moralities of self-renunciation and obedience

MORALITIES OF SELF-RENUNCIATION AND OBEDIENCE

THE LATER FOUCAULT AND DISCIPLINARY POWER RELATIONSCory Wimberly

Michel Foucault’s work is frequently subdi-vided in the secondary literature into three differ-ent time periods: the early “hermeneutic” workfrom the 1950s and 1960s, the middle “genealog-ical” writings of the 1970s, and the final “ethical”work of the 1980s. Most commentators acceptthat there is some legitimacy to these divisionsbut there is no consensus on what defines thesethree periods of Foucault’s work. Today, most ofthe debate centers on the nature of the divisionbetween the middle genealogical work and thelater ethical work. If we are to believe the storytold by Charles Taylor, Eric Paras, and NancyFraser then Foucault’s genealogies of the 1970sdescribe a dire political situation that we arehelpless to resist:1

Without a nonhumanist ethical paradigm, Foucaultcannot make good his normative case against hu-manism. He cannot answer the question, Whyshould we oppose a fully panopticized, autono-mous society?2

This criticism of Foucault’s middle workfeeds into the further claim that Foucault’s shiftto ethical work in the 1980s aimed to address pre-vious faults. The argument runs that Foucaultabandoned his pessimistic genealogical analysesof disciplinary power and made a positive turn to-wards robust notions of individual self-transfor-mation and change in his final ethical work. ThisFoucaultian ethical “turn” to the subject suppos-edly corrected the pessimism of his middle workby definitively breaking with it:

According to the consensus established by the sec-ondary literature, Foucault’s early and middlework culminates in a kind of totalizing theoreticalcage (of which “discipline” is the highest manifes-tation) that in turn constituted a kind of crisis ordead-end for Foucault’s thinking by the mid-1970s. . . . Foucault’s late work performs a 180-de-gree turn away from the (too-totalizing and demor-

alizing) “power” discourse of the early and mid-1970s and culminated in a renewed appreciation ofthe Enlightenment subject, the ethical arts of theself, and resistance to normalized totalizationthrough individual action.3

What is especially notable about this thesis is thatit cleaves Foucault’s corpus in two, definitivelyseparating the parts as having opposing interestsand formulations. By picturing Foucault’s workas oppositional, it becomes difficult to conceptu-alize ways to profitably share across the differentperiods.

Increasingly, commentators have begun tochallenge this reading of Foucault, still acknowl-edging the change in Foucault’s work but resist-ing the earlier narrative that had explained it as atotal break. In work done by Jeffrey Nealon,Ladelle McWhorter, and Timothy O’Leary, theytreat Foucault’s work as undergoing a change offocus between the middle and later work but farfrom implying a rejection, they treat the work inmany ways as complimentary or, as Nealon putsit, as an “intensification” of earlier themes.4 Be-sides making a convincing argument for theirpoints on a textual basis, this interpretation is at-tractive because it offers the ability to read acrossFoucault in ways that are not merely subordinateto the final ethical work. Although one wouldstill need to be careful of the differences in vo-cabulary and method between Foucault’s works,these thinkers open an avenue to promote thecross-pollination of Foucault’s concepts, some-thing that would be far less likely if his work wasdivided into segments that were opposed to oneanother 180-degrees.

Unfortunately, I do not have the room in thisessay to chart my own complete topographicalarguments relating Foucault’s work across the1970s and 1980s to put ideas in play across thattopology as Nealon, McWhorter, and O’Leary doin their book length treatments. As a result, I planto build from their work and start from the thesis

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37© DePaul University 2011© DePaul University 2011

that the middle and later work are not antitheticalto one another but do develop different themesand foci. I work through this topology in order touse Foucault’s later work on ethics as the relationof the self to the self to develop an account of theethical self-relation in the disciplinary subjects ofhis middle work.

In Foucault’s later ethical work, he focused inlarge part on “the way a human being turns him-or herself into a subject.”5 His studies examinedwhat kind of relationship an individual had to as-sume to herself and what kind of work had to bedone to become a subject. For instance, he ex-plains that certain Greeks of antiquity had to takeup a relationship of “self-mastery” in regards tothemselves in order to conquer their passions andprepare themselves for political leadership.6 Inthis later work he explores the different relationsthe self was expected to undertake to itself inGreece and Rome of antiquity, as well as invarious periods of Christianity.

In Foucault’s middle “genealogical” period,he had little to say about how disciplinary bodieshad to relate to themselves and what work theyhad to do on themselves in order to be recognizedas subjects. The lack of focus on the activity ofthe individual in this middle work is not just rec-ognized by commentators but also by Foucault:

I tried to mark out three types of problems: that ofthe truth, that of power, and that of individual con-duct. . . . What hampered me in the precedingbooks was to have considered the first two experi-ences without taking into account the third.7

Although I reject Frasier’s argument thatFoucault’s middle work excludes the possibilityof a robust conception of the agency of the indi-vidual, I do accept that Foucault was not focusedon developing such an account. This difference isimportant because Fraser, Paras, and Taylorwould have us believe that an account of theagency of the individual is impossible in the mid-dle work, while I would argue with Nealon andothers that it is not antithetical, just not wellelaborated.

My aim in this essay is to develop an accountof individual conduct in disciplinary power bycultivating resources from Foucault’s later work.

In the later Foucault, he traces the history of thework that a self is morally obligated to performon itself from ancient Greece to Rome and ontoChristianity. This genealogical account of ethicalself-work shares a connection point with disci-plinary power in that they overlap in Christianity.Foucault argues that the Christian monastery was“the first nucleus,” “the point of departure” andthe “matrix” of disciplinary power and it isthrough the monastery that Foucault’s work onethics edges his work on discipline.8 The disci-plines were formed out of the cradle of the Chris-tian monastery and this essay aims to trace thetransference of lineages of ethical self-relationbetween the Christian monastery and thedisciplines.

