Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CECILIA SJÖHOLM
Foucault recognizes a form of existential impulse or conversion through
which the gaze of the self is developed towards a new aim, that of shaping
the self through a set of social practices. These were called askesis. From the
moment that these practices were put in place, the quest for rational
discourse or theoretical forms of truth had started. The aim in late
antiquity—the period in which these discourses begun to develop— is not,
however, to discover the truth (as in the case with the hermeneutics of the
self), but rather to link the subject to a truth, one that is learned, memorized
and progressively put into practice. To progressively apprehend a relation
to truth is to establish a relation to the external world through “a quasi
subject that reigns supreme in us.” 13 Perhaps such a “quasi subject” could be
likened to a Freudian superego, or a Lacanian Other, to which the desire of
the subject is directed.
In “The technologies of the self” Foucault names four kinds of technologies
serving as the means by which man has come to understand himself:
(I) the technologies of production, through which man produces or changes
artifacts; (2) the technologies of sign systems, making it possible for us to
create meanings through the use of signs and symbols; (3) the technologies
of power, shaping and dominating the individual towards certain goals and
(4) technologies of the self, through which the individual elaborates his
intellect, body and feeling in order to achieve wisdom, happiness and other
moral values. All these technologies were regarded by Foucault as interwoven.
The technologies of power, through moral and social taboos, for
instance, have come to influence the conception of the self. This in itself is a
concept that is very much possible to look at in conjunction with the
Lacanian notion of the subject as a product of the law. While investigating
the tradition of the care of the self, Foucault became increasingly uninterested
in the idea of discourse as regulative for the individual but was
instead engaged in the individual’s relation to himself. The technologies of
the self have a particular place in the system of technologies, representing a
position through which the individual is able to formulate a productive
conception of the self:
Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and
power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself
and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the
13 Foucault, Essential Works, Vol. 1, 102.
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