2011 – The year in a post

December 27, 2011 by Peter Fletcher

Michel Foucault

2011 was the year of Jacob’s Ladder. At the start of the year I set a goal of climbing Jacob’s Ladder 5000 times. That goal was completed in early November. It defined me and set a very clear mandate for every day, every week and every month.

I also set a goal of a daily blog post. I was on pace for about 2 months and then fell away. One of the issues I struggle with is what I’m going to write. I get started and then can’t figure out what I want to achieve, what I want to say and then it all falls apart.

One post in particular brought me undone. It was a long and well thought out post about the future of real estate data. Unfortunately it took me days to research and even longer to put what I wanted to say into words. Instead of publishing I thought and worked on getting it right. In the end it was a post that achieved some kudos from some key players from the industry but it cost me about two weeks of posts.

During my recent uni studies my blog was used as a research tool. It was where I kept all my research notes so you’ll find articles about the hupomnemata, technologies of the self and the death of god. I loved it but once I finished my studies I started thinking that I needed to blog for Google juice and write what my audience wanted.

The problem with doing that is that often I don’t want to write for other people, I want to write for myself. I did that during my studies and it changed the direction of my honours thesis. It introduced me Jeremy Crampton (@jeremycrampton), who, through a pingback on a post about Foucault’s theories on power relationships, alerted me to his book and created in me a drive to analyse the dismissal of Heather Armstrong using Foucault’s theories as a tool kit. So without this blog I would have written a very different honours thesis and wouldn’t have experienced the joy of months of immersion in French philosophy.

What’s been valuable about this blog – and blogging generally – is that it’s been a place for me to get my thoughts in order. As Crampton put it so well,

Now the content of the post is unremarkable and not especially exciting, but the author remarks that this is a post designed to help him think through some issues. It’s not the content, it’s the process (emphasis mine).

So this blog is going to (continue to) be a public hupomnemata, a public place for me to record what I’ve learned and a way for me to take actively take care of the (my) self. It’s a place for me to record what I’ve learned from my daily experiences. Although some of what I learn will be about social media and digital strategy it will also include what I learn from personal experience, such as what I learned from leaning into the pain.

This strategy will have its costs. For a start it will be difficult for Google to work out what my website is about. Is it about social media, digital strategy or Michel Foucault? Google will find it hard, almost impossible to work out. It’s going to cost me traffic.

Then there’s the readers or subscribers. Those who subscribe to my blog wanting posts about digital strategy will be disappointed when they’re presented with articles (like this one) about Michel Foucault and the hupomnemata. If you could name the top blogging sins what I’m doing would be close to the top of the list.

But I’ve decided that having a space to remember and reflect is far more important than worrying about readers and traffic. If this blog becomes a window into my mind then so be it. If it helps me become a better thinker, even better.

And I’ll end this post without a clear conclusion. That’s because I wasn’t sure what it was that I wanted to do with it in the first place.

Photo credit: The Magnet Magazine

Why I’m interested in self-writing and the hupomnemata

August 10, 2010 by Peter Fletcher

Why self-writing and the hupomnemata?

In the paragraphs ahead I explain how writing is central to the question of personal blogging. I briefly summarise Michel Foucault’s theories of self-writing and propose how they might be used to develop an understanding of self-creation through personal blogging.

The central question of my thesis is “What is a blog?” It’s a question that asks ‘by what means did the term blog come into existence?’ It also begs a further question: what is a blog, to whom?

The definition of a blog is contingent on the relationship of the to the blog.

A person who has never blogged will define a blog quite differently to someone who is an experienced blogger. Indeed, within the population of bloggers a blog means something different to each actor. For example, someone maintaining a corporate blog might see a blog as a branding tool whereas to a struggling mum there blog might be a creative outlet.

My response to this range of potential definitions is to limit my field of inquiry to ask: what is a blog to those who maintain a personal blog? There is any amount of commentary about business blogging and I have no inclination to add further to the swill of opinion on the matter.

By focussing on the experience of personal blogging – writing, linking, commenting, maintaining – I can potentially unfurl what blogging is as a project of self-creation.