In order to accomplish these goals, this essaywill proceed in this manner: First, I will reviewthe way that Foucault’s work changes betweenthe 1970s and the 1980s and establish linkagesacross which insights from the later work can betranslated into the earlier work in order to revealthe ethical activity of disciplinary subjects. In thefollowing section, I make the connection be-tween his work on ethics and disciplinary powerrelations through the intermediary of the Chris-tian monastery. In the final section, I show thevalue of an ethical examination of disciplinarypower by shedding new light on two persistently,and perhaps famously, enigmatic areas ofFoucault’s work: his pronouncement from theHistory of Sexuality Volume I that a “counterat-tack” ought to be based on “bodies and plea-sures” and his proclamation that we must re-spond to the contemporary situation “with aninvestigation which is that of an aesthetics of ex-istence.”9 Clarifying these clouded elements ofFoucault’s thought will serve as an example ofthe insights that might be gained in usingFoucault’s later moral genealogies to reveal anddevelop new dimensions of his older work,especially disciplinary power.

Topographical Translations

Although the primary aim of this essay is notto establish the theoretical grounds on which anencounter between the later and earlier work ofFoucault might be staged, in part because it has

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been done elsewhere, it is still nonetheless im-portant to briefly consider the way in which a the-oretical linkage will be established in this essay.The new insights that can be generated inFoucault’s work on discipline by his later workon subjectivity will be shaped by the ways inwhich the works are bridged, and so some discus-sion is necessary, as it will form the theoreticalmatrix through which this essay will be staged.

Although I have sided with those that takeFoucault’s later work not to be a total rejection ofhis earlier work, that does not mean that all hiswork is informed by the same priorities. On thecontrary, Foucault’s later work prioritizes sub-jectivity and truth where the earlier work focusedon power and knowledge. More specifically, inthe later work Foucault aimed “to study thegames of truth (jeux de verité) in the relationshipof self with self and in the forming of oneself as asubject.”10 In this later work, Foucault analyzedhow particular truths were mobilized in the for-mation of a subject such that one might be re-quired to recognize oneself as a subject throughthese truths. For instance, ancient Greeks andRomans recognized themselves as individualsthrough their gender, class, age, wealth, maritalstatus, etc. An important part of what it meant tobe a subject, then as today, was to recognize thatone has a certain truth to manifest in one’s con-duct. This focus on subjectivity and truth tends toprioritize the agency of the individual in that ithighlights the action of the individual in consti-tuting him- or herself as a subject through mani-festing certain truths. Openings for individual re-sistance are easier to spot in the later Foucaultbecause of his exposition of the activity of indi-viduals in constituting themseves, activity thatindividuals might perform otherwise to subvertor resist the power relations they are enmeshedin.

The work through most of the 1970s, in thetime between the Archaeology of Knowledge andThe Hermeneutics of the Subject, tended to focuson power and knowledge. This work exploredhow the conduct of subjects and populationswere informed by power relations and bound tocertain forms of knowledge. This work focusedless on the agency of the individual in the produc-

tion of subjectivity and more on how that agencywas created and regulated through different typesof knowledge and power relations. Accordingly,“the consensus” seems to have concluded thatthis work offers no possibility of resistance be-cause of the minimal focus on individual agency.However, this critique confuses the focus of aparticular work with a pronouncement about theentire contemporary situation. Foucault’s aimwas not to focus on the activity of the individualin self-constitution but that should not be thoughtto imply that it does not exist or that it is impossi-ble. Foucault is clear that power relations alwaysimply the possibility of resistance, of subversion:

The power relation and freedom’s refusal to submitcannot therefore be separated. . . . At the very heartof the power relationship, and constantly provok-ing it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the in-transigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of anessential antagonism, it would be better to speak ofan “agonism”—of a relationship that is at the sametime mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sidesthan a permanent provocation.11

For Foucault, power relations are not relation-ships of physical coercion or violence in whichthe individual or group has no choice but to com-ply. Relationships of power are exercised overthe conduct of others where the “other” alwayshas the choice to conduct herself otherwise.Thus, power is a constant provocation; for in-stance, a request by the teacher in grade school tosit down is often a provocation to standup. Power relations are always exercised in acontext of freedom (unlike relationships of vio-lence or physical domination) and so leave roomopen for individuals to constitute themselvesotherwise. Philosophy has its role in informingresistance because effective power relations, al-most by definition, conceal their weaknesses andoften require concerted study to locate them:

I dream of the intellectual destroyer of evidenceand universalities, the one who, in the inertias andconstraints of the present, locates and marks theweak points, the openings, the lines of power, whoincessantly displaces himself, doesn’t know ex-actly where he is heading nor what he’ll think to-



morrow because he is too attentive to the present;who contributes the raising of the question ofknowing whether the revolution is worth it, andwhat kind.12

It is important to recognize that relations ofpower and knowledge always contain anagonistic struggle with freedom to see thatFoucault’s later work is not a refusal of the earlierwork but a reorientation. Instead of situating theanalysis at the level at which the subject is posi-tioned in relations of power and knowledge as inthe work of the 1970s, the work of the 1980s onsubjectivity and truth takes up the analysis at thelevel of the individual and the work that is re-quired for the individual to do in order to be rec-ognized as a proper and legitimate subject. Thislater shift does not eliminate the question ofpower and knowledge or refuse its importance—it is still the case that the work of the self on theself occurs in the context of particular relations ofpower: “Foucault thinks of the ethos as personal,but not as private. An individual’s ethos is pub-licly observable, and it is visibly permeated bysocial norms and political codes.”13 Foucaulthimself argues that his later work on ethicsshould not be seen as eliminating the question ofpower but of broadening it; he explains that hewas working to “to create a history of the differ-ent modes by which, in our culture, human be-ings are made subjects” and this made it neces-sary to “expand the dimensions of a definition ofpower if one wanted to use this definition instudying the objectivizing of the subject.”14 Putotherwise, one could say that Foucault shiftedfrom an analysis of the power relations exercisedby others on the self (1970s) to an analysis of thepower relations that could be constituted and mo-bilized by the self on itself (1980s). This does notimply a rejection but a shift in focus that can beused to differentially motivate and inform themultiple accounts given in Foucault’s work byexposing them to different levels of analysis.

