourses that surround one and have shaped the actions of the
vast majority of people on earth today. It is very difficult, especially because it
requires nothing less than systematically changing the way in which one thinks and –
even more important – acts in society. The reason why Foucault looked to ancient
Hellenistic society for examples of this kind of thing – in the Stoic and Epicurean
Schools of the time, for instance – was to highlight the kind of discursive training that
stands in stark contrast to everything that we have inherited from Christianity (see
Gutting 2005, pp. 106-107) as well as from western modernity. All of this, by large,
exhorts one to be ‘obedient’ – whether to the church, the state, or more subtly, to the
behavioral models promoted by the media – rather than to think and act
‘autonomously’.
If the need for individuals to learn the art of ‘autonomous’ action was great in
Hellenistic times, when far-flung empires supplanted what used to be the more
tangible communities of independent Greek city-states, it is far greater today, when (if
we take scientific evidence seriously) a ‘docile’ consumer society probably faces an
unprecedented ecological disaster in the not-too-distant future. Here I am not referring
to what has become a veritable ‘climate change movement’ (whatever its merit),
accompanied by a predictable seizing, by corporate-capitalist production agencies, of
the opportunity to generate more wealth through a newly ‘greening’ economy.
Quite apart from this, it is undeniable that impressive, if disconcerting, scientific
evidence is available to confirm that natural ecosystems are in a precarious state
today, largely as a result of unrestrained capitalist economic growth and industrial
activity (Kovel 2007; Diamond 2005; Desmond 2005; Konik 2009; Olivier 2005a,
2007a and 2009c). This supports the argument that one should follow Foucault’s lead
in working towards what Konik (2009) terms a ‘nuanced’ kind of autonomy in the
face of ecological degradation worldwide. Especially valuable in Konik’s work
(which corroborates, in a different context, what I am arguing here) is her claim that
‘radical’ ecological thinkers such as Thomas Princen and Wolfgang Sachs need to
supplement their implicit, largely Kantian (and misguided) model of human
subjectivity, which does not take into consideration the decisive importance of the
discursive formation of the subject, with Foucault’s discourse-oriented model of
subjectivity. Unless they do this, she points out (2009, p. 154-199) they would fail to
understand why people have not changed their social and economic practices, despite
17
ample available information concerning the deteriorization of natural ecological
systems.
‘Autonomous’ living today would therefore probably mean the discursive
ability, not to avoid altogether, but to ‘negotiate’ what the Hellenistic schools would
call ‘false’ discourses of submission, opting instead for those that enable one to
‘master’ oneself. In the process a discursive practice that may function as a publicly
accessible model for other, receptive individuals, can be initiated (Olivier 2009a,
2009b, 2009e and 2009f). This would be a discursively self-empowering practice,
instead of the heteronomous one of succumbing to the lure of fashionable discourses
such as that of neo-liberal economics (‘Brand yourself’, ‘Market yourself’), or of
globalization in the popular (neo-colonial) sense of initiating global economic and
cultural flows aimed solely at profiting from others (which is fortunately not the only
sense ‘globalization’ has).
In this context, ‘mastering oneself’ would entail negative and affirmative
aspects. Among its negative implications would be the cultivation of an ability to
resist or ‘free oneself from’ the ubiquitous discursive injunction, that to get rich in the
material sense of the word is the sole purpose of life, and as for the rest, one simply
has to surrender docilely to ‘authorities’ of all kinds, from educational to political,
economic and religious. The most important affirmative side to adopting a radically
different discourse of relative autonomy today, I would think, would firstly be the
affirmation, in language as well as in action, of an individual’s capacity or ‘freedom
for’ self-mastery and (relative) self-determination in the face of all the dominant
discourses that tend to constitute individuals (with their implicit consent) as
heteronomous. As I have tried to show with the help of Foucault, this is not something
inescapable – relative autonomy is possible, as demonstrated via Foucault’s
examination of the ancient ‘care of the self’. But it has to be claimed by individuals,
theoretically and practically (as the example of Hellenistic practices of the self show),
before a significant breach could occur regarding the docility of contemporary,
panoptically disciplined subjects. There are already hope-inspiring examples of such
relative autonomy in the contemporary practices of some people (discussed by
Wolfgang Sachs and Thomas Princen; Konik 2009, pp. 155-174), who manage to
resist dominant discursive practices in favour of a self-chosen, alternative socio-
economically and ecologically sustainable way of life.
Secondly, claiming one’s relative autonomy by theoretical as well as practical
means would enable one to affirm the bond between all people as ethical agents, on
the one hand, and between humanity and the (economically exploited) natural world
(on the other hand) which, after all, was our species’ home for more than a hundred
thousand years (for millions, if one includes our immediate predecessors in the genus
Homo, namely Homo erectus and Homo habilis). Ironically, this bond is not likely to
be affirmed on a large societal scale; it will have to be done by ‘autonomous’
individuals. Perhaps a new discursive practice would start spreading from there.
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NOTES
1
For an exploration of the significance of this film – Pump up the Volume – regarding a critical
practice which adumbrates the kind of autonomy which the present paper attempts to recuperate on the
basis of Foucault’s work, see Olivier & Hurst (1997).
