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The Labour of Subjectivity

Foucault on Biopolitics, Economy, Critique

Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Becoming Other

As seen, Michel Foucault traced the genealogical roots of modern governmentality back to the inception of the Christian pastorate, as it was institutionalized around the third and fourth centuries A.D. (STP, 163–90; P, 298–325). He was careful, however, to make clear how the latter did not represent an absolute point of origin or primitive signification. In his view, the pastorate rather represented an open site of conflict and experimentation (Senellart 2013a) as, in effect, it did but alter, dramatize and rework a number of themes that, in a more or less systematic fashion, were already widespread in the Mediterranean East. Mesopotamic, Egyptian, Assyrian and Jewish cultures conceived of the cosmological and political relations between God, the king and his people precisely in terms of a 'power of care' revolving around the shepherd-flock metaphor (STP, 124). Hebrew theology, for one, had already explicitly asserted that Yahweh's responsibility was to conduct, guide and save His people, as a shepherd would his flock (cf. Psalm 23, Ezekiel 34). God's omnipotence was not exhausted by a sheer force of conquest and violence, nor did it manifest itself only in the occasional display of splendour and power. Whereas these modes of action were certainly present, they were not the only defining forms of divine intervention. God's power also entailed a constant, attentive and detailed vigilance over each and all of His sheep; a patient and discrete work performed over the mundane facts of individual existence. If His aim was the material and spiritual salvation of the flock it looked after, His characteristic mode of intervention was an unending devotion and empathic participation in the affairs of each and everyone's life (STP, 124–29).

Seen from this perspective, the specificity of the Christian pastoral would appear to lie in the way it extended, multiplied and generalized this rationality of power — which, in Hebraism, only applied to the intercourse between the divinity and his subjects — to the totality of social relations (STP, 151–53, 164–65). Starting from the third century A.D., the pastoral theme progressively colonized the Church's institutional and theological setting: from the Trinitarian dogma down into the hierarchy of bishops, abbots and priests, the whole fabric of religious life came to be enveloped in a systematic, meticulous and all-pervasive grid of spiritual conduction, whose ideal end point was nothing less than the salvation of the whole (gr. kata-holou) of humanity.

Before then, the Western world had arguably never known anything like a form of pastoral politics or theology. Consider, for example, how, for the most part, Greek and Roman divinities remained 'olympically' indifferent to the government of men's daily existence, and how their manifestation, in fact, was usually accompanied by gestures — be they monumental, foundational, salvific or punitive — that stood out of the normal course of human affairs. The Greek gods could found the polis and give it a name; they could protect it in case of peril, or devastate in retaliation for man's hubris. In no case, however, would deities be directly concerned with conducting their people as a shepherd would his flock. If they could — and surely did — affect the life of the men living in the polis, they would hardly ever do so by constantly and zealously intervening into their daily existence (STP, 125).

In a similar fashion, the intercourse between kings and their subjects in pre-Christian antiquity had never been thought of as a pastoral relation. It is without doubt that, time and again, political theory had equated the responsibilities of the ruler to those of a helmsman or a pilot of a ship, with a vocabulary that closely resembled the one used by the Church fathers to define the priestly function. The Greek kubernetes was regularly portrayed as the guide and protector of his people. Yet, as Foucault noticed, the referent object of this type of government was not the citizens themselves but the 'ship' that carried them — that is to say, metaphorically, the city-state. Individuals could only be conducted insofar as 'they boarded the ship,' and exclusively to the extent to which governing the city also required directing men towards the common good (STP, 122–23).

Hence, if the pastoral theme was not altogether absent from the political vocabulary of the Greeks and the Romans, it arguably had very different connotations from the ones that Christianity attached to it. Plato, for example, explicitly rejected the idea that the king should keep watch over the daily affairs of the citizens: how, in fact, "could someone sit beside each individual at every moment of life, in order to prescribe exactly what is right for him?" (Plato 1995, 295a–b, quoted in STP, 158). If anything, the politician's responsibilities would be more like those of a weaver than a shepherd's: "we have completed a correctly woven fabric and political activity when it [the royal art] has fashioned the most magnificent and excellent fabric, with a view to common life, when all the population of the state, slaves and free men, are enveloped in its folds" (Plato 1995, 311c, quoted in STP, 158).

The Greek ruler was not tasked to penetrate, direct or give form to the details of subjective life. He would rather work to integrate those individual elements, taken in their irreducible positivity, within the warp and the weft of the unitary architecture of the polis (P, 304–7). The exercise of sovereignty had in its sight, as its purpose and horizon of intervention, the protection of a territorial, cultural and political whole, to which the subjects had to adapt and submit themselves for the sake of the community's concord. The unity of the state instituted and preserved by the ruler transcended the multiplicity of the singularities that inhabited it. Western antiquity, in this respect, never coherently rationalized something like a form of political governmentality — if the latter can indeed be defined as the permanent management of the daily existence of subjects taken in their individuality (STP, 135–47).