The project here is to explore the ways inwhich Foucault’s work on the power one exer-cises over oneself can open up a new dimensionin his account of disciplinary power, which gen-erally lacks such a dimension and is focused onthe power others exercise on the self. This look atthe work of the individual in constituting herself

as a disciplinary subject will not eliminate or re-place Foucault’s account of disciplinary powerand knowledge relations but it will “expand thedimensions” of it to include the power relationsthat connect the self to itself.

The Ethical Lineage of Disciplinary PowerRelations

If we take monastic life as a model of disci-plinary saturation, and monasticism was ac-tually the point of departure and matrix ofdiscipline, then what the monk does is en-tirely regulated, from morning to night andfrom night to morning, and the only thing un-determined is what is not said and is there-fore forbidden.15

Foucault’s work on the relations of the self toitself extends from ancient Greco-Roman moral-ity to Christianity, bouncing back and forth be-tween the different time periods in the work thatextends from Hermeneutics of the Subject to hislast interview entitled The Return of Morality.The above quote provides us with an organic con-nection between Foucault’s ethical focus on therelationship of the self to the self and his work ondisciplinary power relations as it gives us a sitewhere Christianity, through monasticism, con-tacts disciplinary power relations in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. Foucault argues in theabove quote as well as throughout Discipline andPunish that disciplinary relations were birthedfrom monastic relations.16 In the 1970s, he drawssome insights about disciplinary power from itsbirth in the monastery but those discussions arelargely limited to the operation of monastic tech-niques of government, for conducting the con-duct of others, and do not seriously reflect on therelation of the self to the self.17 In 1978, however,Foucault offers up the provocative idea that thedisciplines gain from the monastery the assump-tion that “man is wicked, bad, and has evilthoughts and inclinations, etcetera. So, within thedisciplinary space a complementary sphere ofprescriptions and obligations is constituted that isall the more artificial and constraining as the na-ture of reality is tenacious and difficult to over-come.”18 Seemingly, Foucault offers us a first in-dication that some elements of the fallen

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Christian subject were passed onto disciplinaryrelations from the monastery when they inheriteda subject that is characterized by its evil andwicked nature.

In Foucault’s later work he makes a muchmore detailed analysis of the Christian relation ofthe self to itself and its roots in Greco-Romanmorality than in the earlier work where he wasmuch more focused on the relation of the selfwith others. If we situate our analysis at this inter-section of Christian coenobitical monasticismand the emergence of disciplinary power rela-tions in the sixteenth and seventeenth century,then we might enrich and add new dimensions toour understanding of disciplinary power rela-tions through his work on Christian subjectivity.More precisely, we can look to how Foucaultcharacterizes the self-relation that is formative ofChristian subjectivity in order to gain some in-sight into the disciplinary subject’s self-relationthat is also “wicked, bad and has evil thoughts.”

Importantly, most of Foucault’s analyses arenot directed specifically at the monastery but atChristianity much more generally. In order to di-rect this account more specifically to the monas-tery and eventually to disciplinary power rela-tions, I will use St. Benedict’s Rule in order tocontextualize Foucault’s insights within the spe-cific setting of the monastery. In other words, Iplan to work to uncover how the principles thatFoucault finds active in Christianity can also beseen to work in the monastery; I do this so thatthese insights appear in this essay in the form thatis most directly related to the birth of the disci-plines—in the monastic milieu. As a result, I willseek to give examples about how the generalpoints Foucault makes about Christianity can beseen to be active in the monastery. I use St. Bene-dict’s Rule to do this because it is the most influ-ential Rule to guide monastic life in the West inthe era that spawned the disciplines.19

As with many other areas of his work,Foucault had a unique view of Christianity thatwas shaped by his genealogies of Greco-Romanmorality. Although I wish to spend the majorityof this analysis looking more directly at the mon-astery and tying it to the disciplines, I believe thata relatively brief overview of Foucault’s relevant

work in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of theSelf on Greco-Roman morality will be helpful infleshing out Foucault’s views on Christianity.

From the start of the two volumes he devotedto Greco-Roman morality, Foucault lets thereader know that the Greeks and Romans of an-tiquity had a focus in their moral practice on theethical relationship of the self with the self:

Here the emphasis is on the forms of relations withthe self, on the methods and techniques by whichhe works them out, on the exercises by which hemakes himself an object to be known, and on thepractices that enable him to transform his ownmode of being.20

As opposed to some moralities that base theirpractice on an attempt to follow a code or a set ofrules, Greco-Roman morality focused on the re-lation of the self to itself. Hence, what was of pri-mary importance was not whether a particular actwas forbidden or allowed by a code but on howone related to oneself in the carrying out of thatact.21

This emphasis in Greco-Roman moral prac-tice on the relation of the self with the self makesmore sense if one understands it in practice,through its aim at self-mastery. For the Greeks,self-mastery was reflected in the moderation ofone’s actions, in the way that one revealed one-self not to be dominated by one’s desires:

