Slogging through my backlog of mail, this caught my attention:
On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, heidi rimke wrote:
> What I find so interesting about Rose is his insistence that we are not
> only 'free to choose' but obliged to be free; we are governed through our
> freedom.
This may be mind-numbingly obvious, but this insistence is fundamental to
Foucault's conception of government: people are governed only insofar as
they are free; they are governed by making them freely choose to behave in
certain ways.
> And this is a predominant tenet of self-help. This notion of the free,
> autonomous, choosing self elucidates something quite telling about the
> ways through which modern subjects in neo-liberal societies have come
> to understand, experience, evaluate their lives. But I think this
> understanding of the subject is what Foucault argues againts in "The
> Subject and Power." The notion of the individual as sole/sovereign
> author of her own existence is a kind of enslavement dedicated to
> "well-being" or acquiring a "new and improved" self while
> simultaneously negating the social horizon against which these norms
> and codes of enslavement could be made visible. So, self-help, i
> think, can be likened to an insitution in a social order with a
> powerfully taken-for-granted truth: while appearing to be normal,
> neutral and natural it conceals the most deceptive of deceptions;
> self-helping enslavements remain invisible.
I guess the interesting question is whether they remain enslavements only
so long as they remain invisible, or whether invisible enslavements are
present whenever and however one engages with a text (self-help or
otherwise--and what's the difference between the "enslavement" of engaging
with self-help texts and engaging with philosophy texts, anyway?), and if
so, what then? If one takes a "properly ironic" attitude toward one's
self-help regime, does one remain enslaved? Does ironic detachment make
us "more free"? But then, if one is "properly ironic", perhaps one is
beyond being able to help oneself--and this seems a certain loss of
freedom, too: we (Foucauldians and others) are surely "enslaved" by our
irony and skepticism. This is what Sartre, for one, makes (depressingly)
apparent, isn't it? The skeptic Mathieu in _The Age of Reason_, unlike
his doctrinaire Communist friend, is so "free" that he is immobilized,
incapable of doing anything at all.... I often wish I could help myself,
or even turn myself over to others so that they may help me--but I have
been governed (by the influence of Foucault among others) to freely choose
not to.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
dear readers, my apologies.
I'm drifting in and out of sleep.
---------------------------------(R.E.M.)----------------------------------
On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, heidi rimke wrote:
> What I find so interesting about Rose is his insistence that we are not
> only 'free to choose' but obliged to be free; we are governed through our
> freedom.
This may be mind-numbingly obvious, but this insistence is fundamental to
Foucault's conception of government: people are governed only insofar as
they are free; they are governed by making them freely choose to behave in
certain ways.
> And this is a predominant tenet of self-help. This notion of the free,
> autonomous, choosing self elucidates something quite telling about the
> ways through which modern subjects in neo-liberal societies have come
> to understand, experience, evaluate their lives. But I think this
> understanding of the subject is what Foucault argues againts in "The
> Subject and Power." The notion of the individual as sole/sovereign
> author of her own existence is a kind of enslavement dedicated to
> "well-being" or acquiring a "new and improved" self while
> simultaneously negating the social horizon against which these norms
> and codes of enslavement could be made visible. So, self-help, i
> think, can be likened to an insitution in a social order with a
> powerfully taken-for-granted truth: while appearing to be normal,
> neutral and natural it conceals the most deceptive of deceptions;
> self-helping enslavements remain invisible.
I guess the interesting question is whether they remain enslavements only
so long as they remain invisible, or whether invisible enslavements are
present whenever and however one engages with a text (self-help or
otherwise--and what's the difference between the "enslavement" of engaging
with self-help texts and engaging with philosophy texts, anyway?), and if
so, what then? If one takes a "properly ironic" attitude toward one's
self-help regime, does one remain enslaved? Does ironic detachment make
us "more free"? But then, if one is "properly ironic", perhaps one is
beyond being able to help oneself--and this seems a certain loss of
freedom, too: we (Foucauldians and others) are surely "enslaved" by our
irony and skepticism. This is what Sartre, for one, makes (depressingly)
apparent, isn't it? The skeptic Mathieu in _The Age of Reason_, unlike
his doctrinaire Communist friend, is so "free" that he is immobilized,
incapable of doing anything at all.... I often wish I could help myself,
or even turn myself over to others so that they may help me--but I have
been governed (by the influence of Foucault among others) to freely choose
not to.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
dear readers, my apologies.
I'm drifting in and out of sleep.
---------------------------------(R.E.M.)----------------------------------