So when I talk about blogging I talk about personal blogging; and by personal blogging I mean a blog that’s written in the first person, that records the everyday and the mundane, that reveals the personal and reflects on the past so as to create meaning in the present.

The subject of a personal blog, then, is the self.

Personal blogs contrast to other forms of blogging where the subject is an Other. The other may be a person or it may be an inanimate object, such as blogs about cars and pets and search engine optimisation.

I recognise, though, the potential for a blog to contain elements of the personal in the guise of – to coin a phrase – an object blog. For example, a blog about a pet may in fact be a blog about the relationship between the pet and the self. And with the contemplation of the self-pet relationship the blog begins to include the primary markers of a personal blog: the existence of a first person narrative and a significant degree of self-revelation that include descriptions of thoughts, perceptions, emotions and bodily sensations.

It is this self-revelation I want to analyse. To do so I intend using Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self as a toolkit for understanding what is taking place on a personal blog.

Foucault, in Technologies of the Self (1988) and Ethics: subjectivity and truth (1997), outlined a range of means by which individuals took care of the self (epimelésthai sautou) (1988, 19). This care for the self involved various practices (askésis) that “involve the progressive consideration of self, or mastery over oneself…through the acquisition and assimilation of truth…It is a set of practices by which once can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action” (1988, 35).

For Foucault, epimelésthai involved taking definite and purposeful steps; activities directed toward taking care of ones health and well-being (25). The principle activity for the care of the self is for the “soul to know itself”. It is, in Foucault’s view, activity that is important and leads to care of the self, not the more benign attitude of “know thyself” (gnothi sauton) (19).

To take care of oneself, then, involved various ascetic practices. It is here that Foucault found, in Hellenistic culture, the importance of writing as an important technology (tecchné) for living a good life.

Foucault detailed two primary forms of self-writing: the hupomnemata and letters or correspondence.

The hupomnemata were records made primarily as a memory aid. “They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation” (??, 1997). And while the hupomnemata served as a memory aid its more important role is to serve as a “framework” (??) of ascetic practices. Whilst personal in nature, Foucault maintained they do not “constitute a “narrative of oneself”…[their] intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self (??).

And it is this capturing and recording of the said, read and heard that is at the heart of what takes place on a personal blog. But this is no ordinary recording of life. Rather, it is a “subjectivation of discourse” (??), a means by which a blogger draws together disparate life experiences and establishes an identity and a relationship with themselves.

Blogging, however, can be distinguished somewhat from the hupomnemata. Most notably, a blog usually has an audience; and the awareness of an (often unknown) audience makes for a particular style of writing. Foucault noted that both the hupomnemata and correspondence work similarly on the writer. Both are productive of the self.

Whereas the hupomnemata was often a document that served the writer alone, correspondence acted as a “way of manifesting oneself to oneself and to others…[making] the writer “present” to whom he addresses it” (??). Being present to another, then, becomes a way for a writer to place himself or herself in view of the other’s subjectivizing gaze. Correspondence, then, becomes a means by which “one opens oneself to the gaze of others and puts the correspondent in the place of the inner god” (??). But, in the case of correspondence, the gaze is two-way; the writer and the reader exchange positions as part of the communication process.

And correspondence or letters work at the level of the banal. The writer is “constituting oneself as an “inspector of oneself,” and hence of gauging the common faults, and of reactivating the rules of behavior that one must always bear in mind” (??).

The interplay between the gaze of the other and the gaze of the self as created through the process of correspondence becomes an important development in the art of living (tekhê tou biou).

It is here that I see most value in Foucault’s concept of self-writing. Although the hupomnemata helps us to understand the self-productive nature of some blog post, it is when these are turned over to the gaze of the audience that they become correspondence or letters. Not only is the writing productive of the self but it also allows the presence of the reader and the writer to be experienced by one another; and that is made particularly so through comments whereby the writer becomes the reader and vice versa.

References

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Press.

Foucault, M. (1997). Self Writing (R. Hurley, Trans.). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics : subjectivity and truth. New York: New Press.

Heather Armstrong (Dooce), August 2005 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging

July 28, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

Heather Armstrong (Dooce), August 2005 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging: “Some days I feel my website writing itself”.