Sophrosyne [moderation] was a state that could beapproached through the exercise of self-masteryand through restraint in the practice of pleasures; itwas characterized as a freedom.22

Moderation “was characterized as a freedom”because it reflected that the domination of the de-sires of food, drink, riches, sex, fear, etc. hadbeen subdued to the force of the individual’s rea-son; one was free of the slavery of one’s desiresand returned to oneself in one’s reason. As a re-sult, the central focus of Greco-Roman moralitywas not on whether one had performed a certainact that was forbidden or not (although therewere certainly forbidden actions), the emphasiswas on whether one had undertaken an action as amatter of rational choice that reflected modera-tion and self-mastery or whether one was moti-vated to it by enslavement to desire. It was fully



possible that the same action one day, done in thespirit of moderation and in complete self-controlcould be morally praiseworthy, while on the nextday the action might be done out of a desire thatthe individual could not break free from and sowould be blameworthy.

This self-mastery was a desirable goal for theGreeks in two senses. First, in a slave society, itwas self-mastery that allowed one to be free fromenslavement, not just to another person, but alsoto the defects of one’s character:

This individual freedom should not, however, beunderstood as the independence of a free will. Itspolar opposite was not a natural determinism, norwas it the will of an all-powerful agency: it was anenslavement—the enslavement of the self by one-self.23

An individual who had mastered himself was nolonger enslaved to his passions and whims butsubject to his own reasonable control. Second, tohave attained self-mastery also qualified one forpolitical leadership because the self-mastered in-dividual was free from the desires and passionsthat might otherwise lead him to abuse or misusehis power. Clifford summarizes this point in hisPolitical Genealogy After Foucault,

The virtue of moderation qualified an individual toexercise authority over others, which was a veryimportant dimension of the individual’s freedom.Those who did not govern, in fact, “received theirprinciple of moderation” from those who did; thus,the “nonruler” had less freedom simply by virtueof his subordinate position.24

To be able to rule others, one had to first knowhow to rule oneself because, as a ruler, theleader’s self-government would extend beyondhimself to order the lives of others around him;thus, it was even more important for the rulerthan for the private individual to learnmoderation.

Although this morality undergoes many vari-ations and important changes as it develops inGreece and is eventually adopted and trans-formed in Roman culture, it is the changes thatChristianity brings to this morality that are ofcentral concern to this essay. Christianity “dis-turbs the balance of the care of the self” by aim-

ing to obtain salvation in a second ‘true life’ afterdeath.25 Benedict echoes Foucault’s analysis andemphasizes that the purpose of monastic life issalvation:

Monks should practice this zeal with ardent love....Let them fear God and think of nothing beforeChrist, Who can lead us into eternal life.26

Removing the telos of moral action from thisworld into the next resulted in fundamentalchanges in the morality as it moved to reorient it-self as means to salvation and not as a moral prac-tice with its rewards centered in this life.

Salvation was fixed as the end of Christianmorality in part because self-mastery and moder-ation became impossible goals. The Christiansubject, unlike the Greco-Roman subject, startswith the presumption of its evil and fallen nature.The Christian subject is not wholly evil, just im-perfect, and in that imperfection cannot be cer-tain that its motives are correct, its actions aregood, and that it is not being falsely deceived inthe blindness of its imperfection by its own pas-sions or by the devil. The Christian subject is al-ways roiled by a variety of good and evil motivesthat mix in its heart causing it to have an imper-fect adherence to the good (God). Foucault de-scribes this conundrum in the hypothetical activ-ity of a Christian trying to sort out the accuracy oftheir own representations of the current state ofthings:

Does this idea I have in my mind come fromGod?—in which case it is necessarily pure. Does itcome from Satan?—it which case it is impure. Orpossibly even: does it come from myself, in whichcase, to what extent can we say it is pure or im-pure?27

The Christian subject, in its imperfection,cannot properly rule itself, which is born out bythe fact that it cannot even properly sort out itsrepresentations of the world such that it knows itis proceeding with a pure or impure and deceitfulnotion. The relation of the self to itself in the formof self-mastery is no longer possible for theChristians and, instead, the self-relation comes tobe marked by self-renunciation.

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Self-renunciation entails the rejection of theefforts of the self to lead itself, to master itself.The Christian self has to turn away from its pro-ject of self-mastery because no part of the self ispure enough to lead the rest of the self to moralredemption without also introducing evil. This iswhy Foucault writes that Christianity turnedfrom being a morality based on the relationshipof the self to the self as in antiquity to a moralitythat more greatly focused on following a code ofbehavior—the self could not lead itself and sohad to follow the leadership of God as given in asacred text.28

Likewise, Benedict was sure that humanitywas incapable of properly carrying out its ownself-government without God: the Fall and theCrucifixion, among other Biblical tales, providedample evidence of humanity’s evil in their reflec-tions on human failure. The solution to the prob-lem of a fallen humanity in need of a way to gov-ern itself virtuously was found, for him, in amonastic life that provided resources and impe-tus to pursue the code laid down by God:

Listen, my son, and with your heart hear the princi-ples of your Master. Readily accept and faithfullyfollow the advice of a loving father, so that throughthe labor of obedience you may return to Him fromwhom you have withdrawn because of laziness ofobedience. My words are meant for you, whoeveryou are, who laying aside your own will, take upthe all-powerful and righteous arms of obedienceto fight under the true King, the Lord JesusChrist.29

In order to achieve salvation, the monasteryaimed to help the monks by establishing relationsthat encouraged and coerced the cenobites to layaside their own fallen and corrupt attempts atself-government and turn themselves over toGod in the most complete obedience and humil-ity possible. Following the message of the LordJesus Christ could guide the brothers to a goodform of conduct that would otherwise be out oftheir sinful and fallen grasp. Self-renunciationand acceptance of God’s leadership was neces-sary for a successful moral practice: “The funda-mental principle of Christian asceticism is thatthe renunciation of the self is the essential mo-

ment of what enables us to gain access to theother life, to the light, to truth and salvation.”30

