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Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of AutopoiesisAuthor(s): James D. FaubionSource: Representations, No. 74, Philosophies in Time (Spring, 2001), pp. 83-104Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176050

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JAMES D. FAUBION

Toward an Anthropologyof Ethics: Foucault and the

Pedagogies of Autopoiesis

IN THE UNITED STATES AT LEAST, 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 voicein ReinventingAnthropology,ublished in 1969 under the editorship of Dell Hymes. It

has, however, proven to be far more durable than the Generation of Love. Though

prevailingly leftist, its voices-neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, "queer"-havebecome increasingly diverse over the past three decades. The recent controversyover Alfred Kroeber's treatment of his Yahi interlocutor, Ishi, is only one of manyindications that its intensity remains quite high. 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 almostentirely by

thewayside. Anthropologists may worry

atpresent

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 field."

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 Patternsof Culture(1934), Richard Brandt's Hopi Ethics(1954), and

Gregory Bateson's NJaven1958) to Clifford Geertz's Religionof 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, suffer 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

REPRESENTATIONS 74 ? Spring 2001 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

ISSN 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

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tendency to dissolve value into obligation, the desirable into the normative, of

which the very definition of ethics as "codes of conduct" is already guilty.2 Even

more commonly, and much more anachronistically, they manifest a tendency-relativist if not precisely subjectivist-to confine the scope of ethical validity within

the tidy and closed boundaries of one or another "culture" or "tradition." As an

increasing number of anthropologists have become aware, we must now face a

much less tidy, much less insular sociocultural landscape, in which the boundaries

of neither cultures nor traditions can be taken either analytically or methodologi-

cally for granted, and in which the cultural relativism of Boas and his heirs must

consequently always fall short.3

At the very least, then, a return to the ethical field would seem anthropologi-

cally timely, if not patently overdue.4 It has a farther-reaching urgency as well. Vir-

tually all the behavioral sciences, and many of their humanistic cousins, have long

been laboring with an understanding of action that continues to leave them waver-ing between two mutually repellent extremes. The one has its purest expression as

decisionism, whether economistic or Sartrean. The other appears as determinism

in any number of guises. Both are recognizable in the familiar oppositions between

agency and structure, between choice and compulsion. Ostensibly falling some-

where in the middle, "social constructionism" has garnered increasing popularitysince the 1980s. Yet social constructionism, which comes in its own multitude of

guises, often turns out actually to repeat one or the other of the alternatives that it

is designed to transcend. In Ian Hacking's persuasive judgment, it is often more

analytically impoverished than at first sight it seems; and what, I think, it all toooften lacks is a full regard of the ethical field itself.5 In clearer focus, that field cer-

tainly includes choice, but it also reveals an array of human activities that are nei-

ther deliberative nor "driven." It is also the privileged setting for distinctive sorts

of cultural events. Or so, if in what must of necessity be a preliminary and schematic

way, I shall argue.

Putting the ethical field into clearer focus is no easy matter, and modern philos-

ophy is less an aid than a further hindrance. On the one hand, Immanuel Kant

and his diverse successors have insistedupon

the subordination of the"good"

to

the "right,"of the consequential to the deontological.6 On the other hand, utilitari-

ans and the majority of their conventionalist and subjectivist confreres have objecti-

fied the good, but only at the cost of reducing it to what one or another person

(or community, or society, or civilization) believes it to be.7 Each of these positionsexecutes at least a partial erasure of the ethical, whether in reducing it to a moral

residuum or in reducing it to a moral radical. The erasure has been carried so far

by now that the "ethical" and the "moral" are in many discursive quarters-in-

cluding the quarters of ordinary English usage-virtual synonyms.Aristotle offers a more felicitous starting point. In his view, ethics concerns the

promotion and procurement of "thriving" or "happiness" (?5atiLgovia)-which

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

the ethical field to be nothing more than yet another field 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."'1 Championing the cause ofJiirgen 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." 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, syntheticform" (123). Privitera'sFoucault calls for the "reappropriation of 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 relevanceof which must be understood indirectly, via gradual cultural processes" (124). Privi-

tera's Foucault may be "a sensitive measure for changes in the Zeitgeist of Western

countries, where the retreat from politics is accompanied by an increase in 'private'and aesthetic efforts 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 takinginto account the individual's interactive dimension as a socialized being" (125). Or

to put it somewhat differently: "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'sportrait, in which

