DE GRUYTER MOUTON DOil0.1515/sem-2012-0092
Semiótica 2012; 192: 243-250
AthanasiosVotsis
Michel Foucault's moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling of knowledge Abstract: Michel Foucault's theory of moral subjectivity, as a trained relation of the subject to itself, contains a latent semiotic theory of self-knowledge. The formation of the moral subject is seen by Foucault as a sign system, given the name of technology, and placed in a broader context of semiotic and non-semiotic paths to knowledge. In such a framework, signification as a technology, the self as a binary opposition, and the in-between space of binaries emerge as important methodological elements in self-knowledge. Furthermore, a semiotic argument comes forth about the epistemological role of culture in the modeling of knowledge at large. Keywords: moral subjectivity; technologies of the self; signification; binary oppositions; knowledge; culture
AthanasiosVotsis: University of Helsinki. E-mail:
[email protected]
1 Introduction Ancient semiotics, at least in Mesopotamia and Greece, concerned primarily the signs of what one cannot know (Manetti 2010): the divine signs, elements radically external to the human being. At about the same historical period, another philosophical tradition was being established, first by Socrates and then by Plato, dictating a turn to radically internal divine elements: one has to take care of the self, and, in order to accomplish this task, one must get to know oneself, identifying the divine element rooted in oneself (for instance, Plato's Alcibiades I). Millennia later, a convergence of those two and quite different traditions was in place. Semiotics came to concern signs of the things one already knows: sign structures of the human mind and objects of the human world. Within such epistemological paradigm, Michel Foucault interpreted the ancient doctrine of the care of the self through a contemporary semiotic framework, developing a distinct semiotic theory of moral subjectivity.
244
AthanasiosVotsis
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
The present paper discusses certain aspects of this semiotic inclination of Foucault's thought.' Such a discussion helps illuminate the reasons behind his key analytical choices in ethics and moral subjectivity, suggests that Foucault should be placed more frequently at the core of the European version of semiotics, from de Saussure to Greimas and Tarasti, and hints at important methodological directions concerning the place of signification and sign systems in the general structure of knowledge and self-knowledge. The tone of the discussion is historical, viewing Foucault's methodology within the intellectual context of his time and place (France of 1970 and 1980), which was content with semiotic and structuralist strains. I highlight two aspects of the relevance of Foucault's works to semiotics. First, I will present Foucault's definition of signification as a technology. Second, I will discuss a more subtle, but by no means less important, contribution that Foucault makes to the field of semiotics. My goal is to attract attention to the solid semiotic framework in his ethical works, which is commonly overlooked. I suggest that the way Foucault describes moral subjectivity is essentially semiotic. The structure that underlines the moral subject is composed by a binary that can be defined here as the subject-to-itself (S-S) binary. In the view of determining the relation of Foucault's works to semiotics, it is worth noting also his insistence on including the specific cultural context of a given age in the philosophical and psychological analysis of moral problems. I will touch upon this topic at the end of my paper.
2 The technologies of sign systems Foucault described four major types of "techniques" or "technologies" that humans use to understand themselves, namely, technologies of production, sign systems, power, and of the self: As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these "technologies," each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine
1 This article is the intellectual result of a stimulating seminar given by Professor Eero Tarasti at the University of Helsinki in November 2010, themed "European semiotics." I thank him for his inspiring instruction as he has been one of the main sources of knowledge for the presented discussion. Moreover, I extend my gratitude to Dr. Dina Babushkina at the University of Helsinki for her insightful remarks on Foucault's moral philosophy.