The Christian and monastic self sought to peelback its own prideful and evil attempts to lead it-self like the skinning of an onion: “the essentialfunction of [Christian ascesis] is to determineand order the necessary renunciations.”31 Theself would examine itself only to renounce itselfas evil and fallen in favor of a strict obedience tothe only thing that is truly good, God and the sa-cred rules he gave humanity to live by in the Bi-ble. Obedience was to be the end achieved by to-tal renunciation of the self’s own leadership and,in fact, the monastic subject found its highestform in the reduction of the individual to totalobedience, a kind of forwarding point for God’swishes:

We are forbidden to do our own will for “Leaveyour own will and desires,” and “We beg the Lordin prayer that His will may be done in us.” Thus welearn not to do our own will for Scripture warns us:“There are ways that seem right to men, but theylead, in the end, to the depths of hell.” We must fearwhat was said of the careless, “They have been cor-rupted and made abominable in their desires.”32

The monks attempted to rule themselves prop-erly by following, in as complete a manner aspossible, the directives given to them by the per-fect God. The sinful and lacking part of the sub-ject combated with the good and obedient part todetermine whether governance would comefrom above and obedience would reign orwhether direction would come from the willful,heavy, and sinful flesh. Ironically, the ideal formof self-government was realized when individu-als governed themselves as little as possible andsought only to obey the commandments of God:

They [monks] do not live as they please, nor astheir desires and will dictate, but they live under thedirection and judgment of an abbot in a monastery.Undoubtedly, they find their inspiration in theLord’s saying: “I come not to do my own will, butthe will of him who sent me.”33

As the quote attests, the monastery deployed a setof power relations that coerced and trained themonks to docilely act out the vision of the good



demanded by God, even if, perhaps especially if,the rebellious individual did not desire it.

This moment, in which proper self-govern-ment was constituted as a form of self-renuncia-tion that welcomed the domination of the subjectby a more expert subject, was a tremendously im-portant moment in the lineage that would giverise to contemporary disciplinary relations. It isat this moment that the subject turns away fromitself as a source of acceptable self-governmentand looks in obedience and compliance to an-other in order to find the proper direction. Themonastery dominates the becoming and constitu-tion of individuals in God’s name; it dominatesindividuals for their own good so that they mayachieve their proper ends regardless of whetherthey desire or even fully understand those ends.In the name of God, the almighty, infallible, andloving Father of all, the monastery authorizes it-self to impose a form of subjectivity on individu-als that the individual had to prepare for throughcontinual self-renunciation and accept with obe-dience. The ethical Expert (God), His discourse(the Bible and by extension the Rule), and Hisemissaries (the abbot and his deans), gain a legiti-mate domination over the body and soul of thebrothers in which it is necessary that the brothersrenounce themselves and work in total obediencefor his own good.

Although Foucault patiently documents thetranslation of technologies of hierarchy, spaceand temporal control between the monastery andthe disciplines, he almost never explores the ge-nealogy of this self-relation of renunciation andobedience as it moves into the disciplinary con-text. It will be our job in the next section to fleshout this insight in the context of disciplinarypower relations.

The Disciplinary Self-Relation

First, we must begin by marking a difference:the disciplines introduce the opposite distur-bance into the self-relation that Christianitybrought to the Greco-Roman care of the self inthat the disciplines return the telos of moral prac-tice to life from the afterlife. The goal of disci-plinary practice shifts from salvation to a varietyof ‘worldly’ ends, such as a well-trained effi-

ciency; coordination with other subjects; docil-ity; and standardization:

Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of aperfect society to the philosophers and jurists ofthe eighteenth century; but there was also a mili-tary dream of society; its fundamental referencewas not to the state of nature, but to the meticu-lously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to fun-damental rights, but to indefinitely progressiveforms of training, not to the general will but to au-tomatic docility.34

The disciplines took their aims from the growingadministration and coordination of the popula-tion to create the “perfect society” through train-ing people in a military fashion, progressivelymoving them ever more towards an “automaticdocility” that would allow them to work like the“meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine.”

To achieve this dream of a perfect society, thedisciplines did not return to the positive valuationof human nature that permitted the Greco-Ro-man culture to believe that people could masterand govern themselves. The aim of self-renunci-ation remained along with obedience to an expertwho possessed the truth about how the individualshould conduct its own conduct. In the disci-plines as in the monastery, subjects were not todetermine the direction of their own formation assubjects by following their own inclinations,pleasures, and best ideas but by submitting to aseries of experts who possessed the truthaccording to which subjectivization shouldoccur:

With this new economy of power, the carceral sys-tem, which is [discipline’s] basic instrument, per-mitted the emergence of a new form of “law”: amixture of legality and nature, prescription andconstitution, the norm. . . . The judges of normalityare present everywhere. We are the society of theteacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the “social worker”-judge; it is on them thatthe universal reign of the normative is based; andeach individual, wherever he may find himself,subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior,his aptitudes, his achievements.35

As Foucault indicates in this quote, the ‘truth’ ofdisciplinary doctrines is not drawn from God, the

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Bible, or the Rule as was the case in the monas-tery, but from the “judges” of the human sci-ences. These human scientists produced a scien-tific discourse that prescribed how bodies shouldconduct themselves. The psychologists, doctors,industrial engineers, evolutionary biologists, an-thropologists, sociologists, educators, politicalscientists, and criminal justice experts were andare thought to be able to scientifically determinea normal range of acceptable behaviors fromtheir scientific regard of the human body andpsyche. Although the disciplines differ from themonastery in that their aims are earthly and thattheir authority extends from the sciences insteadof from God, both aim at the renunciation of theindividual’s self-governance and see obedienceto an expert discourse as a significant part ofsubjectivization.