Foucault 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 different creature indeed. I

might further point out that the interview of which Privitera makes most regularuse 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.12I

might finally pointout that Foucault fashions his

analyticsof ethics

onlyas

partof 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 relationshipo

others-the very stuff of ethics," it is further concerned with "the whole range of

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

individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with eachother."'3Perhaps 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-

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cault is no nostalgist. Does he nevertheless grant aesthetics an ethical pride of place?Does he, as Privitera would have it, elevate an "art of living in which the pleasuresand exigencies of life attain the perfection of a successful balance, as in the case of

a work of art" (Problems f Style, 124), to the status of a cardinal ethical ideal? Is

Foucault a "romantic" at least in this respect? Whatever else might be said, thereis simply nothing in Foucault's thought, early or late, that would justify attributingto him a valorization of so classical, or so static, a conception of art as Privitera

does. Throughout, his interest in aesthetics is not an interest in classical standards

of beauty, but rather in avant-gardist explorations of the formal limits of significa-tion. His exemplar is certainly not Racine.

In "What Is Enlightenment?" Foucault remarks with evident approval Charles

Baudelaire's decisively antinostalgist dictum that the genuine modern must not de-

spise but instead heroize the present ("What Is Enlightenment?" 310). He follows

Baudelaire in applauding that modern attitude for which the hyperbolization ofthe value of the present would be "indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imag-ine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but

by grasping in it what it is" (311). He follows him further in emphasizing that such

an attitude implies not simply an exaggerated relation to the present but also an

ascetic relation to the self: "to be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the

flux of passing moments; it is to take oneself as the object of a complex and difficult

elaboration" (311). This is Baudelaire's dandy. This is the man who "makes of his

body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence a work of art" (312).It

is, however,justthis man from whom Foucault

proceeds immediatelyto dis-

tance both himself and the philosophical ethics he goes on to outline. The Baude-

lairean dandy subsists only within art, as a sort of institutional consummation. He

is-or at least strives to be-"all style." For precisely this reason, he is not yet an

avant-gardist. Foucault's more determinate precedent lies accordingly not even

with Baudelaire, but instead with Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot is Foucault's more

genuine thinker of the "outside,"who willfully transgresses the stylistic criteria that

distinguish one genre from another, who conflates fiction with philosophical reflec-

tion, critique with narration. 4 It is far less Baudelaire than Blanchot who resonates

in Foucault's characterization of the philosophical ethic as grounded in a "limit-

attitude" for which style is simply one of many limiting categories susceptible to a

"practical critique which takes the form of a possible crossing-over [franchissement]"

("What Is Enlightenment?" 315). Aestheticist? Or rather anti-aestheticist? Let us

put it this way: Baudelaire's dandy may function as a reference point for the modern

philosophical ethic, but only because the dandy and the modern philosopher both

labor under the obligation to stylize-to give form-to themselves.'5 But the phi-

losopher, alas, cannot stop there. He, or she, has a broader and more restless obliga-tion to resist all complacency, to put both the world and the self to continual test.

The ethics of Foucault's philosopher has as its telos not formal perfection, but in-

stead "the release of oneself from oneself" [se deprendree soi-meme],an ostensibly

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

stood as "a form of continual self-bricolage" (xxxix).Foucault'sown 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 factthat such a stance is one-if one of indefinitely many others-that his analytics is

designed to resolve and to encompass is enough to render chimerical that third

Foucault, forwhom 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 PsychicLifeofPower(1997), wearinga guise uncomplicated by even a single reference to any of his work beyond the first

volume of TheHistoryof Sexuality 1978). He appears again in Giorgio Agamben's

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

One of the mostpersistent eaturesof Foucault'swork is its decisive abandonmentof

the traditionalapproach o the problemof power,which is based onjuridico-institutionalmodels... in favorof an unprejudicedanalysisof the concretewaysin whichpowerpene-tratessubjects'very bodies and forms of life.... [I]n his final years Foucaultseemed to

orient this analysisaccordingto two distinct directives or research:on the one hand, the

studyof thepoliticalechniquessuchas the scienceof thepolice)with which the Stateassumes

and integratesthe care of the natural life of individuals into its very center;on the other

hand,the examinationof the technologiesfthe elfbywhichprocessesof subjectivation ringthe individualto bindhimself to his own identityandconsciousness nd,at the sametime,to an externalpower.'6

Were Agamben's terminology accepted as an entirely general, an unexceptionableconstrual of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, ethics would once again effec-

tively be under erasure; the considered practice of freedom would effectively 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

humanpossibility.

