Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb: Chapter Ten: Arts of the Self in Understanding Foucault

Danaher, Geoff, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb. “Arts of the Self.” In Understanding Foucault, 150-164. London: Sage, 2003.

keywords:Creative agents, arts of the self, ethics, aesthetics, the subject as form rather than substance, death of the author, artists existence, self-“becoming a subject,” Diana, Madonna, an authored-self, cultivate the self, self-representation, polity, self-reflexive ethical subject, (PEA) political-ethical-aesthetic subject, self-determining agents

Suitably titled “Arts of the Self,” the conclusion to Understanding Foucault surveys his later work on subjectivity in relation to authorship, aesthetics and ethics. I read this chapter not as a substitute for the real thing so much as to know which Foucault to read. Several anthology seem indispensable: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984, Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 and The Foucault Reader.

What is the difference between the historical avant-garde’s ideal of merging art and life and Foucault’s conviction that life can be art? Both gestures are clearly political. Understanding one’s existence as a continuous creative act or acts (Bakhtin) validates the self beyond social prescriptions. At the same time, it fortifies the self, making it resistant to power structures. Thus, the arts of the self can be understood as technologies for negotiating freedom and power (163).

Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb acknowledge criticism of Foucault’s arts of the self: that it privileges taste and beauty over intellectual and moral virtues (163). They also observe its potential to depoliticize subjects by encouraging them to focus on the their respective selves rather than their communities. The authors respond to these criticisms by arguing that the arts of the self can be understood in as a political gesture of affirmation and/or dissent. Aesthetics is socially significant because it is bound up with “…ethics, with meaning, with the ways of presenting ourselves to others, and with the telling of “truths” about society and its members” (161). And to the claim “the arts of the self” are limited to those with leisure, they argue that self-expression is inevitable, so why not make this a conscious act? Why not craft oneself as an ethical, aesthetic and political subject through critical self-styling? Indeed, it could be argued that not taking responsibility for one’s aesthetics is actually negligent, a social infidelity. Danaher, Schirato and Webb argue that by applying an ethical perspective to ensure he or she lives as well as possible, the self-determining agent is able to benefit others and by extension society and its polity (162).

With this said, there are clearly limits to the subject’s agency. Systems, institutions, discourses and so on still limit the subject’s scope for self-realization. It’s also worth acknowledging that self-styling does not guarantee one’s values, ideas and ways of seeing the world will be communicated effectively. Widespread distain for punk, grunge and other movements makes this point clear. And yet, such resistance is usually relatively short lived. As Danaher, Schirato and Web observe, taste and style shape discursive technologies (159). Aesthetics is also a way “…of organizing and regulating populations, and of determining what can be said and how it can be said. In other words, the world of aesthetics has an influence on determining what is understood to be true” (160).

Questions for Further Consideration:

1. How does Foucault of a self-determining agent relate to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism?
2. Basic question: To what degree would Foucault understand the web as a power structure?

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