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
Moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling
245
the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, and objectivlzing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault 1988:16-17)
The extract indicates the following general orientation in Foucault's thought v^th respect to semiotics. On one hand, sign systems are one of four alternatives that human beings use to understand themselves. Humans develop knowledge about themselves through semiotic and non-semiotic ways; in other words, the generation and deployment of a semiotic structure is one of the alternatives for self-understanding. There are a number of characteristics that distinguish the semiotic from non-semiotic ways of self-understanding. First, technologies of sign systems do not presuppose production or alteration of the objective world. Second, they do not necessarily involve the relation of subject to others (in comparison, for instance, to the technologies of power). In this sense, the technologies of sign systems are close to those of the self because they are essentially based on the subject's self-relation. It is within the subject that these two groups of technologies are being applied. Then, the self-knowledge that the subject achieves through signification is ideal (because it is a meaning) and not purely material as in the case of technologies of production. And this ideal knowledge is not merely objective (as a product would be) but subjective because it is the way the self meets itself in the objective world. By the means of signification, humans possess their self as their own meaning; while in production they possess themselves as something that they are not. Finally, in contrast to the technologies of the self, signification is static. It does not involve the work that the subject carries out in order to change itself. Signification is a reflection of what is, whereas the technologies of the self are targeted to the alteration of the subject under the perspective of truth. On the other hand, sign systems are connected to practical reason, or will. When such a structure is deployed for the purpose of knowing oneself, it has the form of practical reason, or in other words, connected to action. Thus, signification is creation and use of meaning, always connected to a form of knowledge. Despite the fact that all four groups of technologies have their specific domain, a closer examination of Foucault's work indicates that the study of the four independent technologies might have an underlying methodological commonality that comes from the second technology, this of sign systems. Stated otherwise, Foucault, in addition to seeing sign systems as one way to produce
246
AthanasiosVotsis
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
self-knowledge, uses sign systems as a methodology to study all the other modes of production of self-knowledge. The idea of the technologies as such is subjected to a semiotic task to study the way the subject produces the meaning of itself. Therefore, it is possible to distinguish two different levels of semiotic activity in Foucault's thought: the first being a category (a technique) of self-understanding, and the second being an analytical tool capable of examining the phenomena Foucault was interested in. In the following sections I discuss a few methodological influences observed in Foucault's core concepts that may be used in support of my argument about the latter fact. Firstly, I discuss the concept of moral subjectivity as an S-S binary. Afterwards, I will highlight the role of the broader context of Foucault's enterprise.
3 Composition of the moral subject as an S-S binary Foucault's moral subject can be laid out as follows. The subject is not the pure transcendental, ahistorical or cogito-type subject found in Descartes and German Idealism alike. It is rather one within and with the discourses and practices that enable a subject to experience itself as such. It is the modification and construction of one's own subjectivity in response to certain goals and desires. Thus, on one hand, we have a formation of subjectivity as the relation of the subject to itself, and this in connection to the existing norms of society at a given time and space. And on the other hand, remembering the previous discussion of sign systems, we have the formation of the subject, or its meaning, in relation to the technology that connects subject to itself. In summary, we have an S-S binary, where the connection of the two components is not fixed and a priori (as in most philosophical doctrines), but can be trained and modified by the individual (see, for instance, Foucault 2005). This formulation of the subject, which is one of the core concepts in Foucault's philosophy, demonstrates a dependency on two core concepts of the European line of semiotics: the insistence on binaries (concepts that are logically brought together in order to create oppositions, contraries, or contradictions, and to facilitate meaning; for instance Greek/barbarian), and the canon that meaning is to be found in the relation of binaries. First, binaries are met in a clear way as early as Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), with the most essential binary being the sign itself, and a number of other important linguistic concepts laid out in the same format, for instance, langue and parole. Similar to Foucault, Saussure focused this methodological framework to
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
Moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling
247
social, cultural, and psychological studies. Binaries are a core tool for social and cultural studies also in the work of Algirdas Julien Greimas. For instance, his utilization (1983) of the ancient semiotic square of the Stoic philosophers and its reworking into the semantic square is at its base a logical treatment of binaries, and his topological semiotics (1986) is a phenomenology built from the ground by a few fundamental binary oppositions. The same goes for other core figures of European semiotics. Yuri Lotman (1990) articulated the two communicative functions of the text in a binary form, and Luis Hjelmslev's (1969) understanding of the semiotic structure as different expressions of form and substance emanates the same methodological axiom. Foucault was a part of this intellectual tradition and his research goes along this hne of binaries. Second, the relation between the two concepts of a binary carries out the function of meaning-generation. Of course, the idea of binaries is not unique to semiotics. They have been heavily utilized by western philosophers from Antiquity until the present day, for instance Parmenides' (1996) One is/One is not, Nicolaus Cusanus' (1985) maximum/minimum, and Hegel's (2010) Being/Not Being, quality/quantity, form/matter. However, what is unique in semiotic binaries is that there is a firm hold onto the doctrine that the relation between their components contains meaning. An example is Eero Tarasti's (2000) existential semiotics model, where, in addition to the content of Moi (me) and Soi (the social), full meaning is realized only by movements between those two concepts. Looking at his theory of moral subjectivity, we can see that Foucault follows sharply such a relational doctrine. This gives a certain opportunity for Foucault to be understood not only as a philosopher and psychologist, but also as a semiotician who applied semiotics to moral philosophy and who contributed to the core of semiotic theory. The latter contribution has important methodological implications beyond the domain of self-knowledge, and they are being considered next.
