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Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of AutopoiesisAuthor(s): James D. FaubionSource: Representations, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 83-104Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2001.74.1.83Accessed: 05-03-2016 16:53 UTC

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Re p r e s e n t a t i o n s 74 · Spring 2001 q t h e r e g e n t s o f t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f c a l i f o r n i a

i s s n 0734-6018 pages 83–104. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission

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Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 83

J A M E S D . F A U B I O N

Toward an Anthropology

of Ethics: Foucault and thePedagogies of Autopoiesis

In t h e U n i t e d S tat e s at l e a s t, anthropology has come to exhibit

a certain ethical self-consciousness, a certain ethical anxiety, which the immediate

heirs of Franz Boas would hardly have countenanced, perhaps hardly have under-

stood. It emerged with the protests of the 1960s and had its earliest collective voice

in Reinventing Anthropology, published in 1969 under the editorship of Dell Hymes. It

has, however, proven to be far more durable than the Generation of Love. Thoughprevaili ngly leftist, its voices—neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, ‘‘queer’’—have

become increasingly diverse over the past three decades. The recent controversy

over Alfred Kroeber’s treatment of his Yahi interlocutor, Ishi, is only one of many

indications that its intensity remains quite high.1 What might thus be called anthro-

pology’s ‘‘ethical turn’’ is indeed still very much in process. Here, I am less inter-

ested in all that it has grown to encompass and enliven than in what, as yet, it has

left almost entirely by the wayside. Anthropologists may worry at present over the

stance they should take toward the Islamic veil, pharaonic circumcision, the Occi-

dentalist trappings of the notion of universal human rights, or the ostensibly pater-nalistic regard of Ishi and of his remains, but they have yet systematically to put the

ethical itself into anthropological question, systematically to inquire into the social

and cultural themes and variations of ethical discourse and ethical practice, into

the social and cultural lineaments of what, for lack of any better terminological

placeholder, one might simply call the ‘‘ethical eld.’’

Perhaps they have thought such questioning unnecessary, or if not that, then

at least largely exhausted. After all, the ethnographic corpus is well stocked with

sustained case studies of ethics—conceived as explicit codes of conduct—from

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), Richard Brandt’s Hopi Ethics (1954), andGregory Bateson’s Naven (1958) to CliV ord Geertz’s Religion of Java (1960). Such

studies do indeed reveal to us something of the range, and the systematicity, of the

ethical imagination. The great majority of them, however, suV er from shortcom-

ings that preclude their full recuperation in the present. Not uncommonly, in what

Pierre Bourdieu has appropriately labeled an ‘‘objectivist fallacy,’’ they manifest a








85Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis

for human beings is good in itself. It thus concerns virtue ( ) and virtuous

conduct, which is ‘‘proper’’ in promoting or procuring happiness most eV ectively

and securely. Virtuosity allows of general formulation, of a catalog of rules. Yet,

however instructive it might be, such a moral catalog could never serve as an ex-

haustive ethical guidebook. Precisely because of its abstraction, it would always re-

main substantively indeterminate. Even the sheer applicability of any one of its

entries would always remain to be assessed in light of the irrevocably particularsituation in which any instance of conduct, proper or improper, must unfold. Genu-

ine ethical virtuosity consists for Aristotle always in something more, or something

else, than what we now think of as ‘‘moral imperatives.’’ It demands the active ex-

ercise of , that ‘‘practical wisdom’’ that enables us to come to terms with

what it is best for each of us to do in the particular here and now of our always

somewhat singular lives.

One need not embrace either Aristotle’s eudaimonism or his psychology in

order to give due credit to his recognition of the gaps between even the most cate-

gorical of imperatives and the vexing contingencies that impinge upon our doing the right thing from one ethically sensitive occasion to the next. His person of prac-

tical wisdom might indeed even be categorically ignorant—or at least largely so.8

Beyond ‘‘experience’’ ( ), he or she is most in need of that special sort of

‘‘perception’’ or ‘‘intuition’’ ( ) that discerns the particularities of things

( NE VIviii8). Or call it what one will: the heuristic value of Aristotle’s focus on

practical lies in its inviting us to attend to all that distinguishes the ethical

eld beyond mere obedience (or mere transgression). Virtually alone in the latter

half of this century, Michel Foucault had begun systematically to take up that invita-

tion, and with it, to eV ect an anthropological renovation of the Aristotelian enter-prise. The renovation was sti ll incomplete at the time of Foucault’s death. It merits

further development.

Foucault distills the ethical into that rapport a soi or ‘‘relation of the self to itself ’’

that manifests itself as the ‘‘considered [ re ´e chie ] practice of freedom,’’ a practice

always analytically distinct from the moral principles and codes to which it has

reference.9 His later genealogical investigations do not, however, merely recover

and repeat an anciently forged divide. They also cast into novel relief certain ethical

parameters that the ancient authors—Aristotle among others—left relatively ob-scure. The heuristic (or ‘‘methodological’’) potential of those parameters is, I think,

signal, but I am impelled to enter my evaluation of them through something of a

back door. The analytics of the ethical eld that might be extracted from Foucault’s

investigations have, at present, far fewer admirers than detractors. Even some who

do admire it fail, I think, to do justice to its genuine complexity. Three theses in

particular demand immediate attention. Least surprisingly, one of these is the thesis

that Foucault’s analytics is subjectivist, even radically subjectivist. Another is the

thesis that his analytics is aestheticist, perhaps radically aestheticist. Somewhat par-






86 R e p r e s e n t a t i o n s

adoxically in light of the other two, yet a third is the thesis that his analytics reveals

the ethical eld to be nothing more than yet another eld of ‘‘subjugation.’’

In ‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics,’’ Foucault asserts that ‘‘from the idea that the

self is not given to us, there is only one practical consequence: we have to create

ourselves as a work of art.’’10 Championing the cause of Jurgen Habermas and of

many other latter-day Enlighteners, Walter Privitera would have us read the asser-

tion as ‘‘a kind of philosophical confession,’’ a late admission of the moralism cryp-tically embedded in the labyrinths of so many earlier works.11 He would further

have us infer from it a certain ‘‘romantic positivism,’’ an extension of Gaston Bach-

elard’s ‘‘critique of substantialist epistemology . . . into a critique of morality that

more or less unites all the motifs of [Foucault’s] thought into one extreme, synthetic

form’’ (123). Privitera’s Foucault calls for the ‘‘reappropriationof pre-Christian eth-

ics’’ (124), and for an activism that concentrates no longer ‘‘on the political level of

social confrontations’’ but instead on ‘‘individual life plans, the political relevance

of which must be understood indirectly, via gradualcultural processes’’ (124). Privi-

tera’s Foucault may be ‘‘a sensitive measure for changes in the Zeitgeist of Westerncountries, where the retreat from politics is accompanied by an increase in ‘private’

and aesthetic eV orts at self-cultivation’’ (124–25), but a measure that precisely de-

marcates the shortsightedness to which those changes have led: ‘‘the reduction of

the individual to the mere ability to creatively plan a new lifestyle without taking

into account the individual’s interactive dimension as a socialized being’’ (125). Or

to put it somewhat diV erently: ‘‘after a sincere and lifelong process of revising his

views, the thinker of the ‘end of the individual’ . . . turns to a form of extreme sub-

jectivism that obscures the socialization problematic’’ (125).

I cannot address all of the presumptions that guide Privitera’s portrait, in whichFoucault the subjectivist and Foucault the aestheticist merge into one. I might at

least point out that Foucault never poses himself as a thinker of the ‘‘end of the

individual,’’ but rather of the end of Man—quite a diV erent creature indeed. I

might further point out that the interview of which Privitera makes most regular

use in constructing his portrait is the same interview in which Foucault explicitly

rejects both the possibility and the worth of transporting the past into the present.12

I might nally point out that Foucault fashions his analytics of ethics only as part

of a much broader analytics of governmentality. If ‘‘the concept of governmental-

ity makes it possible to bring out the freedom of the subject and its relationship toothers —the very stuV of ethics,’’ it is further concerned with ‘‘the whole range of

practices that constitute, dene, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that

individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other .’’13 Perhaps Privitera

reads such remarks as mere lip service. As we shall see, however, they are entirely

programmatic.

Whether any or all of the same remarks further serve as an adequate rebuttal

of allegations of romantic positivism is unclear, but largely because ‘‘romantic posi-

tivism’’ is a virtually hollow and primarily polemical category. In any event, Fou-









mystical activity that Paul Rabinow has rightly suggested might far better be under-

stood as ‘‘a form of continual self-bricolage’’ (xxxix).

Foucault’s own ethical stance—even, or perhaps particularly, as a modern phi-

losopher—does not imply that his analytics is itself normatively biased. It certainly

does not imply that everyone should aspire to be a modern philosopher. Yet the fact

that such a stance is one—if one of indenitely many others—that his analytics is

designed to resolve and to encompass is enough to render chimerical that thirdFoucault, for whom ethics could merely be reduced to subjection. This last Foucault

nevertheless seems to be too bewitchingly disenchanted a presence to bid good-bye.

So, for example, he is revived in Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power (1997), wearing

a guise uncomplicated by even a single reference to any of his work beyond the rst

volume of The History of Sexuality (1978). He appears again in Giorgio Agamben’s

recent and ostensibly more comprehensive summary, which I quote at length:

One of the most persistent features of Foucault’s work is its decisive abandonment of

the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutionalmodels . . . in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power pene-trates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life. . . . [I]n his nal years Foucault seemed toorient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, thestudy of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumesand integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on the otherhand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivation bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time,to an external power.16

Were Agamben’s terminology accepted as an entirely general, an unexceptionable

construal of Foucault’s analytics of governmentality, ethics would once again eV ec-tively be under erasure; the considered practice of freedom would eV ectively disap-

pear, and disappear into an oddly Hegelian void in which self-formation would

consist only in surrender to the transcendent. Not that such an outcome should be

regarded as a historical impossibility: one of the most incisive aspects of Foucault’s

treatment of political techniques and technologies of the self is that it never takes

the ethical for granted. It acknowledges the considered practice of freedom as a

human possibility. It does not, however, perpetrate the error of presuming that the

actualization of such a possibility is always historically given. For Foucault, ethical

practice requires not simply a repertoire of technologies but also an ‘‘open terri-tory,’’ a social terrain in which a considered freedom might actually be exercised.

In ancient Greece, that terrain was largely the province of citizen males; women

and slaves had little, if any, access to it. In the panoptic apparatus, it is ( by design!)

nowhere to be found. Within such an apparatus, within any ‘‘perfectly functional’’

disciplinary apparatus, one might observe only the dynamics of subjugation, a dy-

namics at the ethical zero-degree.

Even through the writing of the rst volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault

often seems of the opinion that our modern ‘‘liberal’’ polities diminish ethical possi-







bilities nearly to a zero-degree. During the course of the long interruption between

the rst and second volumes of the History, he undergoes a change of mind.17 He

never comes to presume that liberalism had led to anything approaching a true

ethical commons, but does come to acknowledge in the present a greater array of

ethical interstices than he had previously recognized. Such interstices are not re-

moved from power. They are not, however, spaces or places of the political micro-

management or psychosocial bondage that Agamben would mistakenly havethem be.

Political domination, economic exploitation, and psychosocial subjugation are

the Foucauldean limits of the ethical. Power relations, those mobile, malleable, and

uid asymmetries of force and inuence that charge even the most egalitarian of

interactions, are its proper social and governmental matrix.18 Nor should we mis-

construe even what Foucault names a ssujetissement —‘‘subjectivation’’—as the nal,

much less the eYcient, cause of any ethical project. Foucault’s parameters of the

ethical eld dene not causes but instead a constellation of points of reference. On

the one hand, no ethical project is altogether free. Or as Foucault puts it:

If I am . . . interested in how the subject actively constitutes itself in an active fashion throughpractices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individ-ual himself. They are models which he nds in his culture and which are proposed, sug-gested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group.19

On the other hand, here as elsewhere, Foucault himself alludes to multiple gaps:

between proposal and commitment, between suggestion and intention. Neither cul-

ture nor society nor the social group thus stands, always and everywhere, as an

insuperable boundary, either to the ethical imagination or to ethical practice. Here,

I think, is where not simply the anthropological promise but also the analytical

provocationof Foucault’s analytics of ethics lie. That analytics forsakes subjectivism

but also straddles those supra-individual enclosures within which cultural relativ-

ism and social conventionalism have long been conned. It is perhaps a sort of

‘‘historical’’ relativism in its own right; but as we shall see, it is so with several impor-

tant, and surprising, qualications.

