#heteronomative society do be exhausting

[red-anansi]

"oh please everyone has gay thoughts sometimes" so what i'm hearing is that heteronormativity is so ingrained that a significant percentage of the population regularly experiences bisexual attraction? but dismisses it as something that all straight people experience? this is so concerning are you guys okay

[hardcorefornerds]

No one today would dare write a book about the art of being happy, the art of not getting angry, the way to lead a tranquil life

Michel Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the College de France 1980-1981, Lecture of 14th January, p. 27

There are a lot of things I think Foucault gets right, but this isn’t one of them - or it is no longer correct, even if it was at the time. Though, as he continues:

“[this] does not mean that in a society like ours models of conduct are not formed, proposed, circulated, more or less imposed or absorbed. There is an art of conduct in our society, but it has absolutely lost its autonomy. One no longer finds these models of conduct except, of course, invested, packaged within the big, thick, massive practice of pedagogy”

The subsequent description of the evolution ‘arts of living’ through Antiquity and early Christianity is worth returning to, and I aim to do so, but he doesn’t bring it up to date with the modern period - or only as far as Max Weber, “who tried to compress together as much as possible in one and the same framework of self-analysis, the category of Judeo-Christianity and the category of capitalism as modes of consciousness, analysis, and decipherment of Western societies.” 

Updating this is the recent work by Byung-Chul Han, a slim pamphlet in the Verso Futures series entitled Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. In the chapter ‘Foucault’s Dilemma’, Han argues that Foucault developed his “historically situated ethics of the self” in “a context largely detached from technologies and techniques of power and domination”. Neoliberalism claims the technology of the self for its own purposes of “perpetual self-optimization” (though one might say that techniques of self in Antiquity were hardly separate from social goals of behaviour, even if these latter were not as totalising as the economic function has become in today’s society). Thus he concludes that

“As an “entrepreneur of himself”, the neoliberal achievement-subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly - and even passionately. The self-as-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.”

This last line is really striking for me, because I can neither really accept nor refute it. I cannot be so cynical as to deny the aesthetic ideal of Foucault’s ethical life, but I also cannot deny the difficulty of finding such an autonomous subject in the modern, heteronomous world of work, consumerism and capitalism. This is perhaps just another case of the problem of identifying ‘resistance’ against power, or more broadly the locus of ascetism in the worldly reality of life. Nevertheless, a dragon sings in a withered tree.