Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom [Foucault]
In my adolescence, I had a dislike for popular culture. The ideals represented in its imagery did not correspond to my experience, and I felt insulted that my experience was expected to be something so altogether difference. I developed a cynicism towards society, and was hard pressed to find its merit. Perhaps it simply evaded me while I grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver. If someone had told me “society must be defended,” I would have laughed in their face. “What society?” would have been my reply.
I had a good friend who was going through some hard times. He was bright and nice but had a messed-up family. They were old hippies and religious freaks, but I got along with them. At one point, the father confronted my friend alone in his room late at night with a shotgun, and threatened to kill him and the rest of his family. His father was high and had a history of drug abuse and violence. My friend called the cops the next day, and the cops took his father to a psyche ward. I remember thinking that it was really messed-up that the cops let my friend’s dad return home a few days later. I remember thinking that maybe they had to send him home. Maybe jail was full with fathers who had actually killed their families. Maybe they didn’t know what else to do. Above all I came to the conclusion that they simply did not care. My friend’s family existed in statistics, and as statistics the family was categorized as a bunch of losers, hardly worth much to anyone.
Around this time my friend become quite depressed, to the point he was attempting suicide. Although he had achieved good grades, he rarely showed up at school. I remember thinking it was incredible how out-of-touch the counselors in the high-school were in regards to the complex situation in which my friend lived. It was apparent that the counselors were not there for him, they were there for the students who still had a chance to get by under “the norm.”
During this time I became quite detached; I could not understand how both government and society could exist, yet at the same time so obviously not exist in a meaningful way to my friend. There was a disparity between society, government, and our selves as individuals, and I was feeling it for the first time.
Looking back at that moment I suppose I was surprised that there could be such absence. What about the protection of the state? I was confused. From the perspective of that disparity, nothing else made much sense. If you don’t exist for the state, then in a certain way, you don’t exist. I started to gather what it meant to “fall through the cracks of society”. It was to be outside of a social system. I also began to understand that social systems where in place to produce.
Society, at our level, existed primarily within the institution of the school, perhaps at the level of police. Culture was minimal, long having been paved over with mini-malls. Relationships were largely found within systems, and seemed to work towards the norms of the state. I came to the conclusion that my friend had to find something meaningful he could relate to, something that would bring him in to some kind of system, so I helped him get a job. With the job, he met new people, found new relationships, and seemed happier. For me, though, I was altogether unimpressed. Something about society was messed up. Or maybe it was just me, since I didn’t see anyone else raising concern.
Of course, a long time has since passed, and I’m not the same now as I was then. I recognize now that it was my experience that led to a cynicism towards society, but luckily that cynicism at some point became criticism. Being critical forced me to defend my critiques, and this helped develop an interest in subjectivity, culture and government. Appropriately, I spent some time traveling, and then enrolled at Concordia for Political Science.
My interest in government, should I consider a career, would be public policy, for this I believe to be level in which government and society meet. This point, for me, is one that I would like to work close to, for I believe that at that point there exists a disparity. Whereas when I was that teenager, this disparity seemed to represent an absence of the state, and I perceived it as something that needed to be filled; government needed better policy, better institutions, based on better theory. Public policy needs to be woven into Society, so that it can have more control in the forming and directing of individuals. Perhaps this could offer a way to integrate the ‘less desirable’ into society into a meaningful way.
Over the last few years I have changed my position many times on what role I think the government should have in peoples lives. I’ve been privileged to learn new ways of thinking and theorizing politics. But none has come so close as helping me understand my own personal experiences with politics, governance and subjectivity. Foucault presents a framework to complex problems that previously only seemed renderable in trite or singular ways.
I now consider what I encountered as a ‘disparity’ between what I perceived as society or government and individuals, was simply a grey area beyond the norms of control; the limits of these norms, and the transgressions thereof, seems intricately linked to some notion of freedom. The disparity is not good or bad, but a condition of possibility; an open grid, if you will. Perhaps it is only at the fringe where one can operate in full freedom. Of course, how that freedom is exercised may differ: my friend eventually committed suicide, while I’ve become interested in critical theory and phenomenology.
Freedom therefore doesn’t necessarily seem to be an inherently ‘good’ thing. It seems to be a complex thing. Systems offer areas of reduced complexity while increasing productivity. In this way, the sphere is also of reduced freedom, for the tradeoff is the norms of the system. Power, as the shaper of the norms, can’t be analyzed from within a system, for at that point, it has already done its job. I think this is why Foucault seeks to analyze power relations in society from the point of resistance against different forms of power, for it is at that point where freedom and power clash. (Power 329)
A concern of the self is therefore a concern for the self in relation to the systems in which it operates. A concern might lead one to want to have a better understanding of the system, to understand what forces are acting on the self. To gain that understanding, one must look to the fringe, where the struggle takes place. This determined orientation is an example of the exercise of freedom, for such action is not required or prescribed by any force of power; it derives solely from a care of the self. Further, perhaps it is only at the limits of a system, under the auspice of our full freedom, where we can fully call our selves our own.