The obedience of the disciplinary subject wasnot an accidental holdover from the monasterybut was actively sought as one of the primarybenefits of disciplinary power relations: “Whilejurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact aprimal model for the construction or reconstruc-tion of the social body, the soldiers and with themthe technicians of discipline were elaboratingprocedures for the individual and collective coer-cion of bodies.”36 Knowledges were being con-structed to make individuals fearful of their ownself-governance and ready to renounce their owninsufficient attempts at self-governance:

And the mere fact that one claimed to be speakingabout it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint ofa science is in itself significant. . . . Claiming tospeak the truth, it stirred up people’s fears; the leastoscillations of sexuality, it ascribed an imagineddynasty of evils destined to be passed on for gener-ations; it declared the furtive customs of the timid,and the most solitary of petty manias, dangerousfor the whole society; strange pleasures, it warned,would eventually result in nothing short of death:that of individuals, generations, the species itself.37

Here we have many of the elements of the mon-astery translated into the disciplinary context: theassumption that the public would wickedly bring“civil disorder” if left to its own guidance; the de-mand that individuals renounce their own self-leadership for obedience and docility to an expert

authority; the establishment of a true form ofself-constitution that can only come from bind-ing oneself in a deep relationship of obedience tothe higher authority of the discipline; and, fi-nally, the goal of establishing a network of disci-plinary institutions across society to teach self-renunciation, docility and obedience and estab-lish, not God’s Kingdom, but a perfectly coordi-nated apparatus that maintains all of theindividual pieces of society in docility andclockwork order.

Looked at from the perspective of the relation-ship of the self to the self we can see further rea-son why disciplinary power relations are so per-nicious. Disciplinary power relations exert such adominant form of control, not just because theyseek to impose their own normative standards ofconduct through meticulous and rigorous train-ing methods, but also because they teach the indi-vidual to distrust and renounce their own self-leadership. Disciplinary power relations offer astrong one-two punch of the imposition and ef-fective training of the “true” forms of subjectivityand the introduction of self-renunciation that un-dermines the self’s own resources to refuse theirsubordination. Disciplinary obedience is formednot just by the coercion imposed by others butalso by the individual’s own deep-seatedpractices of self-renunciation.

In contrast, Greco-Roman morality pro-ceeded from norms to their stylization as part of aprocess of self-mastery and self-formation: “itwas a means of developing—for the smallest mi-nority of the population, made up of free, adultmales—an aesthetics of existence, the purpose-ful art of a freedom perceived as a power game.”38

Although the ancients still had a number of requi-site norms, they gave space to a few individuals tostylize the way that they came to embody thesenorms. This practice of self-formation reflectedtheir confidence in the individual to seek out andembody the good and a distinct distaste for be-coming enslaved to another person or doctrinefor leadership.39 In fact, when certain Romansbegan seeing moral teachers later in life, itseemed ridiculous to their peers because it was anembarrassment to submit oneself to another inobedience beyond one’s youth: “This extreme



eagerness of adults to look after their souls, thezeal with which, like schoolboys grown old, theysought out philosophers so that they might beshown the way to happiness, irritated Lucian, andmany others with him.”40

In the disciplines, one also begins with normsbut one seeks to apply those norms through a nor-malizing process in which one renounces self-mastery and seeks to apply that norm in the regu-lar way demanded by the scientific discourses ofthe discipline. The disciplines seek to apply thesenorms in standardized ways to their obedient anddocile charges, giving individuals little freedomto alter, transform or even to interject themselvesin the process of their own formation as subjectsexcept to reject their own urge to interject them-selves. Where the Greeks and Romans respondedto norms with stylization, the disciplines took tonormalization with the end result that subjectiv-ity was constituted as a kind of permanent obedi-ence to the norm in the regular way required bythe scientific code. Foucault refers to this state asdomination: “one sometimes encounters whatmay be called situations or states of dominationin which the power relations, instead of beingmobile, allowing the various participants toadopt strategies modifying them, remainblocked, frozen.”41

Implications of the DisciplinarySelf-Relation and Conclusion

Keeping in view the relation of the self to it-self, two of Foucault’s pronouncements on disci-plinary relations gain new dimension and sense.New clarification on these two statements byFoucault is especially helpful because theirmeaning is uncustomarily opaque. First, I wouldlike to look at this quote, focusing on the last sen-tence, and see how an attunement to the self-rela-tion within disciplinary relations sheds new lighton it:

From Antiquity to Christianity one passes from amorality that was essentially a search for a per-sonal ethics to a morality as obedience to a systemof rules. And if I have taken an interest in Antiq-uity, it is because, for a whole series of reasons, theidea of morality as obedience to a code of rules isnow disappearing, has already disappeared. To this

absence of a morality, one responds, or must re-spond, with an investigation which is that of anaesthetics of existence.42