The alternative that such an analytics oV ers begins to emerge clearly in the

preface to T he Use of Pleasure , but even more clearly in several interviews, under the

regulative idea of ‘‘problematization,’’ a process through which and in which

thought reveals its ‘‘specic diV erence’’:

What distinguishes thought is that it is something quite diV erent from the set of representa-tions that underlies a certain behavior; it is also something quite diV erent from the domainof attitudes that can determine this behavior. Thought is not what inhabits a certain con-duct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of act-ing or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to itsmeaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what does, the mo-tion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reects on it asa problem.20







Problematization is not only an ethical process, not a possibility for ethical thought

alone. Yet it is problematization that provides the thematic bridge between a histori-

cally specic genealogy of ethics and what, borrowing from the vocabulary of con-

temporary systems theory, I venture to call a comparative anthropology of the ped-

agogies of autopoiesis. It is problematization that aids Foucault, and might also aid

the anthropologist, in clarifying the dynamics not simply of ethical homeostasis but

also of ethical change, within as well as across cultural and social boundaries.

Foucault directs us to ask four primary questions of any given ethical project,

the answers to all of which must be derived from the discourses and practices of a

given sociocultural environment. First, What is the substance of the project, the

prima mater ia of ethical concern? So, in ancient Greece, the project of cultivating

self-mastery had as its substance , ‘‘carnal pleasures.’’ With later Sto-

icism, such pleasures were only one part of the broader substance of the passions.

Nor must an ethical substance always be ‘‘bodily.’’ Among such spiritual virtuosi as

Saint Augustine, as among his many followers, the project of cultivating worthinessbefore God had as its substance not the body—which was mere dross at best—but

the soul. Among the Hageners of highland New Guinea, the prima materia of

subject-formation would appear to be the social relations that any particular indi-

vidual establishes and maintains with others.21 Such variations are surely not end-

less, but they are just as surely more plural than the moral high ground would have

them be.

Foucault’s second question: What mode of subjectivation accompanies the proj-

ect? What manner or manners of coming to be an ethical subject does the actor

embrace or appeal to in orienting his or her conduct? A ne question, even thoughFoucault’s gloss of it is somewhat misleading. In introducing the mode of subjectiva-

tion as the way ‘‘in which an individualestablishes his relation to [a] rule and recog-

nizes himself as obligated to put it into practice,’’ Foucault plainly seeks to direct

our attention to the historical, cultural, and social diversity of the avenues through

which actors might assess or be directed to assess the personal applicability of any

given ethical standard.22 But for any and every such standard that might be at issue,

the concept of the rule (if not too vague) is too narrow; it at least seems to run the

risk of excluding other sorts of ethical standards besides norms, and other sorts of

ethical directives besides that of obligation. The ethical eld is certainly a norma-tive eld. Yet—as Foucault, in subsequent discussion, reveals himself to be quite

clearly aware—it is very often also a eld of ideals that actors are less obliged than

encouraged to realize. It is a domain of obedience. Yet it is also a domain of more

elective aspirations, of the ‘‘quest for excellence,’’ as we moderns like to put it, of

saintly and heroic excess—the heroic excess of the modern philosopher, to name

only one example.

Third, What work does a given ethical project demand? What , what

‘‘training,’’ what plan or plans of exercise lead to the attainment of its imago, its







version or vision of ethical ‘‘graduation,’’ of ethical maturity? And nally, What

telos, what end does the project hold out for attainment? In what does its actualiza-

tion consist? At rst glance, the derivation of these last two questions appears to be

straightforwardly Aristotelian. The Nicomachean Ethics is the locus classicus of the

argument that ethical competence comes to us not by nature but rather through

training, through exercise, through practice ( NE IIi3–8). It is also the locus classicus

of the argument that the good is not, as Plato proposed, a singular , one of the master-forms of the cosmos, but is instead plural, distinct in its content from

one species to another and—if only in its content—even from one human being

to another. Yet Foucault’s schema of the ethical eld is not, in the end, Aristotelian,

and its departure from Aristotelian precedent is twofold. Aristotle inaugurates a

(weakly) pluralist analytics of ethics, but Foucault extends its scope, historically and

culturally, far beyond its Aristotelian frontiers. The Politics —A ristotle’s own version

of an analytics of governmentality— could sti ll be written in full condence of the

existence of what Max Weber called the ethically oriented cosmos, a real world that

also embodied—or, at the very least, tended toward the realization of—the good.23

It could still be written in full condence that the Greek polis, and especially the

Athenian polis, condensed the real and the valuable into an integrated material

whole. A thorough modern, Foucault could never share that condence, nor share

the metaphysics by which it was informed.

At this juncture, however, the querelle des anciens et des modernes still allows of

mediation. If perhaps by oversight, the methodology that Aristotle espouses in the

Nicomachean Ethics provides no more than attenuated support for the naturalistic

premises from which his Politics is launched. Aristotle’s methodological maxim that

ethical inquiry must not be held to the more exacting demands of mathematical orlogical proof is well known ( NE Iiii1–4). It is worth repeating, however, that it rests

upon the more fundamental maxim that there are no other primary data relevant

to ethical inquiry than the data of human opinion, except perhaps the ‘‘data’’ of

logic ( NE Iiii–iv). Aristotle could still presume that such data could be distributed

into a natural hierarchy: the opinions of the young were never to be trusted; the

opinions of the man who was ‘‘thriving’’—as any member of the Greek elite of the

time was likely to have understood the notion of thriving—were to be favored. We

might tentatively—I should stress ‘‘tentatively’’—support Aristotle’s preference for

the ethical opinions of social elders over those of social juniors. Even so, his philo-sophical elevation of the ethical opinions of ancient Greek elders over those of

everyone else, of whatever place or time, must now appear methodologically naive

(or ‘‘ideologically motivated,’’ if one prefers). Abandon that elevation, and the result

is—or might be—a Foucauldean engagement with ethical opinion and ethical

practice. Such an engagement would no longer be concerned with the general con-

tent of what is ‘‘good for human beings.’’ It would instead be concerned with the

coalescence, the entrenchment, and the dissolution of those diverse apparatuses

that allow for and organize the reexive practice of freedom. It would be concerned







with the machinics of inescapably plural teleologies; with the generativity of that

historical, cultural, and social array of ‘‘goods’’ that at once inspire and bring into

being the subjects who are encouraged, exhorted, or duty-bound to aspire to them.

