From Knowledge to Self-Formation: Reading Foucault Through Matrices and Practices
— 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 intelligible.
A person classifies an object, follows a schedule, submits to an examination, observes a rule, or works upon herself. These are particular acts. Foucault's questions, however, often lead beyond the act itself. What makes this way of acting possible? What distinctions make it intelligible? What arrangement makes it observable, measurable, or desirable? What kind of subject can emerge from such practices?
This is why the idea of a matrix is useful for reading Foucault. A matrix is not simply a structure that determines everything that happens within it. It is an organized field of relations and possibilities within which particular practices can take place.
Seen this way, the movement from The Order of Things to Discipline and Punish and then to Technologies of the Self is not simply a movement from knowledge to power to the self. It is a movement through different ways in which historically specific arrangements organize what can be known, how people can be governed, and how individuals can act upon themselves.
2. The Matrix of Knowledge
In The Order of Things, Foucault is not simply cataloguing the ideas that people held during different historical periods. He is interested in the historical conditions that made particular forms of knowledge possible.
This is where the concept of the episteme becomes important. An episteme is not a theory that people consciously accept, nor is it a collection of beliefs shared by everyone in a particular period. It refers to a historically specific configuration that structures what kinds of objects can appear as objects of knowledge, what distinctions can be made among them, and what kinds of statements can function as knowledge.
The image of a table is useful here. A table does not merely contain objects. It gives them positions. It allows them to be compared, separated, grouped, and related. Once objects occupy different positions within an arrangement, certain relations become visible that were not available in the same way before.
This is why Foucault's concern with tables, classifications, and systems of order should not be reduced to an interest in terminology. The important question is what an arrangement does.
A classification does not merely describe differences that were already fully formed. It establishes a field in which certain differences become visible and significant. It allows some things to be compared with one another and makes other comparisons irrelevant or impossible. The order is therefore not simply imposed on a collection of already meaningful objects. It participates in determining what can appear as an object of knowledge in the first place.
We might therefore say: The matrix does not simply contain knowledge; it establishes conditions under which knowledge can take a particular form.
At this level, Foucault is concerned with what we might call a matrix of intelligibility. The focus is not simply on individual statements but on the historical arrangement that makes particular statements, objects, distinctions, and relations possible.
But the same question can be asked outside the organization of knowledge.
If an arrangement can make certain objects knowable, what happens when an arrangement organizes possible forms of conduct?
That is where Discipline and Punish becomes particularly important.
3. From the Organization of Knowledge to the Organization of Conduct
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault shifts the focus toward the organization of bodies and conduct. Yet the underlying analytical question remains closely related.
Instead of asking only, How can something become an object of knowledge?, Foucault asks how individuals can be distributed, observed, trained, examined, compared, corrected, and normalized.
Consider some of the practices associated with disciplinary power: arranging individuals in particular spaces, establishing timetables, dividing activities into sequences, monitoring performance, examining individuals, recording their results, and comparing them against norms.
These practices do not merely restrict actions that already exist. They establish conditions in which conduct becomes visible, measurable, comparable, and correctable.
A timetable, for example, is not simply a neutral way of organizing time. Once time is divided into prescribed activities, an individual's conduct can be measured against it. A classroom, military barracks, workshop, or prison can therefore become an organized field in which behavior acquires particular meanings: punctual or late, productive or unproductive, normal or abnormal, successful or unsuccessful.
The arrangement does not have to issue an order at every moment. It organizes the circumstances in which an individual acts. It establishes positions, expectations, norms, and relations of visibility. Once these are in place, individuals can begin to regulate their conduct in relation to them.
The question has therefore moved from the organization of objects of knowledge toward the organization of possible conduct, but the two forms of analysis remain structurally related.
In both cases, Foucault asks us to look beyond the immediately visible phenomenon.
The question is not simply: What does this individual do?
It is also: What arrangement makes this particular form of conduct possible, intelligible, and consequential?
This becomes especially clear in Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon.
The importance of the Panopticon is not simply that it allows an authority to watch people. Its more significant feature is the way it organizes visibility.
An individual who may be observed at any moment cannot know with certainty whether observation is actually taking place. The possibility of observation can therefore become sufficient to alter behavior. The individual begins to conduct herself in accordance with a possibility built into the structure.
The crucial movement is:
external arrangement → visibility → possible observation → self-regulation
The power of the arrangement does not depend on someone constantly intervening from outside. The individual can begin to participate in the operation of power by regulating his own conduct.
This brings Discipline and Punish much closer to Technologies of the Self than a simple opposition between external power and individual freedom would suggest.