Without the ethical genealogy of the disciplinesthat has been assembled in this essay, it would behard to make full sense of this claim. Why mustone respond to the loss of morality as a code witha study of the aesthetics of existence? It becomesclearer if one sees that as part of Christianity anddisciplinary power relations, the code had toserve as the basis for how one applied socialnorms because of the low estimation of individu-als’ capacity to lead themselves and develop theirown moral practice. If morality as adherence tomoral code begins to whither, then one needs an-other way to apply the norms that seemingly ev-ery society has.43 If we follow Foucault, we willhave to agree that the aesthetics of existence hasbeen the other major form of applying norms inthe West, at least since antiquity. As I argued ear-lier, the aesthetics of existence works to applynorms based on a process of stylization in whichthe individual takes up the socially requisitenorms and alters them into a memorable form “inwhich one could recognize oneself, be recog-nized by others, and in which even posteritycould find an example.”44 The aesthetics of exis-tence provides an alternative relation of the selfto itself based on freedom and self-mastery, in-stead of self-renunciation and obedience. Dummsuggests that Foucault turns to antiquity pre-cisely to gather resources for establishing a formof self-relation not based in self-renunciation,“Foucault’s turn to ancient Greece and Rome isinspired by the search for an ethos concerning thebody that would not be associated with the renun-ciation of the bodily being itself that is to befound in the sort of asceticism he had traced to theemergence of normalizing discourse.”45

However, we should note that Foucault did notsay that we must adopt the aesthetics of existencebut only investigate it. This is for several reasons:First, ancient morality and its quest for self-mas-tery is also deeply implicated in many of thedominating aspects of our society. We should no-tice that the practice of self-mastery in antiquityresults in the self dominating itself, with the ra-tional part of the self dominating the other parts:“This principle of ‘internal regulation’ involves a

PHILOSOPHY TODAY


domination over oneself.”46 This ethical self-re-lation is not far from Christianity or disciplinaryrelations; after all, what happens when the indi-vidual is not seen as able to lead itself towards thegood? Where will the force of domination comefrom if the self is not able to provide it? Whetherone stands on the position that the subject can andshould master itself or that it needs to be masteredby another who possesses the truth, one is still le-gitimizing the domination of the self in legitimiz-ing self-mastery. Once one accepts self-masteryas a principle, it becomes a debate about who isthe best agent of domination, the self or others?But it is already a foregone conclusion that theself must be dominated. It is likely that a newform of self-relation that wants to avoid the dom-ination of the subject will also have to challengebasic assumptions about the role of self-masteryin moral life; challenges that Greco-Romanmorality may not be able to muster.

Second, and more simply, Greco-Roman mo-rality was set in its own unique historical contextand functioned as part of that social reality; anymorality today will have to establish connectionswith the present—connections that will inevita-bly shape and alter the morality. Politically andhistorically, the aesthetics of existence as the an-cients practiced it is an insufficient response tothe present; however, as an object of investiga-tion and inspiration for a new moral practice, itmight contain the promise that Foucault hoped inan example of a society that related to norms onsomething other than normalization grounded inself-renunciation and obedience. Although itdoes not seem wise to attempt a return of Greco-Roman morality in toto, the aesthetics ofexistence can hold promise in its stylizingapproach to norms.

Likewise, the analysis of the disciplinary self-relation is also able to draw out similar implica-tions in another persistently vague and opaquearea of Foucault’s thought. Foucault insisted atthe end of The History of Sexuality Volume I that,“The rallying point for the counterattack againstthe deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”47 What inter-ests me here is Foucault’s insistence on pleasure

as a rallying point for the resistance to thenormalization of sexuality.

A focus on pleasure makes sense if one no-tices how disciplinary self-relations use pain toteach one to renounce oneself and turn to the ex-pert “other” to provide guidance. Disciplinarypower relations employ pain to turn individualsaway from themselves and towards the “other” inorder to find out how to stop the other from ap-plying the pain. Pain typically only ends once theself becomes focused on the other for leadershipand submits in self-renunciation. Foucaultwrites, “At the heart of all disciplinary systemsfunctions a small penal mechanism”—a smallmechanism of pain, self-renunciation and, if suc-cessful, obedience.48 Pain for the disciplines is ameans towards achieving the end of self-renunciation and obedience.

To follow one’s pleasures can turn that lookfor government back towards the self. Unlike thedisciplinary use of pain, which was created, re-fined and applied by the other as a means to anend, the use of pleasure does not have its end orgoal outside of itself. The use of pleasure is notjust a reversal of the use of pain—a trading of thestick for the carrot—as if instead of using nega-tive means to induce self-renunciation one wouldturn to more positive and pleasurable tactics toinsure the same goal. Pleasure is used quite dif-ferently than pain in that it is an end in itself; aturn to pleasure is a turn to pleasure itself. Theself-relation would be based on growing anattunement to one’s own pleasures that would al-low one to diversify, intensify, and even to renderthem more complex and nuanced. To base a pro-cess of subjectivization on pleasure is to abandonself-renunciation as the central mode of self-rela-tion and to base a process of subjectivization onthe cultivation and knowledge of one’s pleasures;to turn to pleasure is to listen to oneself and one’spleasures as a source of leadership. Pleasure fo-cuses one on oneself as a guide rather than on thepain that serves as a bridge to obedience and sub-mission. The cultivation of one’s pleasureswould be much more likely to lead to an art ofstylization, an idiosyncratic practice of develop-ing and maturing one’s capacities for self-leader-ship, something much more like the ancient art of



existence than the contemporary disciplining ofthe subject.

