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Joel Fagerberg 02 June 2015

Epimelesthai Sautou and Gnothi Sauton: Resisting the Militarization and Commodification of Inner Space in the 21st Century

I. Introduction

Is critique capable of supporting a resilient, resistant form of selfhood against the encroachments of the State and capitalism upon our psyches in the present? While many critical theorists have remained caught up in attempts to deconstruct imposed forms of selfhood following the legacy of post­structuralism, this has not stopped the security state nor the market from using the unstable self as a blank slate for their designs. With critique caught flat­footed, the U.S. government and major corporations have moved to colonize frontiers of selfhood in new ways, continually claiming the right to produce forms of knowledge about and ways of caring for the self regarding its moods, motivations, fears, and prescribed protective measures. While critique struggles to find a new ethos beyond the never­ending dissections of post­structuralism, the psychology of the deconstructed self is being increasingly militarized and commodified.

I’ve chosen to focus on the militarization and commodification of our psyches (inner space) because it is at this site in particular that the deconstructed self appears to be increasingly important to reconsider. Of course this is true of other sites, too, such as in ongoing conversations surrounding the status of reason or the body in contemporary critique. But in working towards an approach to resistance that might go beyond deconstruction, it became clear to me that such an approach would find some of its stiffest opposition in the form of this profound focus on our moods, inspirations, fears, and motivations driving both the State and Capitalism today. This is because, when it comes to their approach to the realm of inner space, the notion of the self as deconstructed is currently folded directly into the programs of both the security state and the market. Whether it be through the overwhelming proliferation of potential terrorist threats via the War on Terror, or through managerial techniques for maximizing worker productivity via present­day capitalism, individuals are actually being fragmented along the lines of government and corporate interests. Their dispositions, from mood to motivation, are being molded in new ways which do not require the construction of a standardized, fixed, rational subject. Moving beyond the deconstructed self is difficult here not just because of the historical inertia of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida within the Left. It is especially difficult because the State and Capitalism have internalized aspects of those poststructuralist critiques, incorporating the deconstructed self into their strategic frameworks for militarizing and commodifying inner space. Gaining momentum on this front would be a major step forward for critique, and is therefore, worth considering at length. It would allow us to reconstruct selfhood anew in ways which subvert these forces, utilizing the constructive agency of the subject for resisting the State and capitalism today on a number of fronts including, but not limited to, inner space.

After attending to the tactics of the State and capitalism in their militarization and commodification of inner space, this essay will thus seek to formulate a counter­project. In hopes of moving critique towards a more durable form of selfhood, one capable of resisting the encroachments of the State and capitalism in our present, I will turn to Michel Foucault’s work on the intertwined values of epimelesthai sautou and gnothi sauton. In lectures and writings near the end of his career, Foucault shifted his focus to “...the relation between care and

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self­knowledge, the relation found in Greco­Roman and Christion traditions between the care of oneself and the too well­known principle ‘Know yourself’” (Michel Foucault “Technologies of the Self” 1988). In studying these relations, he noted that participation in the Greek polis was founded on the premise that one had already committed oneself to self­knowledge and self­care as a prerequisite for political involvement. By unpacking this aspect of antiquity, his thinking around these issues ultimately arrives at the potential for a new politics in our contemporary world, and not by simply romanticizing Athenian democracy as a perfectly functioning model (which it certainly was not). Instead, he spurs on a consideration of what the relationship between both epimelesthai sautou (‘to take of yourself’) and gnothi sauton (‘to know yourself’) might mean for the task of rethinking politics today.

Along the lines of this intellectual turn, I will also be calling on support from what some may consider to be an unlikely source of political inspiration: the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. By turning to Kierkegaard’s radical subjectivity, with emphasis placed upon his concepts of irony and repetition, I will be animating the thoughts of a later­Foucault in such a way as to make clearer this subject­in­resistance who has reclaimed both epimelesthai satou and gnothi sauton. If the task remains, as Foucault himself said in “The Subject and Power”, to use “...resistance as a chemical catalyst,” then we may be well served to also mix in some of Kierkegaard’s insightful work on subjectivity in order to see in what ways resistance to the State and Capitalism may take form. (Michel Foucault “The Subject and Power” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics 211). This will provide us with the a window into the ways in which a reclamation of self­knowledge and self­care may be approached by a subject­in­resistance today. I will also be looking at specific examples of contemporary attempts to resist the militarization and commodification of inner space, highlighting the ways in which people are reorienting themselves to power in inner space by undertaking self­knowledge and self­care on their own terms. II. Militarized Inner Space

