Foucault and Agency

 “Given a code of actions, and with regard to a specific type of action (which can be defined by their degree of conformity with or divergence from the code), there are different ways to “conduct oneself” morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent (sic), but as an ethical subject of this action.”

--Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 2

And so we get about as close as we can, in Foucault, to a notion of agency.

I sense a paradox here, one to be relished. Foucault, the suspicious critic of all social relationships (which are always already power relationships), finds more room to operate within spheres of life where there is a greater elaboration of a behavioral code. I become more free when there are more rules that I recognize.

Of course, to state the later risks significantly misinterpreting Foucault. I want to write it down though--as a provocation, a chance to think through his project.

We have considered which of our everyday practices society tends to get worked up about--practices which have elaborated codes defining a set of specifically moral consequences that flow from undertaking them. Sexual practices have moral consequences, alimentary practices less so--Foucault wants us to see the strangeness of that situation. He wants to de-naturalize our assumptions about morality.

Sometimes we don’t know that a code exists until we’ve violated it. We may think that, as a society, how we dress is not a moral issue. Yet when little boys attempt to wear dresses to school, a code kicks into action. People worry. Scientific discourses rush in to pinpoint “the problem.”  They turn the child into “a case.”

People who challenge the moral codes are in some cases to be admired. But not always. It all depends. Sometimes a code is too limited. It makes us into something we would rather not be--it seeks to normalize in ways that are limited, ugly, disgusting. It polices pleasure, confines it, routinizes it.

On the other hand, if “my pleasure” involves the involuntary degradation of an other, if it puts the other at risk, if it in turn limits the ability of an other to be herself--then the moral code, while still dangerous, might be said to be legitimate.

Every code is an attempt to police, to normalize. It is neither good nor bad; it is dangerous.

Yet, paradoxically, one reading of Foucault is that elaborated codes are what allow a certain creative stance toward life. It involves the ability to massage ambiguities, contradictions, areas of grey. It allows us to shape ourselves in novel--even beautiful --ways.

De Certeau calls this the moment of “second production.” It is an acknowledgement that there are no rules for when, how, and with what state of mind to follow the rules.

Modernity is marked by the disappearance of spaces “off the grid” or “under the radar.” The Panopticon is a very apt figure in this sense. Yet in being viewed, in internalizing the gaze, there are still questions of how, when, and to what ends we internalize.

How do we as humans cobble together a sense of self--given all of our contingency, plasticity, mutability? This is, to my mind, the great drama of human existence which educational research seeks to document.

Is the best athlete the one who has best learned the rules? The one who is best at changing the rules? Of course not. The best athlete is the one who, working at the outer limits of the rules--that place where x and not x converges, where the rule itself no longer seems to apply--expresses an essentially aesthetic standpoint vis-à-vis life.