4. The Panopticon and the Subject's Participation
The Panopticon shows why it would be misleading to describe Foucault's account of discipline simply as a matter of others acting upon individuals.
That dimension is central. Disciplinary institutions establish rules, distribute individuals, monitor them, measure their performance, and impose norms. But disciplinary power becomes particularly effective when individuals begin to participate in the regulation of their own conduct.
The subject is not merely the passive recipient of power. The subject becomes part of the mechanism through which power operates.
This does not mean that the individual becomes autonomous or liberated. Self-regulation can itself be an effect of disciplinary power. But the relation between power and the self is therefore more complicated than a simple opposition between an external authority and an internally free individual.
This is where Discipline and Punish opens toward the later Foucault.
In Discipline and Punish, the analysis begins largely with how conduct is organized and regulated. In Technologies of the Self, Foucault increasingly asks about the practices through which individuals themselves act upon their bodies, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being.
The questions are different, but they overlap: How can power organize conduct so that individuals regulate themselves? And How do individuals actively work upon themselves?
The Panopticon does not provide the whole answer to the second question, but it helps reveal why the relation between power and the self cannot be understood as a simple opposition.
The transition should therefore not be understood as a movement from power to freedom. Foucault is not replacing the study of power with a celebration of autonomous selfhood. He is examining a more complicated relationship in which subjects are formed within historically specific arrangements and can also become agents in their own formation.
The individual can therefore occupy two positions at once: an object of practices and an agent of practices.
This double position becomes central to the idea of the technology of the self.
It also helps explain why Foucault's four technologies in Technologies of the Self should not be understood as four isolated categories. Production, sign systems, power, and the self intersect because the practices through which we produce things, use signs, govern others, and transform ourselves are embedded in historically specific fields of possibility.
This is where the ordinary word technology begins to acquire its specifically Foucauldian force.
5. “Technology” as a Foucauldian Concept
The word technology initially sounds more familiar than it actually is. In ordinary usage, we tend to associate technology with machines, tools, devices, and technical procedures. Foucault deliberately extends the term beyond this familiar sense.
In Technologies of the Self, he distinguishes four major types: technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power, and technologies of the self. These are not four separate kinds of machines or instruments. He describes them as different matrices of practical reason: ways in which practical activity is organized so that things can be produced or transformed, signs can be used, conduct can be directed, and individuals can act upon themselves.
The important point is therefore not to take the ordinary meaning of technology and simply apply it mechanically to each case. Its meaning changes as it enters a new conceptual network.
This happens repeatedly in theoretical writing. A familiar word enters a new context and acquires a more specific function without simply losing its ordinary meaning. Barthes does this with myth. Derrida does it with writing. Foucault does it with technology.
The ordinary meaning remains part of the background. There is still something recognizably technical about a Foucauldian technology: it involves procedures, operations, means, and transformations. But the object being transformed need not be a physical object. It can be conduct, a relation, a system of signs, or the self.
The word therefore acquires its conceptual force partly from the terms with which it is combined:
- technology of production concerns the transformation of things;
- technology of sign systems concerns the organization and use of signs;
- technology of power concerns the direction of conduct;
- technology of the self concerns practices through which individuals transform themselves.
The broader methodological lesson is that a theoretical concept is often not created by assigning an entirely new meaning to an ordinary word. Its meaning emerges through the tension between the word's familiar associations and the new relations in which the author places it.
This is one reason difficult theoretical texts become easier to read when we stop treating individual words as isolated definitions and begin looking at their collocations and conceptual relations.
6. Technologies of the Self: When the Subject Becomes an Agent of Transformation
Foucault's fourth category introduces something that the previous three do not quite capture: the individual acting upon itself.
He describes technologies of the self as practices through which individuals carry out operations on their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being in order to transform themselves and attain particular states—such as happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.
The important word here is operations.
The self is not simply treated as a fixed inner essence waiting to be discovered. It becomes something upon which practices can be performed.
This is where the connection with Discipline and Punish becomes important. A disciplinary arrangement can organize an individual's conduct from the outside, but it can also produce forms of self-regulation. The individual learns to monitor, evaluate, and modify herself in relation to norms.
A technology of the self involves a more active relation: the individual engages in practices of examination, reflection, confession, exercise, or ethical formation directed toward the transformation of the self.
Yet Foucault does not present this as a purely autonomous process. Technologies of the self can involve “the help of others.” A teacher, spiritual director, physician, therapist, or other guide may participate in the process through which an individual learns how to work upon herself.
