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(You?) Never Walk Alone: Reading Foucault's Technologies of the Self

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The Strange Title The title Technologies of the Self contains a tension that is easy to overlook. Technology seems to belong to the world of mechanisms, instruments, procedures, and technical operations. Self , by contrast, suggests something human and inward: identity, consciousness, subjectivity, perhaps even the private domain of the person. The two terms seem to belong to different conceptual registers. One evokes machines; the other, interiority. Yet Foucault places them together without qualification. He does not speak of technology and the self as two separate domains that happen to interact. He speaks of technologies of the self. The effect is more than terminological. The conjunction changes the force of both words. Technology is no longer restricted to machines or material instruments. Foucault uses the term for organized procedures through which things, individuals, conduct, or ways of being can be transformed. A technology can concern bodies, thoughts, conduct, or ...
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From Knowledge to Self-Formation: Reading Foucault Through Matrices and Practices

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  “As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these ‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason.” — Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self 1. The Problem: Foucault Seems to Change the Subject Foucault can seem to change the subject from one book to another. The Order of Things is concerned with knowledge, classification, and the historical conditions under which things become objects of knowledge. Discipline and Punish turns to prisons, surveillance, discipline, and the organization of conduct. In Technologies of the Self , the focus shifts again, toward the ways individuals work upon themselves. It is tempting, therefore, to see these as three different Foucaults: first an analyst of knowledge, then an analyst of power, and finally an analyst of the self. There is certainly a change of emphasis. But the continuity becomes clearer if we distinguish between particular practices and the matrices that make those practices possible and intel...
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