It doesnot, however, perpetrate

the error ofpresuming

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 first volume of TheHistoryofSexuality,Foucault

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

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

the first and second volumes of the History,he undergoes a change of mind.'7 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 have

them be.

Political domination, economic exploitation, and psychosocial subjugation are

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

fluid asymmetries of force and influence that charge even the most egalitarian of

interactions, are its proper social and governmental matrix.'8 Nor should we mis-

construe even what Foucault names assujetissement-"subjectivation"-as the final,

much less the efficient, cause of any ethical project. Foucault's parameters of theethical field define 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 ... interestedn howthesubjectactivelyconstitutes tself n anactive ashionthroughpracticesof the self,thesepracticesareneverthelessnotsomethinginventedbythe individ-ual himself.They are models which he findsin his culture and which are proposed, sug-gested,imposedupon him by his culture,his society,and his socialgroup."9

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

provocation of Foucault'sanalytics of ethics lie. That analytics forsakes subjectivismbut also straddles those supra-individual enclosures within which cultural relativ-

ism and social conventionalism have long been confined. 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, qualifications.The alternative that such an analytics offers begins to emerge clearly in the

preface to The UseofPleasure,but even more clearly in several interviews, under theregulative idea of "problematization," a process through which and in which

thought reveals its "specific difference":

Whatdistinguishes hought s that it is something quitedifferent romtheset of representa-tions that underliesa certainbehavior; t is also something quitedifferent romthe domainof attitudes hat can determinethis behavior.Thoughtis not what inhabitsa certain con-duct andgivesit itsmeaning;rather, t is whatallows one to stepbackfrom thiswayof act-

ing or reacting,to presentit to oneself as an objectof thoughtand to questionit as to its

meaning,itsconditions,and itsgoals.Thoughtis freedom n relation o whatdoes,themo-tion by which one detachesoneself fromit, establishes t as an object,and reflectson it as

a problem.20

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Problematization is not only an ethical process, not a possibility for ethical thoughtalone. Yet it is problematization that provides the thematic bridge between a histori-

cally specific 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 aidthe 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 materiaof ethical concern? So, in ancient Greece, the project of cultivating

self-mastery had as its substance raa()po68ota, "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 worthiness

before 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 arejust as surely more plural than the moral high ground would have

them be.

Foucault'ssecond question: What mode ofsubjectivation 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 fine question, even thoughFoucault'sgloss of it is somewhat misleading. In introducing the mode ofsubjectiva-tion as the way "in which an individual establishes 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 throughwhich actors might assess or be directed to assess the personal applicability of any

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

theconcept

of the rule(if

not toovague)

is toonarrow;

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 field is certainly a norma-

tive field. Yet-as Foucault, in subsequent discussion, reveals himself to be quite

clearly aware-it is very often also a field 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 ilCKTltq;,what

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

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version or vision of ethical "graduation," of ethical maturity? And finally, What

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

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

straightforwardly Aristotelian. The NicomacheanEthics is the locus classicus of the

argument that ethical competence comes to us not by nature but rather throughtraining, 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 E'i8o;, 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 beingto another. Yet Foucault's schema of the ethical field 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-Aristotle's own version

of an analytics of governmentality-could still be written in full confidence of theexistence 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.23It could still be written in full confidence 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 confidence, nor share

the metaphysics by which it was informed.