Foucault’s second departure from Aristotle is perhaps of even greater conse-

quence.

In his discussion of the acquisition of the virtues, Aristotle is at pains to empha-

size the importance of teaching, of pedagogy. He asserts: ‘‘Good builders becomeso through building well; bad ones become so through building badly. Were this

not so, no one would have need of being taught [how to build]; instead, everyone

would be born a good [builder] or a bad one. So, too, indeed it is with the virtues’’

( NE IIi6–7). Plying a , an ‘‘art’’ or ‘‘craft,’’ demands the acquisition of those

dispositions that underpin competency in it, and this comes in turn through prac-

ticing. So, too, with the acquiring of ethical competence; and this, Aristotle writes,

is why ‘‘it is of no small importance whether we become accustomed to doing one

sort of thing or another from childhood,but of very great, or rather, supreme impor-

tance’’ ( NE IIi8). We might accordingly be invited to understand the NicomacheanEthics as a sort of general manual for the pedagogueof ethics. Yet for all he has to say

about the lineaments of the virtues, and of virtuous conduct, Aristotle is remarkably

silent about pedagogy itself—its procedures, its strategies and techniques, its

‘‘scene.’’ Plato would hardly have approved.

His silence on this count is, moreover, inextricable from another, more telling

silence. In the third book of the Ethics , Aristotle reviews those epistemic conditions

that diV erentiate voluntary actions from their involuntary counterparts:

Actions are said to be i nvoluntary not because they are executed in ignorance of what is inone’s best interest, nor because they are executed i n a state of complete ignorance, but ratherbecause they are executed in ignorance of their particular circumstances andconsequences. . . .

These include knowledge of (1) the agent, (2) the act, (3) the thing that is a V ected by oris in the sphere of the act; and sometimes also (4) the instrument, for instance, a tool withwhich the act is done, (5) the eV ect, for instance, saving someone’s life, and (6) the manner,for instance, gently or violently ( NE III15–16).

He proceeds to provide a number of examples—from legend, from the store of con-

ventional wisdom, from common experience— of how such conditions might fail

to hold. He examines the rst of them, that of an agent knowing who it is who isperforming a certain action, however, only to dismiss it. ‘‘No one,’’ he says, ‘‘could

be ignorant of all these conditions together unless he were mad, nor plainly could

be ignorant of the agent—for how could he be ignorant of himself [

]?’’ ( NE III17). Granted, Aristotle is not focusing here on that reexive

awareness of one’s status, of the diacriticals of one’s being in the world, which we

have come to think of as ‘‘identity.’’ His rhetorical impatience with the putatively

simpler question of sheer sensory self-awareness should thus not lead us to ascribe

to him a similar impatience with the more complex question that Foucault’s second







parameter of ethics underscores. Even so, whether in the Ethics or elsewhere, Aris-

totle is hardly inclined to explore the complexities and perplexities of identity with

anything approaching the centrality or urgency that we moderns have come to

think they demand.

In the Ethics at least, that disinclination might even lead to something vaguely

resembling a mistake. There, Aristotle aims at codifying the abstract guidelines of

that ‘‘master-craft’’ ( ) which isthe designing and maintenance of thepolis, ( NE Ii4), and which has as its end that unique object which is

sought always for its own sake, and never for the sake of anything else ( NE Ivii1).

The object of must thus be an ‘‘act ivity’’ ( ), since it is evident

that only among the class of activities, rather than the class of latent capacities or

that of passive states, that one might locate an object perfect or complete enough

to be suYcient for us, in and of itself. It is not until the sixth book of the Ethics that

Aristotle argues explicitly that such an object must also be a ‘‘practice’’ ( ),

and never a ‘‘creating’’ or‘‘making’’ ( ). Atissue in that bookare the intellec-

tual virtues, and especially the cardinal intellectual virtue of the ethical actor— ‘‘practical wisdom’’ ( ), ski ll at deliberative choice ( ). Assessing

its genus, Aristotle concludes that practical wisdom cannot be a science, for it deals

with the variable, not the xed and determinate. ‘‘Nor,’’ he continues, ‘‘can it be

the same as ‘art’ [ ] . . . [and] not art, because practicing and making are

diV erent in kind. The end of making is distinct from it; the end of practice is not:

practicing well is itself the end’’ [ . . . . . .

] ( NE VIv3– 4). Shortly be-

fore this, he will have declared that ‘‘all art deals with bringing something intoexistence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing

which may either exist or not exist, and the eYcient cause [ ] of which lies in

the maker and not the thing made ’’ ( NE VIiv4; my emphasis).

These distinctions have a number of striking implications. One of them

amounts to a rejection of the Socratic analogy between ethical and ‘‘technical’’

virtuosity. Another is that —qua , in any case —is a technical

enterprise, though one that aims at bringing ethical practice into existence. In this

respect, it is ‘‘ethically relevant,’’ a constant and indeed privileged component of

the ethical eld. The various activities to which Foucault refers as ‘‘practices of theself ’’ or ‘‘techniques of the self ’’ or ‘‘technologies of the self ’’ are also technical

enterprises, the ethical relevance of which seems obvious enough. They are vivid

features of the Foucauldean ethical eld. Yet here, Aristotle must diV er—though

how far is diYcult to say. Taking him strictly at his word, he actually has no room

for techniques and technologies of the self in the realm of ‘‘art,’’ for all that is art

manifests a causal ssure between maker and thing made. He would thus seem

obliged to construet hem as ‘‘doings,’’ though done always for the sake of something

else. He would not thus be guilty of paradox, but could perhaps be accused of a







certain classicatory awkwardness. He might be accused of oversight as well: for

Aristotle, the ‘‘middle voice’’ of reexive activity, of an agency in which the self is

at once subject and object, doer and that to which something is done, is without its

poetic pitch.24

Foucault restores its pitch, and restores much of the genuine complexity of ethi-

cal subject-formation in doing so. He is not the rst: one might look back to

Friedrich Nietzsche, or to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or to Michel Montaigne. Mattersof originality aside, though, the moderns (and near-moderns) must, I think, be

deemed to have won at least this stage or moment of the debate. Or more fairly, we

might judge the whole matter something of a red herring. Foucault has himself

shown, after all, that practices and technologies of the self were altogether as inte-

gral to the ethical life of the ancient world as they were to its Christian successor.

