Foucault and the use of exposure: discipline, ethics, and self-writing

ABSTRACT

This essay develops the concept of exposure as it functions in Michel Foucault's philosophical project. I argue that exposure is a critical component of subject formation in disciplinary society. It also is a concept that can elucidate Foucault's ethics as a form of resistance to power. Discipline forms subjects through processes of exposure that, on the one hand, isolate individual bodies and derive discursive knowledge and norms from them. On the other hand, discipline communicates a variety of techniques and knowledge to physical bodies until those techniques and knowledge are incorporated. Some ethical practices, such as self-writing, mimic disciplinary practices insofar as they derive knowledge from bodily exposure and serve as important tools in embodying new knowledge. However, these ethical practices can be used to counter-disciplinary ends in everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• exposure
• discipline
• discourse
• documentation
• writing

Acknowledgement

Parts of this essay appear in my dissertation: Strand Sheldahl-Thomason, “Discourse, Documents, and Counter-Discipline: Michel Foucault's Ethics and the Practice of Writing,” (PhD diss., Purdue University, May 2018).

Notes

1 See Dennis K. Mumby, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Communication Studies: A Rereading of an Ongoing Debate,” Communication Theory 7, no. 1 (1997): 1–28; James A. Anderson and Geoffrey Baym, “Philosophies and Philosophic Issues in Communication, 1995–2004,” Journal of Communication 54, no. 4 (2004): 589–615.

2 Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 4 (1992): 351–52.

3 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 234.

4 Robert Dobbin, ed. and trans., The Cynic Philosophers from Diogenes to Julian (New York: Penguin, 2012), 28–60.

5 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 232.

6 Ibid., 234.

7 Edward F. McGushin, Foucault's Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), xvii.

8 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 25–26.

9 Ibid., 141.

10 Ibid., 147.

11 Ibid., 148.

12 Ibid., 150.

13 Ibid., 151 original emphasis.

14 Ibid., 152.

15 Ibid., 170.

16 Ibid., 174.

17 Ibid., 179.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 184.

20 Ibid., 189.

21 Ibid., 190.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 191 original emphasis.

24 Ibid., 192.

25 Ibid., 191. See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 2010).

26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.

27 Ibid., 30.

28 Ibid., 192.

29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin, 2009), xiii.

30 Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 96.

31 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 319.

32 McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 100.

33 Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Continuum, 2006).

34 Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, ed. Trevor Winkfield, trans. John Ashbery et al. (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1995), 3.

35 Ibid., 4.

36 Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” 353.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 361.

39 Kendall R. Phillips, “Spaces of Invention: Dissention, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 339.

40 Ibid., 338.

41 Martha Cooper and Carole Blair, “Foucault's Ethics,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 4 (2002): 529.

42 See McGushin, Foucault's Askēsis; Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2002).

43 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 108.

44 Ibid.

45 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 207.

46 Ibid., 209.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 210.

49 C. R. Haines, ed. and trans., The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Lucius Verus, Antoninus Pius, and Various Friends, Volume I (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1919), 181.