Peter Fletcher

Why I write this blog

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Michelle Foucault

Writing is a technology of the self. Image: thierry ehrmann http://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/


I was asked today why I write this blog. It’s a good question.

Here are the best reasons I can give you right now.

  1. It gives me a place to reflect, like I’m doing now.
  2. It gives me an opportunity to show leadership. I tell clients “get things out of your head and onto the web.” This is me doing just that.
  3. Writers write. One day I’ll write a book. If I’m to be a good writer I need to write more. By going public on a commitment to write something every day I’m holding myself accountable for being a better writer.
  4. It gives me an opportunity to clarify my ideas. Knowing I’m writing to an audience makes me think things through in more detail.
  5. It forces me to stop thinking and just do. Having a deadline forces me to make my mind up and get something – anything – written. Even if it’s not great at least it’s something. Something is better than nothing. For someone who’s a perfectionist it can be a tough ask somedays.
  6. It forces me to be clear about my motivations. Like I’m doing here.
  7. It allows me to express my fears and imperfections. Not that I can’t do that privately but there’s something courageous about speaking my truth to an unknown audience.
  8. It builds my profile. The traffic on this blog has increased substantially since I started writing every day.
  9. It’s a “technology of the self,” as my favourite philosopher puts it, a way to structure and document the activity of looking after the soul.

Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity. This is not a modern trait born of the Reformation or of romanticism; it is one of the most ancient Western traditions.(Foucault, p.27)

  1. It’s a way for me to reflect on what I learn. Rather than simply reading something this blog makes me ask “so what?” Knowledge through action becomes clarity and wisdom.
  2. It’s a form of gymnasia, a way to test myself both physically and mentally. The discipline of blogging every day takes as much effort as exercising every day. The benefit of that discipline shows up in more mental strength and a greater endurance to cope with what life throws at me.
  3. It gives me a place to record what I’m learning. I did this throughout my uni studies and find it useful to go back through my old notes.

The conclusion? Don’t expect too much from this blog. It’s a work space, a place where you’ll catch a glimpse of what makes me tick, what’s caught my attention, and what I think is important right now.

These aren’t fully formed thoughts. Rather their notes, reflections and resources I find useful.

Footnotes

See how the numbering above is separated by a block quote. Well the trick to starting the numbering at a number other than 1 requires a tiny piece of code that you can read about here. Like I told you, this is a place to record what I’m learning.

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

2011 – The year in a post

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Michel Foucault

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

When was Twitter launched?

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A friend on Twitter posed a question in the form of a statement recently. She asked, “Still searching for the full official launch birthdate of Twitter! Only got March 2006 so far…Even tweeted the creators!”. It was an innocent enough request.

In reading Foucault’s Nietzsche, Genealogy, History I can’t help but think about posing the response to this question in a different light. Or, as Foucault did in The Subject and Power, ask it a different way. Foucault reformulated the question “what is power?” to “how has power come to operate in our society?”. I could do the same with the Twitter question. Rather than “when was Twitter launched” it could become “what is it in our recent past that allowed Twitter to emerge?”.

Of course I could be accused of being pedantic and rightly so. But the question of when evades the why and the how. It also performs a function that Foucault was particularly wary of, and that is to inscribe a linearity of history, an assumption of a unified whole having an unbroken line of existence from a distant past to the present.

In establishing his genealogical method (based on the work of Nietzsche) Foucault made it clear that it was with the body, inscribed as it is with the marks and fissures of history, that we must start. Unlike the traditional historical approach where the historian starts at a distant past and moves back to the metaphysical present, the genealogical approach begins at the most recent history – the body – and traces these many fissures and ruptures into the distant past.

In proposing this method of analysis Foucault sought to establish the many and variant influences that serve to shape the notions we hold as universal truths today. Ideals, such as liberty, freedom and rationality, are but creations of society at various stages. Each serve a particular end and purpose in the ebb and flow of a will for power and knowledge.

Foucault warned that, rather than some human rationality being responsible for the emergence of various phenomena, these occurred through accident and cleavage at points far distant from their apparent metaphysical arising. History, then is laden with contingency and breakages that can be observed shaping all phenomena, particularly the human body.