What I find interesting here is Armstrong’s reference to her website having a life of its own. Such an understanding of a blog is anticipated by Foucault in that he suggests that self-writing isn’t the revealing of the self but in fact the self being expressed.

The hupomnema and correpsondence as techne of the self

July 23, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

Self-writing is likened to the digestion of food. It’s all very well to read many books but at some point the bee must return to the hive and turn the pollen into food. Put another way we must stop eating and digest our food (what we read) so that it becomes a part of our soul and serves to shape who we are.

Stultia: A kind of mental agitation which has one jumping from one idea to the next without ever settling. Has a future focus which the hupomnema resists through fixing acquired elements. “The hupomnemata contribute one of the means by which one detaches the soul from concern for the future and redirects it toward contemplation of the past” (Foucault, 1997, p. 212).

The hupomnema is a way to gather together disparate thoughts and ideas and create from these heterogeneous elements one’s own truth.

Unification is achieved through the author digesting what is read and written so that concepts become flesh and blood. They are no longer memory but have changed the soul of the author. (p. 213)

In the hupomnema one does not simply regurgitate what is written – much as I’m doing here – but rather makes it one’s own through reflection. Nevertheless a genealogy is present in that one can see the genesis of one’s identity through the writing in much the same way as one’s ancestors can be known by one’s face. (p. 214)

Thinking about this as it relates to Armstrong we can see her emergence through her blog. The history of her identity is knowable through her writing.

The hupomnema is more in the style of a personal journal or an account book of what is happening in one’s life. Correspondence is something a little different. Both are similar in that they create a reading of what is written. As I’m writing this I’m also reading it (just as when I’m speaking I’m also listening) and this acts as much on me as on the receiver of the communication.

In the process of both teaching and writing we also learn so writing is both benefit to the writer and reader. Which reminds me of the saying “the teacher teaches what he/she needs to learn the most.” No truer is that than it is for me this semester. I’m tutoring in Dreamweaver and have never used the programme. Steep learning curve here I come.

Correspondence is more than an extension of the huomnema, a training of oneself. It’s a way of manifesting ourselves to another, of being present to the reader – almost as if physically present in a face-to-face meeting – and a way of the writer gazing upon the reader through the content of the letter and in turn offering oneself to the gaze of the reader. There exists a reciprocity of both gaze and examination. My, how much fun would Foucault have with the Internet. (p. 216)

An observation. Correspondence works differently to surveillance in that the authoritative gaze goes in one direction and is, at least as understood as a panopticon, internalised. With correspondence though their is a mutual gaze of authority. Power flows in both directions through the internalisation of the mutual gaze. Blogs, or might we say self-publication on the Internet, are much more akin to correspondence in that there exists in the writer an ever-present sense of an other, an audience, whether that audience is intended or otherwise.

Finally, the letter is a way of presenting to another all that can be said about everyday life, a reviewing of one’s everyday life as a form of self-examination. “[I]t is a matter of bringing into congruence the gaze of the other and that gaze which one aims at oneself when one measures one’s everyday actions according to the rules of a technique off living” (p. 221).

Armstrong’s blog contains much of the banality anticipated by Foucault’s concept of the letter. Nappies, bowel movements, drinking, drugs all form part of the complete (almost) revelation of the self to the gaze of botht the self and the other. Over the longer term we can see evidence of the reconcilliation of gazes to which Foucault refers wherein Armstrong writes about matters that were, up until the point of writing, previously unknown by the readers – her family and her supervisors. Through the process of her writing she came to be seen in a congruent manner by both herself and her readers.

Foucault, M. (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: subjectivity and truth. New York: The New Press.

The hupomnema

July 23, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

“…the intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purposes that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (Foucault, 1997, p. 211).

In this we see the project on which Armstrong embarked, not as a way to reveal something deep and hidden within herself, but as a way to reveal that which she heard and saw. These included interactions with her supervisor, the Asian database administrator, and the colleague with whom she car-pooled. Her hupomnema – her blog – also shaped the self free from the constraints of her religion through the revelation of what she heard, did, and said in relation to her departure from the church.

Foucault, M. (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: subjectivity and truth. New York: The New Press.