Yet we must still give Aristotle his due. If he did not adequately discern the distinc-

tiveness, or perhaps even the possibility, of ethical ‘‘autodidacticism’’ (a term I intro-

duce advisedly, since ethical subject-formation can never be purely autodidactic,

even at its most reexive), he must still be given credit for discerning, or reiterating (see NE VIiv2: once again, matters of originality are irrelevant), the depth of the

divide between making and doing, between creation and choice. It is regrettable

that so few modern theorists of action have preserved this bit of his broader wisdom.

Having slighted it, they tend to rush headlong toward dichotomization: either plac-

ing both creation and choice under the inuence of a quasi-demonic psyche (or

culture, or society), or releasing both into the Elysian expanses of sheer contingency.

Hence, I would suggest, the decidedly modern quarrel between decisionists and

determinists that continues to plague us. That antagonists on both sides of this

quarrel have claimed Foucault as an ally is, I think, indicative less of his ambiguitythan of his belonging no more to one side than to the other. With Aristotle, he sees

in an activity neither passively determined nor entirely ‘‘up to us.’’25 Or

to put itmorepositively: forAristotle as for Foucault, is an activity in which

the peculiar dynamics of thought interposes itself between reaction and action. For

Foucault, the indeterminate house of mirrorsthat thus permits of access is the house

of ethical maturation.26

The allusion to Lacanian imagery is intentional, but not meant to suggest

aYnity. Foucault could perhaps agree with some suitably diluted version of Aris-

totle’s postulate that ‘‘the life of right conduct is pleasurable in itself ’’ ( NE Iviii10).He could at least agree that pleasure is an important epistemological index for ethi-

cal inquiry.27 But he is not a theorist of desire (of ‘‘libido’’). He is rather a genealogist

of ‘‘those practices by which individuals [have been] led to focus their attention on

themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of de-

sire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain relationship

that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being.’’28 Nor is his analytics

closed to other genealogies, other practices, other subjects. With its more generous

scope, it provides a refreshing alternative to those automatic psychoanalyses that







too many contemporary cryptologists of subjectivity deploy in transferring—usu-

ally with dubious empirical warrant—the deep structures of the Lacanian psyche

onto the social plane, the plane of interaction. It also provides us with the opportu-

nity to reconsider the whole dialectics of internalization and objectication through

which socialization itself transpires. It is especially striking that Foucault places

within something like Husserlian brackets the prevailing tenet that our earliest,

our primary socialization bestows upon us our subsequent health or pathology, oursubsequent psychic fate. He invites us to consider the possibility that technologies

of the self might not always serve as the instruments of the reiteration and reinforce-

ment of the cathexes and traumas, the defenses and disguises of our childhoods,

but sometimes also as the instruments of their revision.

Such a possibility would not, however, exist were the ethical Imaginary simply

a given ethical Symbolic seen through a speculum in aenigmate (and vice versa). It

would not, in other words, exist were ethical limited merely to mimesis,

were its sole master-trope the trope of simile. Foucault, for his part, does not develop

an ethical semiology, a maker’s guide to ethical creation, but from the cases andcommentaries he has left us, we can say something about what such a guide would

have to include. No less than does require reasoning about means

and ends, so it, too, must rest upon the logic of that intellectual capacity that Aris-

totle regards as the signature of practical wisdom: the capacity for deliberation. Yet

as guration, it must further rest upon a tropology, for which simile would be ade-

quate only if the ethical life always and everywhere consisted in ‘‘living up to’’ a

given exemplar or ideal. The Christian valorization of the imitatio Christi is an obvi-

ous case in point of such a mimetic ideal, but the case on which Foucault comments

in The Use of Pleasure is not in tropological conformity with it. For the ‘‘practice-oriented’’ ethics of the classical Greek elite, an ethics that has its fulcrum in the

hiatus irrationalis between the generality of precept and the particularity of situation,

simile frequently cedes its place to irony, tragic or comic from one instance to the

next. I have myself argued that metalepsis is the master-trope of one prominent

current of self-(re)formation in contemporary Greece.29 Or we could again visit the

Hageners, for whom self-formation proceeds in an open-ended synecdoche that

Marilyn Strathern has deemed ‘‘cyborgic.’’30 Throughout a good stretch of North

America, we could encounter a strange people whose ethical individualism has its

tropological summum in Walt Whitman’s grand metaphor: ‘‘I am everythi ng.’’ Atthe risk of advocating a formalism that would run counter to Foucault’s method-

ological nominalism, I cannot help but propose that tropology might in fact consti-

tute the framework for a comparative hermeneutics of modes of subjectivation.31

But I leave a more substantial justication of that proposal for the future.32

To return, then, to what ethical must in any event be, whatever its

precise logic or semiology: , a labor, even if not always ‘‘disciplinary’’ labor.

In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1986), Foucault collects the tool kit

of the ancient ethical economy. It contains diaries, journals, the or







‘‘memory books’’ that Hellenistic Greeks kept as miscellanies for the conduct of

life. It contains schedules of solitary reading, of the silent examination of the course

of one’s day, of such thought-experiments as the praemeditatio malorum (a reection

on misfortunes which may occur in the future), of the interpretation of dreams. It

contains an array of ‘‘calisthenics,’’ from the restraint of sexual and other appetites

to regular indulgence in walks in the countryside. Yet if ethics subsides in the rela-

tion of the self to itself, and if ethical can (in part) be conducted aloneand in private, Foucault grants pride of place to what we might think of as ethical

exchange. In ‘‘Self-Writing,’’ and again in ‘‘Technologies of the Self,’’ for example,

he focuses at length on one of Marcus Aurelius’s intimate letters to his friend and

condant Cornelius Fronto; in The Use o f Pleasure , on the management of the

(household, estate) and of pederastic aV airs. Nor is the privilege an arbitrary one.