Under the rule of a State whose fear of terrorism has become an overwhelming phobia with an ever­expansive scope, the inner space of the United States’ citizenry has been repeatedly inundated with the paranoia of the security state. This militarization of inner space, as Jackie Orr calls it, aims for “...the psychological organization of civil society for the production of violence” (Jackie Orr “The Militarization of Inner Space 456). The State tries to embed the necessity of its violence by tying it to pathological depictions of national security threates, imprinting the relationship between safety concerns and state intervention directly onto the psyches of its citizens. Department of Homeland Security posters show unattended backpacks on train platforms, compelling the citizen to call law enforcement immediately if they are to encounter such a suspicious site (Joseph Masco The Theatre of Operations 29). Simulated bioterrorist attacks in middle America help local boy scouts and the rest of their town participate in a national obsession with potential catastrophe that is managed by the State in both its simulated and pragmatic dimensions (Orr 474­475). Everyday reality becomes infused with a hyper­attentive attunement to the possibility of terrorism, with large doses of vague fear and patriotism added for good measure. Insecurity reigns and threats loom in the inner space of the citizenry. This space is “...not irreducibly individual” but is actually both a product of and a producer of social norms (ibid 456). It depends on an engagement between the individual and felt intensities that are projected by the State at a mass level, creating an interplay. (Joseph Masco

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The Theatre of Operations 20). To be clear, this paper will consider inner space to mean the realm in which one’s subjective awarenesses and affects, one’s emotions and concerns, are formulated through both our individual and collective experiences. Actions and their accompanying narratives are bolstered by the not­so­rational exchanges between the State and its citizenry which occur on a psychological plane. Looking at the militarization of inner space this way will allow us, with Orr, to see the how contemporary techniques of power are shaping a landscape that is at once both private and public, both partly individualized and partly communal. It will also allow us to consider inner space in the same way when we approach capitalism in the next section (section III). Doing so is important to the larger scope of this essay, in which a new politics of ethical subjectivity will require an awareness of the intersection between the personal and the collective as a fraught but dynamic locus for change.

The U.S. government has encroached upon inner space by using a unique combination of certainty and uncertainty: they’re certain that an attack is just around the corner, but it’s not clear around which corner that threat lurks behind exactly, nor what form it will ultimately take. Joseph Masco, following in the footsteps of Orr, articulates this point as well when he writes: “The inability to perfectly predict and counter threat creates in the American security system the opportunity to constitute nearly every domain and object of everyday life as a potential vector of attack…” (Joseph Masco The Theatre of Operations 20). Thus when George W. Bush announced that “Every American is a soldier now” shortly after September 11th, he was effectively enlisting citizens in a war fueled by an obsession with uncertainty that would flood the psychological landscape with insecurities (Orr 452). This is what sets the War on Terror apart from the more specific forms of fear that undergirded previous national security projects. Masco notes that “Specifically, the counterterror state proliferates danger rather than regulating it, rehearsing vulnerability in public to amplify threat rather than establishing a psychosocial space of sustainability...as the Cold War system attempted to do” (Joseph Masco The Theatre of Operations 26). Without the specificity of the nuclear bomb or the Soviet Union to stabilize this form of fear, the individual citizen today is met with the vague but horrifying notion of the “Terrorist with a WMD.” Masco elaborates further:

“This counterterror state project amplifies public fear not to mobilize citizens with the goal of engineering a political consensus...but to immobilize them, to suppress public participation in the realm of security politics by generating an atmosphere of constant imminent danger that is too large to individually engage. (ibid 168)

Each of these tactics serves to highlight the elusive omnipresence of potential threats. Furthermore, they act as attempts to legitimate, with little to no democratic involvement, the following capabilities on the part of the State: their increasing means for producing knowledge about the lives of individuals, and their growing claims to the means for providing ways of caring for citizens, namely through preemptive violence in the name of fending off proliferating terror.