4 The cultural context Traditionally, aesthetics is separated from ethics, and often even distinguished from philosophy as such; so our scientific customs dictate. But in Foucault's work aesthetics is philosophy indeed, and it is moreover deeply related to ethics. This is possible due to a semiotic point of view, and is a commonplace in contemporary semiotics. However, this is not the case in traditional philosophical analysis. Contrary to the philosophical tradition and too close to a semiotic one, Foucault rejects the metaphysical vocabulary that includes such notions as substance. His moral subject is rather a structure, flexible and changeable, historically and
248
AthanasiosVotsis
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
culturally shaped and specified. In connection to the present discussion, for instance, even the Platonic notion of the care for the self refers to concrete people of our historical continuum that exercised known techniques and left known discourses. In particular, for the case of The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005), the contexts where three: Ancient Graeco-Roman, Hellenistic, and Early Christian. On the other hand, his ethical analysis, which is philosophy proper, is largely embraced and esteemed by the philosophical sciences of our time. The result is a quite distinct case where the discussion of abstract philosophical topics and of themes such as knowledge, subjectivity, and ethics is intertwined with analysis of culture and cultural products, as in the case of The Order of Things: an Archeology of the Human Sciences (1970) and its analyses of famous artworks in relation to various aspects of the question of knowledge. There are a few other instances where concepts such as knowledge, worldoutlooks, and the subject are firmly engaged into discussion with concrete cultural products, yielding works with important philosophical implications: the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), the semiotic modeling of culture by Yuri Lotman (1990), and the analysis of medieval aesthetics by Umberto Eco (1986) are the most relevant. One can see here once more that Foucault's methodological choices come from and complement a clearly delineated intellectual movement of semiotics. One of Lotman's cultural models is a potent way to explain in semiotic terms Foucault's methodological versatility. According to Lotman (1990: 20-22), the text contains two modes of communication: M and I-He/She. M communication resembles directly Foucault's methodological construction of the moral subject as S-S (as discussed in the previous section), and both are in turn intellectual children and heritage of semiotic binaries found in the European segment of semiotics. The crucial part of Lotman's theory in relation to the present discussion is that a significant amount of cultural production happens in between the two modes of communication (1990: 29-30). It is here, in this inbetween area, that (i) the subject forms knowledge about itself, and we see here Art as a form of knowledge and Foucault's use of aesthetics as the study of forms of self-knowledge, (ii) the subject determines the relation to itself, and (iii) the mechanism of that relation, the technology, is substantiated. Under this light, Foucault's choice to formally utilize aesthetics in the analysis of subjectivity is fully justified from a semiotic point of view, whereas a philosophical point of view would frequently object to such a mixture, starting with the fundamental distinction between imagination and reason. But with the help of semiotics, modern western ethics is reinvented to be something similar to what it was in Classical Greece: an aesthetics of life, firmly connected to the art of life ßlov).