At this juncture, however, the querelledes ancienset des modernes till allows of

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

NicomacheanEthicsprovides

no more than attenuatedsupport

for the naturalistic

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

ethical inquiry must not be held to the more exacting demands of mathematical or

logical proof is well known (NE Iiii 1-4). 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 reflexive practice of freedom. It would be concerned


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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 become

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

(NE IIi6-7). Plying a TEXvr,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 onesort 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 Nicomachean

Ethicsas a sort of general manual for the pedagogue of 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 differentiate voluntary actions from their involuntary counterparts:

Actionsare saidto be involuntarynot becausetheyare executed n ignoranceof what is in

one'sbestinterest,norbecausetheyare executed n a stateofcomplete gnorance,but rather

because they are executed in ignorance of their particular circumstances and

consequences....These includeknowledgeof(1) the agent,(2)the act, (3)the thing thatis affectedbyor

is in the sphereof the act;and sometimes also (4)the instrument, orinstance,a tool with

which the act is done, (5)the effect,forinstance,savingsomeone's ife, and (6)the manner,forinstance,gentlyorviolently(JE III15-16).

Heproceeds

toprovide

a number ofexamples-from legend,

from the store of con-

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

to hold. He examines the first of them, that of an agent knowing who it is who is

performing 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 [rcxiyap ayvoEi

/auo6v ye]?" (NE III 17). Granted, Aristotle is not focusing here on that reflexive

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'ssecond

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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"(dpXut?Kxovtili)which is the designing and maintenance of the

polis, il 7CnoTIKlc(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 Iviil).The object ofi nloXtttKTlmust thus be an "activity" (ev'pyeta), 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 enoughto be sufficient 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" (ipatl;),and never a "creating" or "making" (7oirTctS). At issue in that book are the intellec-

tual virtues, and especially the cardinal intellectual virtue of the ethical actor-

"practical wisdom" ()p6vrolat), skill at deliberative choice (Tnpoaipeot;).Assessingits genus, Aristotle concludes that practical wisdom cannot be a science, for it deals

with the variable, not the fixed and determinate. "Nor," he continues, "can it be

the same as 'art' [x?xvl] ... [and] not art, because practicing and making are

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

practicing well is itself the end" [oicKav 'irl l )p6vr(ot .... T?XVl . .. 6' 60t &dXo

TOY?vo; 7cpdat5E

Kca7iotilo?0;

TrfLv?Vap 7coti?Oc(; eTepov

TOT?XXo;;

6&

7ipdat5O) OcK av etir ETt yap avwil imE-ztpatia xrXo;] (NE VIv3-4). Shortly be-

fore this, he will have declared that "all art deals with bringing something into

existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thingwhich may either exist or not exist, and the efficient cause [i1dpXil] of which lies in

themakerndnot he hingmade"NEVIiv4;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 il tOXuTtKl--qua Icoilat7;, 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 field. The various activities to which Foucault refers as "practices of the

self" 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 field. Yet here, Aristotle must differ-thoughhow far is difficult 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 fissure between maker and thing made. He would thus seem

obliged to construe them 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

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

Aristotle, the "middle voice" of reflexive 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 first: one might look back to

Friedrich Nietzsche, or toJean-Jacques Rousseau, or to Michel Montaigne. Matters

of 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" (aterm I intro-duce advisedly, since ethical subject-formation can never be purely autodidactic,

even at its most reflexive), he must still be given credit for discerning, or reiterating

(see VEVIiv2: once again, matters of originality are irrelevant), the depth of the

divide between making and doing, between creation and choice. It is regrettablethat 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 influence 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 anddeterminists 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 7oirat an activity neither passively determined nor entirely "up to us."25Or

to put it more positively: for Aristotle as for Foucault, 7roirlot; is an activity in which

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

Foucault, the indeterminate house of mirrors that thus permits of access is the house

of ethical maturation.26

The allusion to Lacanianimagery

isintentional,

but not meant tosuggest

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

totle's postulate that "the life of right conduct is pleasurable in itself" (JVE viii10).He could at least agree that pleasure is an important epistemological index for ethi-

cal inquiry.27But he is not a theorist of desire (of"libido"). He is rather a genealogistof "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 relationshipthat allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being."28Nor is his analyticsclosed to other genealogies, other practices, other subjects. With its more generous

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

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too many contemporarycryptologistsof subjectivitydeployin transferring-usu-

ally with dubiousempiricalwarrant-the deep structuresof the Lacanianpsycheonto the socialplane,theplaneof interaction.It alsoprovidesus with the opportu-

nityto reconsider he whole dialecticsof internalizationandobjectification hrough

which socialization itself transpires.It is especially strikingthat Foucaultplaceswithin something like Husserlianbracketsthe prevailingtenet that our earliest,ourprimarysocializationbestowsuponus oursubsequenthealth orpathology,our

subsequentpsychicfate. He invites us to considerthe possibility hat technologiesof the selfmightnotalwaysserveas the instrumentsof the reiteration ndreinforce-

ment of the cathexes and traumas,the defenses and disguisesof our childhoods,but sometimes also as the instrumentsof their revision.