Self-writing, frank and fearless speech

April 24, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

I’ve been reading The Political Mapping of Cyberspace by Jeremy Crampton (2003) after finding a comment about one of my posts on Jeremy’s blog. Jeremy’s comment lead me to begin an exploration of the terms “hupomnemata” (self-writing) and “parrhesia” (frank and fearless speech, particularly spoken against the powerful) (p. 107). This post, therefore, is an attempt to distill and focus those parts of Crampton’s writing that have particular relevance to my upcoming thesis. I claim no special knowledge or understanding of the topics about which he speaks and invite any meaningful critique of this summary.

One of the struggles I’ve been waging is to distill a thesis statement; and have had even more difficulty conceiving of a way into the discussion of the tensions experienced between employee bloggers and their employers. In this regard Crampton’s approach may prove highly valuable. He frames his own work as a focus on the “contact point” (p. 17) between Foucault’s concepts of the technologies of the self (he explains these in detail later in the book) and the technologies of domination utilised by those in power. The overlap of these two forms of government – the government of the individual self by the self and the regulation of institutions – produce a domain of contestation and the necessary recalcitrance and resistance required for the existence of a power relationship. Looked at in this manner the tension between employee and employer has two connected but separate domains that continually bear and act on one another.

Expectedly Crampton invests a section of his book on the technologies of the self in which he critiques the concept of “confession” (he notes that there has, to this point, been little meaningful discourse on the concept despite its centrality and importance to Christian societies) and explains some of techniques of self such as hupomnemata and parrhesia.

Crampton notes the importance of confession of truth about oneself in the process of authentication of self in cyberspace (user names and passwords require confession of truth to a system/person of power) and without this confession the authentic self is denied access.

He points out that the “technologies” (of the self) to which Foucault refers have a broader meaning then how we might imagine technology (computers, calculators, electricity grids); a production, a fabrication, a bringing forth, not something that is hidden, needing to be found, but something to be produced as an artist or craftsmen would their work (p. 84). In other words:

“What is brought into existence in technologies of the self is precisely the truth about oneself” (p. 85).

These “techne” are techniques that mould, shape, and produce the self. As opposed to a self that is already existent, the self becomes a deliberate act performed and produced by the self – one must work to be attain the gay life he notes Foucault as saying (no doubt this idea might not go down well for those who propose the existence of the gay brain, but that’s a discussion for another day). One of these techne is the already mentioned hupomnemata (it’s a Greek word), a way of self-writing, not as some form of Christian confessional in order to reveal ones true self, but as a way to transform the self through the process or act of writing. Crampton believes that such non-confessional self-writing has rich potential for the practice of the self, a framework in other words, or a process in which we might write our self into being, or finally a way of “working on oneself in the context of a community (world)” (p. 95).

It is this sense of community that Crampton uses to direct his attention to the matter of the world of blogs; personal online journals around which develop various levels of community. But Crampton is aware of the manner in which much of the understanding about cyberspace in which blogs exist hinge on the twin concepts of authenticity and confession; understandings that he holds has problematic. In relation to the concept of confession he notes that the confessing of one’s sins (or the truth about oneself on the psychiatrists couch) are designed both to allow for the emergence of the pure, sinless self and for the normalisation of the individual (how far from the norm do our sexual tastes, behaviours, and psyche vary?). He further notes the all-pervasive nature of the confession (TV shows, fields of medicine, law) each reliant on the revelation of the truth of the inner self and each creating, more or less, the normalisation of the subject. Little wonder, therefore, that the concept of the confession has been taken to the extreme by scholars such as Dodge and Kitchin and Turkle who propose that the confessional finds its ultimate manifestation in the online world where cyber-dwellers may disavow their own bodies in a space that allows finally the discovery of one’s true, but heretofore, lost identity.