Consider his remarks on the Greek ethics of the care of the self:

The care of the self is ethical in itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar

as this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others. This is why it is important for afree man who conducts himself as he should to be able to govern his wife, his children, hishousehold; it is also the art of governing. Ethos also implies a relationship with others insofaras the care of the self enables one to occupy his rightful position in the city, the community,or interpersonal relationships, whether as a magistrate or a friend. And the care of the self also implies a relationship with the other insofar as proper care of the self requires listening to the lessons of a master. One needs a guide, a counselor, a friend, someone who will betruthful w ith you. Thus, the problem of relationships with others is present throughout thedevelopment of the care of the self.33

Most of these remarks reach little beyond the Greeks, or at least beyond antiquity.

The last of them, however, is more wide-ranging. In fact, it suggests yet anotherbasic parameter of an analytics of ethics, vaguely present already in Aristotle but

better brought to the fore against the foil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Could there ever

be a perfectly private ethics, an ethics whose substance, whose mode of subjectiva-

tion, whose labors, and whose end only a single person might deem ethical as such?

The legion of ethical subjectivists notwithstanding, I think the answer can only be

no, and for very many of the same reasons that Wittgenstein adduced in rejecting

the possibility of a private language. An ethics completely unmoored from public

criteria of validity would simply be no ethics at all. It would be devoid of ethical

sense (or, for that matter, of sense tout court). Nor does such a conclusion hinge onsemantics alone. Like language, ethics must be taught. If ethical might

sometimes occur in the remote isolation of a desert cave, its primal scene is never-

theless a scene of instruction, the scene of that pedagogy, that interactive art that

has as its overarching end the crafting of human beings into beings of ethical craft.

Hence, the programmatic (and decidedly nonsubjectivist) aspect of Foucault’s

insistence that the self in its relation to others is ‘‘the very stuV ’’ of ethics, the ground-

work for a comparative hermeneutics, a comparative anthropology, of pedagogies

of autopoiesis. Precisely because it would have to delve into the devices, the strate-







gies, the tactics, and the tricks that are essential to any pedagogy, whatever its end,

such an anthropology would also have to be an anthropology of power. There is no

thinking of ethics without thinking of power, or rather of powers, whether they are

those that suppress autopoiesis or those that allow it to ourish. I am uncertain

whether Foucault’s dictum that ‘‘the slave has no ethics’’ is an entirely accurate

characterization of the condition of enslavement in ancient Greece, but it neverthe-

less has an ideal-typical justication.34 An individual under the uninching controlof another—whether completely dominated, or completely exploited, or com-

pletely subjugated—would indeed be ethically abject. Even at best, he or she could

function only as the ethical proxy of a master. Short of such abjection, autopoiesis

emerges as a ‘‘theoretical’’ possibility, a historical potential. It is in need of what I

might now more precisely identify as the social and cultural institutionalization of

a practical pedagogy in order to be made animate.

And what of the politics of such a pedagogy, of its internal disposition of forces?

Though Foucault speaks in the passage I have quoted of the ethical pedagogue as

a ‘‘master,’’ he certainly does not mean to imply that the ethical student is a slave.Short of performative inconsistency, any ‘‘ethical pedagogy’’ worthy of the name

could neither maintain nor promote abjection. Its politics consequently cannot rest

in permanent political asymmetries. The ethical master must devote himself (or

herself, as t he case may be) instead to the enhancement and renement of the re-

exive freedom of his students. He must devote himself to the production of other

masters. His politics cannot ultimately be a politics of domination. It must instead

rest in the maintenance and promotion of power relations. Is the ethical master

thus forbidden to dictate, to seduce, to punish, to use coercion with those under his

charge? Foucault does not say so, but his analytics does, I think, entail that such aprohibition must be in force, at least insofar as the commands, the seductions, the

punishments, and the coercion of which the ethical apprentice is the object e V ec-

tively cast him or her into a permanent state of compulsory obedience or irresistible

manipulation. This is why so many disciplinary and pastoral relationships fail to

be ethical relationships. Yet those relationships that, in spite of relatively permanent

asymmetries, stop short of being purely authoritarian, of being nothing more than

the play of subjugation and resistance might still be counted as ethical—if only in

small degree.

It is not, however, the issue of uctuating ethical degrees that leads Foucault

beyond an analytics of ethical homeostasis to an analytics of ethical change. Prob-

lematization takes precedence. To reiterate, as that reexive process through which

one presents to oneself a certain way of acting or reacting, asks questions of it, exam-

ines its meaning and goals, problematizationhas nothing intrinsically ethical about

it. Yet it has special interest to the genealogist (and the anthropologist) of ethics, not

merely for its role in stylization or decision-making but for its occasionally precipi-

tating or inciting the parametric transformation of one ethical eld into another,







perhaps unprecedented one. Ethical pedagogies, ethical practices remain homeo-

static so long as the contents of the Foucauldean ethical fourfold—substance, mode

of subjectivation, work, and telos—remain stable. Yet by no means the least of Fou-

cault’s achievements as genealogist is his demonstration that each of these parame-

ters can itself be (and in fact has been) the focus of problematization. In classical

Greece, pleasures were rendered problematic as an ethical substance in light of the

telos of , self-mastery; the content of ethical work was rendered prob-lematic in light of the antinomies of pederastic pleasure.35 In the early Christian

period, the received content of self-mastery was rendered problematic in light of

substantive dualism of esh and spirit; and so on. We are consequently not the

Greeks, however much we fancy ourselves the beneciaries of their legacy.

Between the Greeks and us, moreover, much else has passed besides the always

limited dialectics of subjugation and resistance, with which Foucault’s initial foray

into the history of the present of sexuality had virtually exclusively been concerned.