“The body”, he said, ” is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding” (p. 88-9)

So to ask “when was Twitter launched?” is to miss the richness of its emergence into social consciousness. It misses the many accidents that made it possible and the many discourses that prevailed in so many ways to invite its emergence. It treats Twitter as a body whole and complete from its birth.

But it’s still a good question. The answer is July 15, 2006.

Sex and repression on dooce

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Here’s a fascinating entry relating to Armstrong’s account of her first kiss. It combines a number of elements anticipated in Foucault. First, the post contains a quote from a letter Armstrong sent to a friend. Foucault would probably read this as a hupomnema or perhaps more accurately as correspondence. Letter writing is an important technology of the self in Foucault’s technologies of the self. Second, the account documents a limit moment where Armstrong’s bodily experience lead to the creation of new limits. She uses this experience as a source of reflection on her various relationships with power. Finally, she refers to her conscience at play as a result of the experience, a move anticipated in Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity.

Here is a quote from the post:

David kissed me in I guess what he would consider sensual fury, what I
would consider beastly uncoordination. At about midnight I pulled out of his
driveway never to see him again, well, never to see him for a long, long time. I
was really messed up from the experience even though all we did was smooch. In
the eyes of the Church, I thought, I must be a heathen, a stiffnecked wayward, a
virtual Lamanite. For about three months I lingered on the brink of
self-destruction. David was gone forever far far away in a land called Caltech.
My innocence was gone forever far far away with Nirvana as my only
witness.

And then Armstrong reflects on her subjectivity at the time:

And then I remembered just how distraught I was at that first kiss, how I seriously thought I was going to hell because my tongue had entered another human being’s mouth for purposes other than life support. And I so totally and completely don’t want my daughter to ever have to go through that sort of self-loathing.

So I’m going to keep this letter — a single-spaced account of my whole sexual non-history from ages 14-18 that is written in one whole paragraph and stretches over seven pages — and hope that when the time comes I’ll be able to teach my daughter about making healthy personal decisions about sex and about relationships, and about never using the word “uncoordination” because it DOESN’T EXIST.

The hupomnema and correpsondence as techne of the self

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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.

Technologies of the self

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Michel Foucault (1998): “This contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call governmentality” (p. 19).

In ToS Foucault was more interested in the latter.The Greeks believed it was important to take care of oneself but this was replaced by the now more common concept of know thyself. But in ancient times knowing oneself came out of taking care of oneself. This has occurred possibly due to the Christian idea of self renunciation being essential for salvation. We are also conditioned to accept external rules as the basis of morality rather than something internal. Additionally, since Descartes, self-knowledge is important for the development of the thinking subject.

Epimelesthai: An activity that involves taking care of ones health and wealth. “Taking pains with oneself” (p. 25). What is the self to which Alcibiades was to be concerned? The question really becomes, rather than “what is the self?”, “what is the plateau on which the self might be found?”. When we take care of the body we don’t take care of the self. It’s taking care of the activity of taking care of the soul that is care of the self. (p. 25) How can we take care of the soul? First, we must know what it is by looking into a mirror. We must contemplate the divine element of the soul which will then give us the right rules for action. Writing was seen in ancient Greece as an important technique of taking care of the self.

“Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity. This is not a modern trait born of the Reformation or of romanticism; it is one of the most ancient Western traditions. It was well established and deeply rooted when Augustine started his Confessions” (p. 27).

This style of writing marked a shift to a new experience of self that involved introspection. Writing and vigilance were connected. A new range of experiences were opened up as a result. 

Anachoresis: As in the retreat of an army, a retreat into oneself, a spiritual retreat, a retiring into the self to uncover, not faults but to “remember rules of action, the main laws of behavior” (p. 34). 

Askesis: A Stoic technique, “not a disclosure of the secret self but a remembering” (p. 35).

Stoics believed the truth was in the logoi, the “teaching of the teachers”. You remember what you hear and convert that into rules of conduct and a subjectivity based on this truth. It’s not a renunciation of the self or of reality but a progressive working on oneself through the “acquisition and assimilation of truth” and allows one to access the reality of this world rather than some future reality (p. 35).