What both of these examples together revealis the way that a focus on the self-relation in dis-ciplinary power facilitates the development of in-dividual strategies of resistance. After all, asFoucault notes, power is always a provocation tofreedom; a focus on the work a self must do in or-der to discipline itself is a provocation to performthat work in some other way, threatening the sub-ject’s good “self-discipline.” Revealing the prev-alence of a code morality is a provocation to ren-der oneself a subject through some other meansand the use of pain as a means to secure self-re-nunciation and obedience invites reflections onhow pain, self-renunciation, and obedience canbe subverted or surpassed. Bringing the opera-tion of power into explicit relief opens it to cri-tique: “power is tolerable on the condition that itmask a considerable portion of itself.”49 But, toreturn to those critics that I addressed at the outsetof this essay, it should be acknowledged that thelater Foucault is no panacea. Certainly, the laterwork can help to develop an account of the workone must perform in order to render oneself asubject and drive new ways to perform one’s ownself-relation differently, but it is unquestionablyimportant to alter one’s relationships with othersto change the present as well. Foucault’s focus ontruth and subjectivity is neither a replacement foran account of power and knowledge relations noris it likely to sidestep the resistance that could begenerated by a collectivity of individuals seekingto alter their relationships with one another.Choosing the later work over the earlier threatensto leave one with just the sort of one-dimensionalaccount that many protested in Foucault’s lack offocus on the individual in his middle genealogi-

cal work. Foucault’s later work is situated on adifferent level than his earlier work, but it is not a“higher” level that can serve as a replacement ofearlier accounts. What I hoped to have accom-plished in this essay is to show how an account ofthe relationship of the self to itself in disciplinarypower relations can expand the earlier account,bringing out a new dimension of analysis withoutreplacing the old. This relatively unused level ofethical analysis was used to “intensify” the viewof disciplinary relations through uncoveringelements of its operation and providing for morerobust opportunities for individual resistance.

In sum, this essay developed a new account ofthe work the self must perform on itself in disci-plinary relations through the cultivation of re-sources from Foucault’s later work. By tracingthe ethical self-relation from Greco-Roman an-tiquity to the Benedictine monastery, I was ableto provide insight into the relationship of self-re-nunciation that underlies disciplinary docilityand obedience. This self-renunciation under-mines individuals’ ability to lead themselves andmakes them reliant on another who has masteryof the truth by which the subject must be consti-tuted. Disciplinary relations were thus seen to bedoubly efficacious in producing relations ofdomination: they attempt to eliminate the self-leadership of the individual which not only un-dermines the individual’s potential to resist; itleaves them in need of the dominating trainingthat disciplinary relations institute. This insightinto the activity of the individual in the produc-tion of their own docility was then used to clarifyand develop aspects of two perennially enigmaticbut powerful areas of Foucault’s work, his focuson “bodies and pleasures” and his turn to the“aesthetics of existence.”

ENDNOTES

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48

1. Charles Taylor, “Foucault, Freedom, and Truth,” in

Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical

Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1985), 154–84; Eric Paras, Foucault 2: Beyond

Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press,

2002); Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young

Conservative’?” Ethics 96 (1985):164–84.

2. Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?”

180.3. Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power

and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press, 2008), 8–9.4. Ibid., 46.5. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in

© DePaul University 2011© DePaul University 2011

University of Texas Pan American, Edinburg, TX 78539


49

Power: Essent ial Works of Foucault1964–1983 (New York: Free Press, 2000), 327.

6. Michel Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” trans.Phillis Aranov and Dan McGrawth, in FoucaultLive: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. SylvèveLotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 459.

7. Michel Foucault, “The Return to Morality,” trans.Colin Gordon, in Foucault Live: Collected Inter-views, 1961–1984, 466.

8. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: TheBirth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:Vintage, 1977), 162; Security, Territory, Population:Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans.Grahm Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2000), 46.

9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I:An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:Vintage, 1990), 159; “The Concern for Truth,” 451.

10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II:The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (NewYork: Vintage, 1990), 6.

11. “The Subject and Power,” 342.12. “Ethics and the Concern for the Self,” in Foucault

Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, 225.13. David Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Post-

structuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2004), 70.

14. “The Subject and Power,” 326, 327.15. Security, Territory, Population, 46.16. Discipline and Punish, 162.17. For a closer view of how Foucault relates the monas-

tery to the disciplines, see ibid., 137, 140–43, 146,149, 150, 154, 160–62, 172, 179, 238.

18. Security, Territory, Population, 47.19. Daniel Marcel La Corte, “Introduction” to Regular

Life: Monastic Canonical, and Mendicant Rules, ed.Daniel Marcel La Corte (Kalamazoo: Medieval In-stitute Publications, 2004), 5.

20. History of Sexuality Volume II, 30.21. Iibd., 38.22. Ibid., 78.23. Ibid., 79.24. Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy After Foucault

(New York: Routledge, 2001), 68.25. “The Concern for Truth,” 439.

26. The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Anthony Meiseland M. L. del Mastro (Garden City: Image Books,1975), 105–06

27. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lec-tures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, trans. Gra-ham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2005), 300.

28. Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” inFoucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984,451.

29. The Rule of Saint Benedict, 43.30. Hermeneutics of the Subject, 250.31. Ibid. 485.32. The Rule of Saint Benedict, 57–58.33. Ibid., 55.34. Discipline and Punish, 169.35. Ibid., 304.36. Ibid., 169.37. The History of Sexuality Volume I, 53–54.38. The History of Sexuality Volume II, 253.39. “An Aesthetics of Existence,” 451.40. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume

III: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (NewYork: Vintage, 1988), 49.

41. “The Concern for Truth,” 434.42. “An Aesthetics of Existence,” 451.43. Brent Pickett, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for

Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005).44. “An Aesthetics of Existence, 451.45. Thomas Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of

Freedom (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996),137–38.

46. Keith Robinson, Michel Foucault and the Freedom ofThought (Lewiston, ME: Edward Mellen, 2001),218.

47. The History of Sexuality Volume I, 157. For a widerranging reading of this phrase, see LadelleMcWhorter’s excellent exegesis and development ofthis phrase in Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault andthe Politics of Sexual Normalizations (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1999), 176–92. For my-self, I remain confined here to the specific insightsthis study can generate around this enigmatic phrase.

48. Discipline and Punish, 177.49. The History of Sexuality Volume I, 86.

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moralities of self-renunciation and obedience

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