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
Moralsubjectivity and the semiotic modeling
249
5 Concluding remarks: Semiotics and the ways of l^nowing Foucault is deeply related to semiotics, as a key figure in the plenitude of overlapping paradigms that emerged in twentieth-century continental thought; Lagopoulos (2010) is a particularly comprehensive exposition of this. Departing from this foundation, it is possible to further identify explicit and specific semiotic elements in Foucault's methodology, in addition to general methodological dispositions. Moreover, such elements correlate with the epistemological paradigm of European semiotics, and certain of such aspects concern moral subjectivity: the technologies of self-understanding, work along the lines of binaries, excavating the relation between binaries for meaning, and insisting on the inclusion of the cultural context, converting ethics into an aesthetics of life. So, where does the present placement of Foucault within semiotics lead to? A first effect may be the stirring of the long-time discussion about the methods and methodological strongholds of philosophy, social psychology, cultural analysis, and semiotics. For instance, the relation of each discipline to consistency and completeness, the levels of analysis each discipline deserves to refer to, and so on. Most certainly, such a debate influences our understanding of Foucault's thought, with questions related to the grand goals of his work, understanding of key terms, intellectual motives, and so forth. Such debates are valid indeed, helping theorists understand Foucault's work and expand it accurately. I would like, however, to regard as more important a somewhat different methodological direction. The placement of the full theory of Foucault, content with questions of knowledge, self-knowledge, and moral subjectivity, into central parts of the intellectual movement of European semiotics, along with the subsequent identification of the particular methodological tools that influenced his most utilized by other scientists concepts, yields interesting insights into the ways of knowing made possible by our own scientific outlook. Hence, the aesthetic analysis of cultural artifacts is on one hand as valid, and on the other can be combined with traditional philosophical speculations on ethics to illuminate, as in the case of Foucault, aspects of subjectivity. Similarly, contemporary semiotic theories that often reconfigure already carefully developed philosophical concepts (for instance, the semiotic rejection of idealism, but the concurrent treatment of signs as nothing but philosophical ideas; Tarasti [2000: 37-55] and Clarke [2010] are two stimulating entry points for the interesting relation of ideas and semiotics) yield, as in Foucault's case, valid results for significant philosophical problems. Such encounters on the borderlines of philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics, and cultural analysis force one to consider the matter of what knowledge is and how it is attained in its full expanse.
250
AthanasiosVotsis
DE GRUYTER MOUTON
References Clarke, NorrisW. 2010. The integration of Thomistic intentionality theory and contemporary semiotics. Semiótica 178(1/4). 11-22. Eco, Umberto. 1986. Art and beauty in the middle ages. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. Tbe order of things: An archeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the self. In Luther H. Martin, HuckGutman& Patrick H. Hutton (eds.). Technologies of the self: A seminar witb Michel Foucault, 16-49. London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at tbe Collège de France 1981-1982. NewYork: Palgrave MacMillan. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1983. Sfwcfura/semon(/cs;-An ortempt oí omertod. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1986. For a topological semiotics. In Mark Gottdiener & Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulös (eds.). The city and the sign: An introduction to urban semiotics, 25-54. NewYork: Columbia tJniversity Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2010. Tbe science of logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hjelmslev, Luis. 1969. Prolegomena to a theory of language. Madison, Wl: University of Wisconsin Press. Lagopoulos, Alexandros Ph. 2010. From sémiologie to postmodernism: A genealogy. Semiótica
178(1/4). 169-253. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural anthropology 1. NewYork: Basic. Lotman, Yuri. 1990. Universe of tbe mind: A semiotic tbeory of culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Manetti, Giovanni. 2010. Ancient semiotics. In Paul Cobley (ed.), Tbe Routledge companion to semiotics, 13-28. Abingdon: Routledge. Nicolaus Cusanus. 1985. On learned ignorance. In Jasper Hopkins (ed.), Nicholas of Cusa on learned ignorance: A translation and an appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia, 49-205. Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press. Plato. 1996. Parmenides. In Albert K. Whitaker (ed.), Plato's Parmenides, 23-89. Newbury Port, MA: Focus. Plato. 1892. Alcibiades I. In Benjamin Jowett (ed.). The dialogues of Plato, vol. 2, 457-510. London & NewYork: Oxford University Press. http://www.archive.org/stream/dialoguesofplatol8922platSpage/n9/mode/2up (accessed 23 May 2011). Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in general linguistics. NewYork: McGraw-Hill. Tarasti, Eero. 2000. Existential semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bionote Athanasios Votsis is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki (athanasios.
[email protected]). His research interests include urban planning, urban semiotics, classical studies, and semiotics of culture.
Copyright of Semiotica is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