Such a possibilitywouldnot, however,exist were the ethicalImaginarysimplya given ethical Symbolic seen througha speculumn aenigmateandvice versa).It

would not, in otherwords,exist were ethicalnloirlotSimited merelyto mimesis,were its solemaster-tropehetropeof simile.Foucault, orhispart,does notdevelopan ethical semiology,a maker'sguide to ethical creation,but from the cases and

commentarieshe has leftus,we can say somethingabout what such a guidewould

have to include. No less thanTpaO4t;oes7toirlot requirereasoningabout means

and ends,so it, too, must restupon the logic of that intellectualcapacitythat Aris-

totleregardsas thesignatureofpracticalwisdom:thecapacity ordeliberation.Yet

as figuration, t must furtherrestupon a tropology, or whichsimile would be ade-

quate only if the ethical life alwaysand everywhereconsisted n "living up to" a

given exemplaror ideal. The Christianvalorizationof the imitatioChristis an obvi-

ous casein pointof sucha mimeticideal,but the case on which Foucault omments

in The UseofPleasures not in tropologicalconformitywith it. For the "practice-oriented" ethics of the classical Greekelite, an ethics that has its fulcrumin the

hiatus rrationalisetweenthegeneralityofpreceptand theparticularity f situation,simile frequentlycedes its place to irony, ragicor comic from one instance to the

next. I have myself argued that metalepsisis the master-tropeof one prominentcurrentof self-(re)formationn contemporaryGreece.29Orwe couldagainvisit the

Hageners, for whom self-formationproceedsin an open-ended synecdochethat

MarilynStrathernhas deemed "cyborgic."30 hroughouta good stretchof North

America,we could encountera strangepeoplewhose ethicalindividualismhas its

tropologicalsummum n Walt Whitman'sgrand metaphor:"Iam everything."At

the risk of advocatinga formalism that would run counter to Foucault'smethod-

ologicalnominalism,I cannothelpbutproposethattropologymightin fact consti-

tute the framework or a comparativehermeneuticsof modes of subjectivation.31ButI leavea more substantialustificationof thatproposal orthe future.32

To return, then, to what ethical 7toirlotSmust in any event be, whatever its

precise ogicorsemiology:ac(YK7jtS;,labor,evenifnotalways"disciplinary"abor.

In The UseofPleasure nd The Careof theSelf(1986),Foucaultcollects the tool kit

of the ancient ethical economy.It contains diaries, ournals, the intoLgvtigata r


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"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 praemeditatiomalorum(a reflection

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

tion of the self to itself, and if ethical 7toitrlat can (in part) be conducted alone

and 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

confidant Cornelius Fronto; in The UseofPleasure,on the management of the o'iKo

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

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

The careoftheself s ethicalin itself;butitimplies complexrelationshipswith others nsofaras this ethos f freedom is also a way of caringfor others. This is why it is importantfor afreeman who conducts himself as he should to be able to governhis wife, his children,his

household;t is also the art of governing.Ethos lsoimpliesa relationshipwith others nsofaras the care of the self enablesone to occupyhis rightfulpositionin the city,thecommunity,or interpersonal elationships,whetheras a magistrateor a friend.And the care of the selfalsoimpliesa relationshipwith the other insofaraspropercare of the selfrequires isteningto the lessons of a master.One needs a guide,a counselor,a friend,someonewho will be

truthfulwithyou.Thus, the problemof relationshipswith others s presentthroughout he

developmentof 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 another

basic 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 rejectingthe

possibilityof a

private language.An ethics

completelyunmoored from

publiccriteria 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 on

semantics alone. Like language, ethics must be taught. If ethical 7oirlot; mightsometimes 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 o others s "the very stuff" 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-