Truth is tested by melete (meditation), a form of remembering certain truths and arguments so as to have them available during (real or imagained) dialogue and gymnasia (testing oneself through bodily training).

Christianity is both a salvation and confessional religion. One must believe certain truths and dogma and show that you believe them and accept institutional authority. (p. 40) Individuals must know who they are so they can confess their sins and weaknesses to God or another. 

Exemologesis: The public recognition of the fact of ones Christianity and faith, the recognising oneself as a sinner seeking penitence. (p. 41) “The acts by which he punishes himself are indistinguishable from the acts by which he reveals himself.” Exemologesis “rubs out the sin and yet reveals the sinner” (p. 42). The thinking behind this revealing behaviour is the appeasement of the judges by being contrite and the way a person should face martyrdom before relinquishing his faith. “The theories and practices of penance were elaborated around the problem of the man who prefers to die rather than to compromise or abandon the faith. The way the martyr faces death is the model for the penitent. For the relapsed to be integrated into the church, he must expose himself voluntarily to ritual martyrdom” (p. 43).

*Interesting aside here in relation to Armstrong who had a similar defiance after being fired. It appears that her ritual martyrdom may have been performed in an attempt to be (re)-integrated back into the folds of the secular church (main-stream society); and we could analyse her pre-dismissal interview with her immediate manager as a way of being offered penance but accepting the offer. A bit speculative possibly but worth considering.*

“Penance is the affect of change, of rupture with self, past, and world. It’s a way to sho that you are able to renounce life and self, to show that you can face and accept death. Penitence of sin doesn’t have as its target the establishing of an identity but serves instead to mark the refusal of the self., the breaking away from the self: Ego non sum, ego…It represents a break with one’s past identity. These ostentatious gestures have the function of showing the truth of the state of being of the sinner. Self-revelation is at the same time self-destruction” (p. 43).

Exemolgesis is not verbal but, rather, ritual and symbolic and the truth about the self is imposed by violent dissociation and rupture, whereas in the Stoic techne self-knowledge is achieved through memorising rules.  

Exagoreusis (p. 42-49): a Christian tradition based on obedience and contemplation; a continual verbalisation of thoughts to the master; all aspects of ones life is addressed in this techne; attempts to still the consciousness through awareness of thoughts that lead to, or away from, God. We must be like the miller who sorts the good grains from the bad or the money changer who examines and weighs coins to determine their value. The way to know if a thought is “good or “bad” is to tell all to a master, a “permanent verbalization of our thoughts” (p. 47);

“By telling himself not only his thoughts but also the smallest movements of consciousness, his intentions, the monk stands in a hermeneutic reations not onlyy to the master but to himself” (p. 47).

*Armstrong may have performed a similar act through creating her readers as a master and continually expressing her inner thoughts on her blog to her reader-masters and therefore being guided to the “right” answer. It appears that Penelope Trunk is on a similar path.* Everything that can’t be expressed becomes a sin and therefore the techne relies on a vigorous and all-encompassing confession.

The common theme between exomologesis and exagoreusis is that one “cannot disclose without renouncing” (p. 48). In the latter the permanent disclosure of self and permanent obedience to master renounces the self but it is possible to use this constant verbalisation of the self as a means to create a new self. *Which is what I contend was Armstrong’s project.*

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

Technologies of the self

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In Technologies of the Self Foucault states:

“[In ancient Greece] it was generally acknowledged that it was good to be reflective, at least briefly…Writing was also important in the culture of taking care of oneself. One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, …and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed. Socrates’ letters are an example of this self-exercise” (p. 27).

Foucault continues:

“Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity…this is not a modern trait born of the Reformation…it is one of the most ancient Western traditions” (p. 27).

And then:

“This genre of epistles shows a side apart from the philosophy of the era. The examination of conscience begins with this letter writing. Diary writing comes later” (p. 30)

Foucault refers here to what he later describes as the hupomnema, the writing of the self into being.

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

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