As appealing as these theories may sound, says Crampton, they cannot be sustained in that they conceive of cyberspace as being a separate, heterotopian (with a nod of the head to Foucault?) space as opposed to another part of the real world in which various technologies (including the Internet and “cyberspace”) has been introduced. Technologies and cyberspace did not form the real world but rather came out of the real world as ways to make life more enjoyable/easier/more comfortable. Insofar as cyberspace is conceived of as a separate space, Crampton claims that the confession and authentication required to access this space requires or creates a form of subjectivity by which people become “discriminable individuals with identifiable selves, who dwell in physical space, and who produce the truth about themselves in order to enter the separate domain of cyberspace…” (p. 100). And in the process of the conceiving of cyberspace as a separate space subjects are normalised, cyberspace becomes opposed to real space, and human beings are denied the opportunity that cyberspace provides for them to practice the self.

As part of this practice of the self blogs provide individuals with a means by which to resist the forces of individualisation and provide a process through which they might work on oneself to fully become. Crampton posits that “blogging [is] a deliberate strategy of resistance against the normalized, confessional conception of the self” (p. 104) and an expression of “a care of the self through techniques of self-writing” (p. 105). Bloggers, he proposes, through their writing, develop themselves rather then expose a previously hidden inner truth from within. In other words the self of the blogger is constructed and brought to life through self-writing not discovered through the peeling away of layers via confessions.

Connected with the idea of resistance (and I will say connected also to blogging) Crampton builds the Greek concept of parrhesia on which Foucault built a considerable volume of work in the early 1980’s. Crampton shows that parrhesia means “frankness; speaking everything on your mind and not holding back” (p. 107) but the concept also means that there must be a telling of what one knows to be true (not in the evidential manner of the word but through something known morally; to speak one’s own truth I would say) and an element of risk or danger in the telling (risk of losing a job, risk of losing a relationship, risk of beheading). Parrhesia stems from a sense of duty, is made without coercion, and does not share the same sense of compulsion found in the concept of confession.

In the context of power relationships (I imagine here the tension between employer/employee) Crampton explains Foucault’s notion of the “parrhesiastic contract” (p. 108) wherein a ruler, invested with great powers, allows and encourages courtiers and advisors to speak their mind, assuring them of their bodily safety despite the ‘truth’ they might tell. What is curious and fascinating about this contract is what each of the parties bring to the relationship; the powerful has the power but not the truth, the subject has the truth but not the power. Therefore the two become complicit in each other’s strategies and in the maintenance of the power relationship. On the one hand the rulers “govern with a light hand” (p. 108) permitting and encouraging the governed to publish and speak openly and freely, on the other, the ruled legitimate the rulership of those in power through the maintenance of their ongoing relationship with the rulers.

Such a legitimation does not suggest that the contract is fixed either by its terms, domain, or consideration. Rather the lines of a parrhesiastic contract are always, or at least often, being negotiated and renegotiated. Using the example of Diogenes and Alexander, Crampton explains how new ground and new lines of contestation are opened and created; but these are not just any battles. Unlike struggles that react to various instances of the implementation of power, parrhesiastic struggles, in the true manner of the Cynics, question the very foundation of – the basis of – power. The parrhesiast is concerned less with winning the debate at hand and more with the addressing the very relevance and structure of the debate.

It is worth pointing as an aside here the relevance of the work of Jodi Dean in regard to the location of power structures within society. As I have posted previously, Dean’s critique of Habermas recognises the messiness of civil society and the importance of recognising the fragility of embodied human beings, and of thus allowing power relationships to contest the very structure and formation of the debates in pubic discourse. In this regard Foucault, Crampton, and Dean all share a common conception of the problematics of the public sphere and the sense of possibility arising from the recognition of the existence of power structures deeply embedded within the social body. It is this continual resistance to power at all levels of society which Crampton believes holds great promise for the possibility of change.

Crampton’s book is more far-reaching than I have portrayed here, delving into the world of cartography and the politics of the mapping of cyberspace (hence the name of his book). However I have attempted to constrain my comments here to matters which affect and address concepts that may be covered in my thesis. These concepts must now include the technologies of the self as suggested by Foucault and techne including hupomnemata and parrhesia, both of which go directly to the methods used by the employee blogger. Whether using blogs as a process for writing oneself into being in the world or used as a means for questioning the foundations of authority and bringing about change Crampton’s work is highly informative and worthy of further investigation.

Reference

Crampton, J. (2003). The political mapping of cyberspace. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.