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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 flourish. I am uncertain

whether Foucault's dictum that "the slave has no ethics" is an entirely accuratecharacterization of the condition of enslavement in ancient Greece, but it neverthe-

less has an ideal-typicaljustification.34 An individual under the unflinching control

of 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 offorces?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 the case may be) instead to the enhancement and refinement of the re-

flexive 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 andpromotion

ofpower relations. Is the ethical masterthus 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 a

prohibition 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 effec-

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 fluctuating 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 reflexive process through which

one presents to oneselfa certain way of acting or reacting, asksquestions of it, exam-

ines its meaning and goals, problematization has 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 field into another,

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

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

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

Greeks, however much we fancy ourselves the beneficiaries 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 he

had previously treated, from MadnessandCivilization orward.36Yet 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.37Sometimes, 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, andso refused to recast the history of systems of thought exclusively in its terms. Prob-

lematization might lead away from what Weber had (antinomically) regarded as

rationalization 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 givenmoment. Against them, it commences as an aporia, a paradox or puzzle, a surpriseor anomaly, asjust that sort of "problem" that Foucault had found so compellinglyarticulated in the "transcendental empiricism" of Gilles Deleuze.38 Against a givenmental fabric of the

expectable,it thus commences in the

experienceof the unex-

pected, the odd, the baffling. Cybernetically, problematization thus has its provoca-tion in the encounter with what might (ormight 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 affect the same universe. As Foucault's

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

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"elaborations" and "refinements." Problematization also constitutes the dynamicinterface between one discourse and another, one discursive formation and another,

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

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

gations of the ethical field must be accorded anthropological pride of place-andnot 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 field, in which power is fluid and problematization capableof 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 field is the primary site of cultural

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

from those of an ossified governmentality (dominating, exploitative, or subjugatingas 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 field

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'sanalytics does,

Ithink, imply that

allcultural 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 genealogiesof 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 adequationofcreatural 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 oppositionof the true and the false,the values that are brought o the one and to the

other, he effectsofpowerthatdifferent ocietiesand different nstitutions inkto thesepara-tion [betweenthetwo]-all of this isperhapsnothingbutthemostdelayedresponse o that

possibilityof errorwhich is intrinsicto life. If the historyof the sciences s discontinuous, fone canin otherwordsanalyze t onlyas a seriesof"corrections," s a newdistribution hatneverfreesfinallyand once and forall the terminalmoment of truth,that is becausein it


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as well "error" onstitutesnot the forgettingor the delayof a promised accomplishmentbut theverydimensionproper o the life ofhumanbeingsandindispensableo theduration

[temps]f 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 positionamounts less to pragmatism-at least in the versions in which it has appeared in

the past two or three decades-than to a sort offallibilism. The history of thought,and so of ethical thought, is a history of trials, an open-ended history of multiplevisions and revisions, some more enduring (which is not to say "more correct")

than others.

Specifically 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 field is thus a field of the self at risk;and its pedagogies, as apparatusesfor 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 makinga closely analogous point. Autopoietic reproduction in general, Niklas Luhmann

observes,

is not merelya questionof replication,of culturaltransmission,of reproducing he same

patterns nder similarcircumstances.... the primary process s the productionof the next

elementsn the actualsituation,andthese ave o bedifferentfromhepreviousne n orderto be

recognizableas events.This does notexclude the relevanceof preservablepatterns; t even

requires hem forsufficient[ly]quick recognitionof nextpossibilities.However, he [auto-

poietic] systemmaintains itselfnot by storingpatternsbut by producingelements,not by

transmittingmemes.. butby recursivelyusingevents forproducingevents.Its stability s

basedon instability.This built-inrequirementof discontinuityand newnessamounts to anecessityo handle ndprocessnformation,hatever he environmentor the stateof the systemoffersas 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 briefly 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