This, however, is not to suggest that the government of men, as conceived by Foucault, remained altogether foreign to antiquity's thought and experience. Consider, for example, the way Plato's Statesman develops a thematic opposition between the exceptional nature of the king's office and any other activity that undertakes to conduct men. The ruler's power is unique — quantitatively as much as qualitatively — precisely inasmuch as it is irreducible to the way other 'professions' purport to take care of men. This already implies that within the Greek polis some subjects (the farmer, the baker, the doctor, the gymnastic teacher, etc.) were believed to carry out pastoral tasks, insofar as they provided for the material or spiritual health of the citizens. No doubt, Plato's argument is precisely that these individuals should not make any claim to power, since the ruler's responsibility is not to conduct a flock, but to weave together the fabric of the polis. This, however, for him, does not disqualify the pastoral function as such: if the politician can concentrate his attention on the harmonic integration of the city, this is because the education and material well-being of the population has already been attended to by an array of non- or extra-political activities. In as much as they give form and nourishment to the elements that the ruler is charged to weave together, those activities would indeed appear pivotal to the eudaimonia of the city (STP, 142–47). Seen from this perspective, classical culture knew — and, within certain limits, valued — forms of pastoral direction. This recognition, however, would seem to be invariably accompanied by a rooted suspicion towards the possibility of their direct interference within the political realm.

For different reasons, the same argument would seem to apply to practices of spiritual direction in classical, Hellenistic and Roman philosophical circles. If politics did not concern itself directly with the government of men, the conduction of the self, in turn, developed within a sphere that was deliberately kept separated from the realm of political coercion and institutional control (STP, 147). This was primarily due to the fact that the 'liberation' of the self from forms of hetero-direction represented the very rationale of self-government in antiquity. If, in order to master himself, the individual had first to endure a period of submission to a guide, in no case was his spiritual conversion thought to depend on his permanent obedience to a master. The diverse and manifold practices of the self that proliferated in the philosophical circles of late antiquity unfailingly held self-mastery as their ultimate end. The government of the self was first and foremost a 'practice of freedom,' which free men would undertake precisely in order to liberate themselves from all that kept them apart from themselves. To the extent that, for a limited period of time and with regard to a specific issue or aspect of his life, a free citizen consented to be conducted, his guidance had to remain within the boundaries of a voluntary, temporary and reversible renunciation to individual sovereignty: "if a person likes to place himself at the disposal of another because he believes that in this way he can improve himself in some department of knowledge, or in some other excellent quality, such a voluntary subsmission involves by all standards no taint of disgrace or servility" (Plato 2003, 184d).

The governed would agree to subordinate his will to a master only for the purpose of strengthening and empowering himself and thus eventually achieving self-mastery. The obedience that the disciple owed to his director had to recede — and, in fact, it was meant to disappear — once the former had learned to direct and obey himself autonomously. In this respect, throughout antiquity, political subjection, understood as a coercive form of rule, remained essentially extrinsic to processes of subjectivation (MF, 128–32; GV, 225–31; E, 268–71).

To be sure, it might be retorted that the education of the political elites could and was made to rest upon a prior work of ethical subjectivation. Plato's political philosophy, for one, unequivocally attests to this possibility (HES, 32–79). Here, the legitimate exercise of power is said to be conditional upon the knowledge of the rational order of the polis, which presupposes, in turn, knowledge of the truth of being in general and the conversion of the self in particular. The future ruler, for Plato, should undergo a process of askesis: he should turn his gaze towards the light of being, in order to contemplate the hierarchy internal to the soul and, therefore, by analogy, envision (and eventually enforce) the proper disposition of the different orders of men living in the polis. The askesis of the king is thought of as the necessary condition that enables the city to turn towards the achievement of the 'good' and, in this sense, it presupposes a close relationship between the exercise of political power and the government of the self. In different places, after all, Plato would seem to gesture explicitly at the necessity for the king to directly transform (i.e., to convert to the 'good') the subjectivity of the citizens living under his rule. However, as Hadot (2002, 225–26) noted, good government in Plato is never equated to the spiritual transformation of the subjects making up the polis, but only to the conversion of the polis as a political entity. The task of the Platonic ruler is not to turn each and every citizen into 'enlightened,' sovereign individuals, but to arrange the existing multiplicity of men, with their talents and weaknesses, into an ordered composition reflecting the truth of being. As with most pre-Christian thought, the conversion of the self is here primarily envisioned as the necessary work of education that precedes the effective exercise of power, rather than as its end point or ultimate objective.