The dynamics of subjectivation and problematization are much broader, and far

more various. Foucault in fact retrospectively declared them to encompass all hehad previously treated, from Madness and Civilization forward.36 Yet they are not the

same as, not merely the dynamics of power-knowledge and its driving ‘‘will to

know.’’ The motors of problematization are heterogeneous. The always vested will

to know is one, but that less suspect urge that Foucault came to call ‘‘the will to

truth’’ is another.37 Sometimes, at least, problematization and its outcomes seem to

conform very closely to Weber’s developmental model of rationalization. Foucault,

however, was skeptical of the potential historical myopia of even that model, and

so refused to recast the history of systems of thought exclusively in its terms. Prob-

lematization might lead away from what Weber had (antinomically) regarded asrationalization as often as toward it. It is quintessentially unpredictable, even if not

arbitrary. Its background conditions are those in which any particular system (or

subsystem) of thought, crisply coherent or cognitively bedraggled, rests at any given

moment. Against them, it commences as an aporia, a paradox or puzzle, a surprise

or anomaly, as just that sort of ‘‘problem’’ that Foucault had found so compellingly

articulated in the ‘‘transcendental empiricism’’ of Gilles Deleuze.38 Against a given

mental fabric of the expectable, it thus commences in the experience of the unex-

pected, the odd, the baZing. Cybernetically, problematization thus has its provoca-

tion in the encounter with what might (or might not) turn out to be ‘‘information.’’39

Yet, however much it consequently stands apart from the prime Weberian hall-

mark of the history of the West, problematization also stands with it, not merely as

antecedent but as consequence. If the dynamics of problematization does not en-

tirely encompass the dynamics of rationalization, the former is at the very least an

especially intimate correlate of the latter. It is operative across the same planes, the

same ideational expanses; its repercussions aV ect the same universe. As Foucault’s

genealogy of ethics illustrates with particular acuity, it does not merely produce







‘‘elaborations’’ and ‘‘renements.’’ Problematization also constitutes the dynamic

interface between one discourse and another, one discursive formation and another,

one putative historical period and another. It is the specic mental catalyst of the

brusque ideational disruptions which Foucault so diversely investigated. His investi-

gations of the ethical eld must be accorded anthropological pride of place—and

not merely because of their illustrative clarity, nor even merely because of their

greater attention to continuity through change. They earn it instead because theyreveal that the ethical eld, in which power is uid and problematization capable

of being the catalyst of revisionary resolution, is the primary site of the active trans-

formation at once of the parameters of subjectivation and of given views of the

world. They reveal, in short, that whether opening up at the banquet table, or in

the streets, or even in the university, the ethical eld is the primary site of cultural

invention. Or to be more precise: the conditions that distinguish the ethical eld

from those of an ossied governmentality (dominating, exploitative, or subjugating

as the case may be) would appear to be necessary conditions for anything we might

properly designate as cultural invention. All that transpires elsewhere, in other situ-ations, may well have to be deemed what many sociocultural diagnostics would

have them be: reproduction or disruption; coercion or the feckless spontaneity of

‘‘resistance.’’ For the later Foucault at least, resistance is one thing; the ethical eld

and the cultural invention it allows is another, not to be reduced to mere con-

trariness.40

What follows is not that all cultural invention is or must be either ethical or

unethical. Yet Foucault’s analytics does, I think, imply that all cultural invention—

among the products of which is ideation itself—is ethically relevant. Nor is this

implausible; ‘‘facts’’ may not be ‘‘values,’’ but they certainly bear upon the formula-tion of both values and moral norms. The implication points, moreover, to what

might (and here’s the surprise) be called Foucault’s own ‘‘ethical naturalism.’’ In

any event, Foucault derives the most abstract contextualization of his genealogies

of problematization from the ‘‘hypothetical’’ vitalism of his teacher, the historian

of life sciences Georges Canguilhem. It is from Canguilhem that he borrows his

understanding of ‘‘life’’ as a continuous quest for ‘‘normativity’’—the adequation

of creatural being to its environment. It is further from Canguilhem that he derives

an understanding of thinking life as ‘‘errant.’’ In a lengthy homage, Foucault credits

Canguilhem with leading him to see that ‘‘life . . . is that which is capable of error,’’and that error, in its turn, is generative of both ‘‘human thought and its history’’:

The opposition of the true and the false, the values that are brought to the one and to theother, the eV ects of power that diV erent societies and diV erent institutions link to the separa-tion [between the two]—all of this is perhaps nothing but the most delayed response to thatpossibility of error which is intrinsic to life. If the history of the sciences is discontinuous, if one can in other words analyze it only as a series of ‘‘corrections,’’ as a new distribution thatnever frees nally and once and for all the terminal moment of truth, that is because in it







as well ‘‘error’’ constitutes not the forgetting or the delay of a promised accomplishmentbut the very dimension proper to the life of human beings and indispensable to the duration[ temps ] of the species.41

Like Canguilhem, Foucault is an ‘‘adaptationist,’’ but only at his methodological

limit. If human striving is a striving to adapt, human history—so long as it lasts—

is a failure to do so, or at least to do so permanently. Philosophically, the position

amounts less to pragmatism—at least in the versions in which it has appeared inthe past two or three decades—than to a sort of fallibilism. The history of thought,

and so of ethical thought, is a history of trials, an open-ended history of multiple

visions and revisions, some more enduring (which is not to say ‘‘more correct’’)

than others.

Specically ethical trials and errors, however, exhibit a special complexity.

They require a double coming to terms: with the self and with its natural and cul-

tural environment, but also with the relation between the two. ‘‘Knowing oneself ’’

is impossible without reference to an environment—as the systems theorists would

also avow. Yet such knowledge must thus be potentially vulnerable to any alteration,either in the self, or in its environment, or in both at once. Such alterations of course

include those wrought by the self itself (on itself, on its environment, or on both).

The ethical eld is thus a eld of the self at risk; and its pedagogies, as apparatuses

for the production and reproduction of the self, must serve not— per impossibile —

to negate but rather to control, to manage, to cope with the self in its ‘‘riskiness.’’

Aristotle had already seen that they would consequently have to provide for more

than mere mimesis. A contemporary systems theorist has his own way of making

a closely analogous point. Autopoietic reproduction in general, Niklas Luhmann

observes,

is not merely a question of replication, of cultural transmission, of reproducing the same patterns under similar circumstances. . . . the primary process is the production of the next elements in the actual situation, and these have to be di V erent from the previous one in order to berecognizable as events. This does not exclude the relevance of preservable patterns; it evenrequires them for suYcient[ly] quick recognition of next possibilities. However, the [auto-poietic] system maintains itself not by storing patterns but by producing elements, not bytransmitting memes . . . but by recursively using events for producing events. Its stability isbased on instability. This built-in requirement of discontinuity and newness amounts to anecessity to handle and process information, whatever the environment or the state of the system

oV ers as occasions.42

Cybernetically speaking, this is the essence of our ethical burden. What is endur-

ingly at issue is life itself. As Foucault could agree. As could Aristotle.