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dilemmas of decisionismand determinism.Not altogether ndependently, think

we mightexpect it to enrichthe subtletyof the anthropologyof embodiment,and

especiallyto advance it beyondthe now classic formulationsof Bourdieu'sOutline

of a Theory fPracticepublished n Frenchin 1972)and Mary Douglas'sNatural

Symbols1973),neitherof which leavesufficientlyample analyticalroom (toput itmildly)for the reflexivepracticeof freedom,and both of which leave ethical (andmost other sortsof) transformationargelyin theoreticalsuspension.43 thinkwe

might expectit to enrichthe still somewhat ragmentedanthropologyof globaliza-tion and localization,which has tended so farto concentrateethnographicallyon

the circulationandappropriation f materialculture,and to treatthe circulationof

thought argelyundertheweathered andantireflexive) ubricof"ideologization."Criticsof globalizationsee it as the handmaidenof capitalism,but also as a threat

to socialand culturaldiversity.Ethnographicresearchdoes not, however, end to

confirm at leastthe latterof theirsuspicions. n spiteof all the asymmetriesof flow,we do not in fact findourselvesn an evermore "Western"world.Wefindourselves

insteadin a world of an evermountingbarrageof increasinglydenseinformation;but what we makeof it is veryoften"upto us,"andthatveryoften differs romone

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

ratherone of the increasing ntensityof problematization.No wonderanthropolo-

gists-among others-are at loose ends.

An anthropologyof ethical homeostasisandchange mightalso hold theprom-ise not ofrepeatingbut of renewingthegreat questions hatcompriseWeber's oci-

ologyof

rationalization-which commences,afterall, with a still stimulatingvol-ume entitled The Protestant thicandtheSpiritof Capitalism.44ne can certainly

agree with Foucault(and Luhmann)that ethical formulationand reformulation

areusuallynot-perhaps arenever-merely a matterof the questforsemiologicalcoherence, the recognition and resolution of paradoxesand inconsistencies,the

evolution of cognitive systematicity.Weber'srelentlessly ogicalCalvin was not an

ethicaleccentric,but he wasby no meansan ethicalEveryman,either.It is further

clear that we can no longeraffirmwithout muchqualification hestoryof thegrad-ual differentiationof "spheresof value"that Webertold in his essayon the direc-

tions of religiousworld-rejection.45

We have seen too much in theway

of "de-

differentiation" f late forthat. Nor can we affirmthata desacralizedCalvinism is

theprevailingethic of capitalism oday-or eventhatanyparticularethicprevailsat all. TheProtestantthic s a classic,but it is out of date.In renewingour attention

to ethical pedagogies-and to their external relation not simplyto the economybut to politics, to other institutional and culturalorders,other regimes, to their

micro-environmentsand their macro-environments-we might neverthelessbeable to attach a more satisfactoryappendix to the Weberiannarrative than the

mainstreamof contemporary ocialthoughthas so farsucceeded n doing.Forthat

mainstream,"reflexivity" as become a byword.For all theirdisparities,however,

prevailing heorizationsof reflexivity end to restwith an actor-in AnthonyGid-

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

sociology, still something of a scientist strictosensu-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 reflexivity 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 favoriteparadox-that of "unintended consequences"--collapseinto 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 finality would court the danger of con-

verting an anthropology of the present and in the present back into a "science ofMan." Problematization itself militates against closure. What is called for is further

research-and with it, I think, an anthropology of ethics must begin. Or, with all

due charity to the anthropological past, at the very least must begin again.

Notes

1. Fora recent overviewof the Ishi controversy,ee ChristopherShea, "The Return of

Ishi's Brain," LinguaFranca10, no. 1 (February 2000): 46-55.

2. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outlineof a Theory of Practice,trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge,

1977), 26-27.

3. For a broad-ranging discussion of this issue, see Elvin Hatch, Culture ndMorality:The

Relativityof ValuesnAnthropologyNew 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, see

Paul Rabinow, FrenchDNA: Troublen Purgatory Chicago, 1999).5. Ian Hacking, The Social Constructionf What?(Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

6. For example, John Rawls, A TheoryofJustice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).7. For a subjectivist position, see John L. Mackie, Ethics:InventingRightand WrongHar-

mondsworth, U. K., 1977); for a conventionalist position, see Gilbert Harman, TheNJa-

tureofMorality:An Introductiono Ethics (New York, 1977).8. Aristotle TheNicomacheanEthicsVIvii7 (hereafter NE). Throughout this essay, I make

use of the Loeb edition of TheNicomacheanthics, rans.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 Practiceof Freedom," n

Essential Works fMichelFoucault,vol. 1, Ethics:Subjectivitynd 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.

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11. WalterPrivitera,Problemsf Style:MichelFoucault'spistemology,rans.Jean Keller(Al-bany,1995), 123.