This qualification is important because it prevents us from turning the technology of the self into a simple philosophy of personal freedom.
The individual does not stand outside history and invent a method of self-transformation from nothing. The practices available for working upon oneself are themselves historically specific. They depend upon languages, institutions, forms of knowledge, moral codes, and relations with others.
The self is therefore both formed and forming.
It is formed through practices that precede it, but it can also become an agent within those practices. This is one reason Foucault's later work does not simply abandon his earlier concern with power. The question becomes more complicated: how are individuals governed, how do they participate in governing themselves, and what possibilities exist for transforming that relation?
This is also where the notion of governmentality becomes useful. Foucault describes governmentality as an encounter between technologies of domination directed toward others and technologies of the self. The distinction between governing another person and governing oneself therefore remains real, but the two cannot be cleanly separated.
The subject is situated at their intersection.
7. One Foucauldian Problem, Three Analytical Levels
We can now return to the apparent discontinuity among The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and Technologies of the Self.
The three works ask different questions, but they can be placed within a common analytical movement:
|
Work |
Central question |
What is organized? |
|
The Order of Things |
How is knowledge made possible? |
Objects and relations of knowledge |
|
Discipline and Punish |
How is conduct organized? |
Bodies and behavior |
|
Technologies of the Self |
How do subjects act upon themselves? |
Relations to the self |
This should not be read as a sequence of three stages in which Foucault first studied knowledge, then abandoned it for power, and finally abandoned power for the self. The connections are more interesting than that.
The same analytical sensitivity to arrangements, relations, and possibilities runs through all three.
In The Order of Things, the concern is with historical arrangements that allow things to become objects of knowledge.
In Discipline and Punish, arrangements of space, time, visibility, examination, and normalization make particular forms of conduct possible and governable.
In Technologies of the Self, historically available practices allow individuals to act upon themselves and constitute particular relations to themselves.
The Panopticon makes the continuity particularly visible. An arrangement designed to govern individuals can produce individuals who participate in their own regulation. Power does not simply operate against the subject from outside; it can operate through practices that the subject comes to perform upon itself.
This is why the distinction between matrix and practice is useful.
The matrix establishes a field of possibilities. The practice is what individuals actually do within that field. But the relationship is not one-way. Practices can reproduce an arrangement, reinforce it, modify it, or resist it.
We therefore have something more dynamic than a structure simply determining behavior:
matrix → practice → subject → self-practice
The subject is neither simply outside the matrix nor completely determined by it. It is formed within historically specific arrangements and can, through particular practices, participate in the reproduction or transformation of its own formation.
8. From Acts to the Conditions of Their Possibility
One way to make Foucault easier to read is to ask two questions at the same time.
First: What is happening here?
Who is classifying? Who is being examined? Who is being watched? Who is following the rule? Who is working upon themselves?
Then ask: What makes this particular action possible, intelligible, or effective?
What distinctions have already been established? What forms of knowledge are available? What arrangement of space or time is in place? What norms make the conduct measurable? What conception of the self makes a particular form of self-examination meaningful?
This double perspective is one of the most useful ways into Foucault.
The point is not to choose between the individual act and the arrangement that surrounds it. Foucault asks us to see their relationship.
A classification makes certain differences visible. A disciplinary arrangement makes certain forms of conduct observable and correctable. A technology of the self makes certain forms of self-transformation possible. In each case, a practice takes place within an already organized field of possibilities.
But individuals are not simply determined by that field. They inhabit it, act within it, and can sometimes act upon themselves through it.
This gives us a more precise way of understanding the movement across Foucault's work. The Order of Things asks how historically specific arrangements make particular forms of knowledge possible. Discipline and Punish shows how arrangements of power organize conduct and can lead individuals to participate in their own regulation. Technologies of the Self examines practices through which individuals take up a relation to themselves and work upon who they are.
The continuity lies not in a single subject matter but in a way of asking questions.
Foucault repeatedly moves from the immediately visible practice toward the historical arrangement that makes it possible—and then back toward the individual who acts within that arrangement.
The important question is therefore not simply what people do, nor simply what structures constrain them. It is how historically specific arrangements make certain forms of knowing, acting, and relating to oneself possible—and how subjects, once formed within those arrangements, can act upon themselves and others in turn.
To read Foucault in this way is to see that the matrix is not simply behind the practice, determining it from a distance. It is present in the practice itself: in the distinctions we make, the norms we follow, the ways we are observed, and even the ways we learn to observe and transform ourselves.
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References
Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1966)
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)
Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). University of Massachusetts Press.
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