I conclude briey with a few inevitably abstract considerations of what an an-

thropology of autopoiesis and its pedagogies, so outlined, might help us to under-

stand—or in any event, to render more trenchantly problematic. As I have already

suggested, I think we might expect it to be of use in extricating ourselves from the







dilemmas of decisionism and determinism. Not altogether independently, I think

we might expect it to enrich the subtlety of the anthropology of embodiment, and

especially to advance it beyond the now classic formulations of Bourdieu’s Outline

of a Theory of Practice (published in French in 1972) and Mary Douglas’s Natural

Symbols (1973), neither of which leave su Yciently ample analytical room (to put it

mildly) for the reexive practice of freedom, and both of which leave ethical (and

most other sorts of ) transformation largely in theoretical suspension.43 I think wemight expect it to enrich the still somewhat fragmented anthropology of globaliza-

tion and localization, which has tended so far to concentrate ethnographically on

the circulation and appropriation of material culture, and to treat the circulation of

thought largely under the weathered (and antireexive) rubric of ‘‘ideologization.’’

Critics of globalization see it as the handmaiden of capitalism, but also as a threat

to social and cultural diversity. Ethnographic research does not, however, tend to

conrm at least the latter of their suspicions. In spite of all the asymmetries of ow,

we do not in fact nd ourselves in an ever more ‘‘Western’’ world. We nd ourselves

instead in a world of an ever mounting barrage of increasingly dense information;but what we make of it is very often ‘‘up to us,’’ and that very often diV ers from one

of us to the next. Our common condition is not one of bland homogeneity. It is

rather one of the increasing intensity of problematization. No wonder anthropolo-

gists—among others—are at loose ends.

An anthropology of ethical homeostasis and change might also hold the prom-

ise not of repeating but of renewing the great questions that comprise Weber’s soci-

ology of rationalization—which commences, after all, with a still stimulating vol-

ume entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.4 4 One can certainly

agree with Foucault (and Luhmann) that ethical formulation and reformulationare usually not—perhaps are never— merely a matter of the quest for semiological

coherence, the recognition and resolution of paradoxes and inconsistencies, the

evolution of cognitive systematicity. Weber’s relentlessly logical Calvin was not an

ethical eccentric, but he was by no means an ethical Everyman, either. It is further

clear that we can no longer aYrm without much qualication the story of the grad-

ual diV erentiation of ‘‘spheres of value’’ that Weber told in his essay on the direc-

tions of religious world-rejection.45 We have seen too much in the way of ‘‘de-

diV erentiation’’ of late for that. Nor can we aYrm that a desacralized Calvinism is

the prevailing ethic of capitalism today—or even that any particular ethic prevailsat all. The Protestant Ethic is a classic, but it is out of date. In renewing our attention

to ethical pedagogies—and to their external relation not simply to the economy

but to politics, to other institutional and cultural orders, other regimes, to their

micro-environments and their macro-environments—we might nevertheless be

able to attach a more satisfactory appendix to the Weberian narrative than the

mainstream of contemporary social thought has so far succeeded in doing. For that

mainstream, ‘‘reexivity’’ has become a byword. For all their disparities, however,

prevailing theorizations of reexivity tend to rest with an actor—in Anthony Gid-







dens’s sociology, something of an Everyman, in the earlier as in the later Bourdieu’s

sociology, still something of a scientist stricto sensu —capable of having some mea-

sure at least of real knowledge of the sociocultural structures within which he or

she abides. Foucault’s analytics of reexivity does not deny the possibility of such

knowledge, but neither does it presume or depend upon it. Its actor is capable, theo-

retically or practically, of assessing his or her situation, but is more likely than not

(or at least as likely as not) to err. Here, Weber’s individualistic hermeneutics of intention and his favorite paradox—that of ‘‘unintended consequences’’—collapse

into one. Here, it is not real knowledge but rather practical error that is the more

constant index at once of ethical and cultural ‘‘progress’’—a term that must as-

suredly remain in quotes.

A Foucauldean appendix to Weber could hardly be the last word, of course,

and not simply because even the rhetoric of nality would court the danger of con-

verting an anthropology of the present and in the present back into a ‘‘science of

Man.’’ Problematization itself militates against closure. What is called for is further

research—and w ith it, I think, an anthropology of ethics must begin. Or, with alldue charity to the anthropological past, at the very least must begin again.

N o t e s

1. For a recent overview of the Ishi controversy, see Christopher Shea, ‘‘The Return of Ishi’s Brain,’’ Lingua Franca 10, no. 1 ( February 2000): 46–55.

2. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge,1977), 26–27.

3. For a broad-ranging discussion of this issue, see Elvin Hatch, Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in Anthropology ( New York, 1983).

4. A very few anthropologists have recently begun to explore the domain of bioethics.Little research has, however, yet appeared in print. For an important exception, seePaul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago, 1999).

5. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).6. For example, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).7. For a subjectivist position, see John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Har-

mondsworth, U. K., 1977); for a conventionalist position, see Gilbert Harman, The Na-ture of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York, 1977).8. Aristotle Th e Nicomachean Ethics VIvii7 (hereafter NE ). Throughout this essay, I make

use of the Loeb edition of T he Nicomachean Ethics , trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge,Mass., 1975); I occasionally modify the English translation for greater clarity.

9. Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,’’ inEssential Works of Michel Foucault , vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth , ed. Paul Rabinow,trans. Robert Hurley and others ( New York, 1997), 284.

10. Michel Foucault, ‘‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’’(1984), in Ethics , 262.








product of the ossication of power relations. Michel De Certeau’s treatment of ‘‘resis-tance’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life , published in French in 1974 and in English adecade later, begins to approach Foucault’s construal of the ethical, but remains a cate-gory of far less historical dynamism, even potentially. Gramscian ‘‘resistance’’ alsobears some comparison to the Foucauldean ethical eld, but always remains a momentin a transcendent dialectic of liberation that Foucault’s skepticism could hardly endorse.

41. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Life: Experience and Science’’ (1985), in Aesthetics , 476.

42. Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference , 9–10 (my emphasis).43. This is true at least of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, which is a lso a theory of social

reproduction. His ‘‘reexive sociology’’ is another matter.44. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), trans. Talcott Par-

sons (New York, 1958).45. Weber, ‘‘Religious Rejections.’’

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Towards an Anthropology of Ethics - Faubion