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Religiously Devoted to Power: Foucault and Technology

Question commonly addressed in reference to philosophers would be “what can we learn from this or that philosopher?”, in this case “what can we learn from Foucault today?” However, one could also re-phrase this question and ask “what Foucault can learn from us?”, or, in other words, is there anything in today’s social/political/economic reality that would have a deep influence on basic Foucauldian notions on subject, ideology and eth- ics? If there is one thing that could be described as fundamental paradigmatic shift that took place after the year 1984, the year of Foucault’s death, that would be a shift related to a changes in media technologies. It is a change from centralized media technologies (television, radio, newspaper) to decentralized or “distributed” technologies – digital media and the Internet, allowed primarily through digitalization and TCP/IP protocol. Major difference in practical sense is that the Internet presents at the same time commu- nicational technology (like telephone or telegraph) and mass-media technology (like televi- sion). In such context it is reasonable to ask whether this change in the power relations – a shift from centralized Panopticon-type broadcasting, to disseminated communications where every subject becomes a disseminator, means, at the same time, empowering of the people. Or does this new form of technologies form, in Foucauldian terms, the “tech- nologies of the Self”, the “arts of existence”, “intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that car- ries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.” (Foucault 1990: 17).

Foucault,

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