12. Foucault,"Genealogyof Ethics,"259, 261.13. MichelFoucault,"Ethicsof the Concernfor Self" (1984), n Ethics,300 (myemphasis).14. See MichelFoucault,"TheThoughtof the Outside"(1966), n EssentialWorksfMichel

Foucault,ol. 2,Aesthetics, ethod, ndEpistemology,d.JamesD. Faubion, rans.RobertHurleyand others(New York,1998),147-69.

15. PaulRabinow, ntroduction o Ethics, xx-xxxxix.16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:Sovereign owerand BareLife, trans. Daniel Heller-

Roazen(Stanford,1998),5 (translation lightlymodified).17. SeeJamesD. Faubion, ntroduction o Aesthetics,xxiii-xxxix.18. Foucault,"Ethicsof the Concern forSelf,"296 (translation lightlymodified).19. Ibid., 291 (translation lightlymodified).20. MichelFoucault,"Polemics,Politics,and Problematizations"1984),in Ethics,117.

21. Cf. MarilynStrathern,PartialConnectionsSabadge,Md., 1991).22. MichelFoucault,The UseofPleasure1984),vol. 2 of TheHistory fSexuality,rans.Rob-

ert Hurley(New York,1985),27.23. Max Weber,"ReligiousRejectionsof the Worldand Their Directions" 1915), n From

Max Weber:ssays n Sociology,d. and trans.Hans Gerth and C. WrightMills (NewYork,1946),351.

24. On the middle voice, cf. Stephen Tyler,"Them Others-Voices WithoutMirrors,"Paideuma4 (1998):31-50.

25. Cf.NE IIIiii6.

26. A much truncatedversion of this treatmentof the relationbetween FoucaultandAris-totle appearsin my "Hieros Gamos:Typology and the Fate of Passion,"PostmodernCulture0, no. 3 (May 2000) <http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/pmc/index.html>.

27. Cf. Rabinow, ntroduction o Ethics, xxvii.

28. Foucault,UseofPleasure,.29. James D. Faubion,ModernGreek essons:A Primern HistoricalConstructivismPrince-

ton, 1993).30. Strathern,PartialConnections,art 2.31. It shouldbe noted that Foucault's"nominalism"was a methodologicalpostureof less

than universalscope.32. I should at least add that this is a more limited assertionthan it might appear,since

modesofsubjectivation onstituteonlyone of theseveralparametersof the ethicalfield.33. Foucault,"Ethicsof the ConcernforSelf,"287.34. Ibid., 286.35. See

Foucault,Use

ofPleasure,9-50 and

214-46,on the classical

problematizationf

ethicalsubstance.36. MichelFoucault,"Le souci de laverite"(1984), n Dits etecrits, 954-1988, ed. Daniel

Defert and FrancoisEwald(Paris,1994),4:669.37. Cf. Faubion, ntroduction o Aesthetics,xxvii-xxxviii.38. Cf. MichelFoucault,"TheatrumPhilosophicum" 1970), n Aesthetics.39. Cf. Niklas Luhmann,EssaysonSelf-ReferenceNew York,1990),30-31.40. It is under the rubricof possible,and actual,"cultural nvention" hatFoucault poke

on severaloccasions about the gaymovements n Hollandand the United States.See,forexample,MichelFoucault,"The SocialTriumphof the Sexual Will"(1981), n Eth-ics,157-62. "Resistance,"or itspart,has hadmuchdiagnosticprominence n thepasttwo decades.In Foucault'sown

work,the term tends to referto the mechanical

by-


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product of the ossification of power relations. Michel De Certeau's treatment of "resis-

tance" in The Practiceof EverydayLife, published in French in 1974 and in English a

decade later,begins to approach Foucault's construal of the ethical, but remains a cate-

gory of far less historical dynamism, even potentially. Gramscian "resistance" also

bears some comparison to the Foucauldean ethical field, but always remains a moment

in 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,-10 (my emphasis).43. This is true at least of Bourdieu's theory of practice, which is also a theory of social

reproduction. His "reflexive sociology" is another matter.

44. Max Weber, The ProtestantEthic and theSpiritof Capitalism 1904-5), trans. Talcott Par-

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

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