This estrangement between the order of the polis and the government of the self, however, should not be taken to imply that the existence of the subject was indifferent to, or unaffected by, political life. There is no denying that man (or, at least, a certain category of men) remained a zoon politikon throughout antiquity — an animal whose existence was thought to belong to, and originate from, the polis. So much so that our culture has probably never witnessed a degree of intimacy between the subject and the political, such as it could be found in pre-Christian societies, and especially in the Greek polis (Arendt 1998). Yet the question that I want to ask does not concern whether there was a relation between the subject and political power before the Christian pastorate, but rather how this event altered the nature of this bond, whose existence in other cultures and times I otherwise take for granted (cf., for example, CV, 62–65). In what follows, I will begin to outline how techniques of pastoral conduction altered the nature of political subjectivity, thus showing how they set the stage for the future rationalization of modern governmentality.

1.1. CONFESSIONS

If, according to Foucault, the question of government remained foreign to political antiquity, there were nonetheless a number of ways in which Latin and Hellenistic philosophies paved the way for the subsequent development of the Christian pastoral. The emphasis they placed on the care of the self as an autonomous and totalizing ethical domain provided the first coenobitic communities with an ensemble of themes and practices that could and, in fact, were often re-inscribed and incorporated within the metaphysical horizon outlined by Christianity. Under the influence of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cassian and the Cappodicians especially, Western monasticism systematically took up antiquity's techne tou biou and turned it into a set of institutionalized practices of subjectivation (HES, 171–72; Hadot 2002, 98).

For the coenobitism of the origins, monastic life became the true philosophical life — or, to put it differently, the only authentic realization of the doctrines of antiquity (MF, 111; Hadot 2002, 77–81). The Christian conceptualization of askesis, for one, was but a transposition of those Hellenistic exercises that, by means of a constant practice of introspection (prosoche), aimed at purifying the will to make it coincide with (or, in any case, to bring it as close as possible to) the logos of being. In a similar fashion, the injunction to achieve a state of apatheia (i.e., absence of passions) — a tenet that would become crucial to a certain monastic tradition — originated in a number of pre-Christian, and especially Stoic, technologies of the self that aimed at the overcoming of desire. What is more, the almost entire array of practical exercises (e.g., exam of conscience, confession, writing of the self, etc.) by which the monk's ascetical-apathetical existence was to be realized were also a legacy of the pagan tradition (Hadot 2002, 81–96).

To be sure, this filiation is not to be confused with the straightforward transposition of themes and practices from one cultural milieu to another. If any passing on of traditions also necessarily implies a certain degree of falsification (Dillon 1995), the rise of Christianity was no exception to the rule. The latter deliberately established an ambivalent relationship — of continuity and rejection at once — to pagan culture. At the most visible level, the first apologists sought unfailingly to mark their distance from classical ontology and, as we shall see, it was the very institutional survival and legitimation of the Ecclesia that, in a way, required them to do so. On the other hand, however, Christianity proved willing to re-inscribe themes and techniques borrowed from antiquity into its own metaphysical ground, in a way that was bound radically to modify their original character. If the pastoral did indeed introduce a break within the history of Western governmentality and subjectivity, it did so only to the extent that it altered — more or less substantially and openly — the ethical presuppositions of ancient practices of the self.

Consider, for example, the case of confession (MF; GV, 247–313; PT, 147–91; see also Chevallier 2011, 131–54, 292–323; Taylor 2009; Elden 2005). In different occasions, Foucault hinted at the fundamental role it played in the juridical and biopolitical formation of modern subjectivity (HS, MF). He also suggested that its origin could be traced back to the first monastic practices of self-examination, insofar as they instantiated a type of veridiction where the object and subject of knowledge (the truth-teller and the source of truth) were made to coincide. Still, monastic confession, as Foucault remarked, should not be viewed as an absolute ursprung — a point of inception irreducible to any prior event or cultural structure. However inconspicuous, some of the basic operations of confession (the opening up and analysis of a field of subjective truths in the presence of a guide) were already known and practiced in Greco-Roman antiquity, and in Stoic and Epicurean circles especially (HES, 373–74; GV, 231–41).

Seneca's De Tranquillitate Animi is a case in point (Seneca 2007; MF, 97–101; PT, 160–66; GV, 235). At first sight, the treaty would appear to unfold as a didactic dialogue between Seneca and a young friend of his, Serenus. As a matter of fact, however, the conversation revolves entirely on the opening discourse of the youngster, who, being dissatisfied with himself and his spiritual achievements, wants to recount the truth of his condition (uerum fateri) to his guide, just like an ill person would to his doctor. Serenus undertakes an expositio animae: a narration and display of the spiritual and material 'facts' of his soul.

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Excerpted from The Labour of Subjectivity by Andrea Rossi. Copyright © 2016 Andrea Rossi. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc..
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