Foucault is back! Here at the university, where people just don’t get tired of including a paper or two in every course, from the wide range of topics he has written or lectured on. And it turns out that he is also back in academia going by citation figures of Foucault’s works on Google Scholar. Figures from the past five years suggest a surge in the references made to his papers worldwide. This seems to be an interesting development for it is hard to imagine Foucault as a philosopher, historian or a thinker aligned to any conventional field of thought or academic discipline. Yet, his thoughts on history, sexuality, power, history of ideas, modernity and social criticism are considered as essential reading in sociology, political science, philosophy and history.
His work Technologies of the Self has been an interesting read for several reasons. The prevalent structures of social relationships, identity, behaviour, thought systems and the institutions that govern such forms in the society are a consequence of how individuals construct an idea of themselves with others in the society as well as with their own selves. The mechanism by which an individual achieves this is referred to as technologies of production of the self by Foucault. These technologies are categorized as –
Technologies of Production – includes social arrangements like family, marriage, tribe and communes. These relationships are produced to create a sense of collective existence and social order under which individuals sustain themselves and prosper.
Technologies of Sign Systems – the relationships created in a society need communicative and signaling mechanisms embedded in the practice of such relationships. These are sign systems which either establish an order or therefore guide a form of behaviour – like husband and wife in a matrimonial relationship. This determines how others should behave with a woman who is a wife of someone else. Or the sign systems could simple serve the need for expression and communication like language, tattoos and ornamentation.
Technologies of Power – individuals in a society behave and also place themselves in a certain relation to each other. This relation is determined by how much influence one has over the other. The technologies of power include patriarchy in a family structure, chief or headman of a tribe and similar production of roles which imply exercise of a certain coercive influence of an individual over others. Social contract is another production of the self with which individuals realize a sense of security and cohesiveness within a group, society or a nation.
Technologies of Self – the range of impressions, awareness, consciousness and construction of one’s own being leads to a production of an individual’s identity. These mechanisms are technologies of self. For instance, sexuality and an individual’s own idea of it – his sense of the body, its desires, its constitution, aesthetics and form, together determine his image of himself. What he ‘produces’ of himself marks his identity and drives an idea of a personality. This then bears upon his behaviour and his relationship with others.
Technologies of the self is a fairly useful articulation of what ‘being’ can mean and how this comes into effect. Further, this could help understand what well-being could possibly mean. Well-being and the self are complementary and in some sense inextricable from each other. My interest in post-colonial identity formation benefits from Foucault’s conception of the self. Thinking through this lens it could be argued that the post-colonial subject is a consequence of power relationships that existed between t individual and the colonial master. In a post on Tranquebar, I was alluding to this phenomenon when I read a conquest in the practice of modern day religion in this former Dutch colony. Such productions have led to conflicting image of self as a subdued, submissive being, at times. On why some former colonies which are independent nations today behave and operate in the way that they do could be examined through this idea. The sense of identity that a person possesses remains an enormously interesting subject, precisely because there doesn’t seem to be a definite way of seeing onself but is always spontaneously forming itself and each emerging sense of identity is as forceful as the other.
Contested Realities 