With life­threatening yet incompletely defined threats always on the horizon, the citizen’s role and duties are not so clear: how can I know where and when exactly the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil will occur, and what can I do about it? If public transportation and the air we breathe are both precariously poised on the border between safe and unsafe due to a constant fear of terrorist attacks, then our subject positions are precariously poised as well. To be sure, some subjects are framed in more Otherizing poses. Glenn Greenwald, describing the

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apparent cognitive dissonance in U.S. public opinion between being against the targeting of American citizens through Drone strikes and in favor of the execution of Anwar Al­Awlaki, writes that for many of those in the U.S., “...the term ‘Americans’ doesn't include people like Anwar al­Awlaki. ‘Americans’ means their aunts and uncles, their nice neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who looks and seems ‘American’” (Glenn Greenwald “The racism that fuels the ‘war on terror’” The Guardian 2013). The racial distinctions are clear, based on more than just Greenwald’s thoughts on the subject: the FBI has been outed by the ACLU and others for using “mosque outreach” programs as covers for illegal spying on Islamic communities in America (Kari Huus “ACLU: FBI ‘mosque outreach’ program used to spy on Muslims” NBC News 2012). But in the context of the counterterror state, this racial distinction is in fact possible without articulating a fully­formed subject position for citizens to occupy against those who are crucially identified as Other.

What I mean to say here is that, because of the emphasis placed upon insecurity and uncertainty in The War on Terror, the position of the citizen­soldier is inherently unstable. This ever­present, incompletely defined terror shatters the possibility of a stable experience for the subject position of a citizen­soldier. Michael Taussig thoughts on Terror as Usual may be helpful here:

“...I can see myself already lost, lost out to terror you might say...utterly unable to absorb the fact that terror’s talk always talks back ­ super­octaned dialogism in radical overdrive, its talk presupposing if not anticipating my response, undermining meaning while dependent upon it, stringing out the nervous system on way toward hysteria, the other way toward numbing and apparent acceptance…” (Michael Taussig The Nervous System 11)

The over­zealous, expanding scale of dangers projected by the counterterror state becomes too much for the stable subject to bear. Individuals become psychologically wiped out: the “golden mean” of the more stabilized terrors from the Cold War and WWII, between too scared to respond (or consequently, conform) and scared enough to respond (or consequently, conform), has been eradicated (ibid).The self has been broken apart in response to an overflow of fear. Taussig describes this further: “...one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a rumor, a sight, something said, or not said ­ something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it” (ibid 18). Alternating between hysterically­on edge and numbed acceptance, the individual has been deconstructed by the government itself. The State does not need to fashion a coherent self for its citizenry to take on in this model, even as it stigmatizes certain populations within that citizenry. It achieves its ends precisely by creating an incoherent, overwhelming, and ever­changing set of fears for the citizen­soldier to consider, fracturing and neutralizing those individuals in the process. Moreover, this focus on imminent terrorist attacks enlarges insecurities related to other real threats to individuals and communities. Masco notes: “The slow violence of capitalism, industrial toxicity, or aging infrastructure is no match for this image of threat, which is at once everywhere and nowhere…” (Joseph Masco The Theatre of Operations 27). The attention necessary for defining and responding to the very real threats of our present is crippled as psychic resources are drained down the sinkhole of this new, potent propaganda. Instability is only worsened as the State over­reaches to define the nature of more and more threats along with their accompanying strategies of protection. The result is an expanding bubble of security discourses and practices that, while threatening to burst, still

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manages to reflect the vision of the State.The government thus continues to produce vast amounts of knowledge and to engage with new forms of preemptive violence under the banner of a War on Terror. In the process, they move to mold our emotions in the shape of certain fears, to torture thousands of individuals, to commit murders under the guise of taking care of American citizens, and to invade the privacy of those very citizens who they claim to protect.

The militarization of inner space and its accompanying fragmentation of selfhood are, of course, being accelerated by developments on the technological front.These developments are also deeply intertwined with the ways in which capitalism is seeking to commodify inner space, which will be the focus of section III. Therefore, it would be more than worth our time to at least briefly consider the ways in which advancements specifically in consumer telecommunications technologies are being utilized by the counterterror state. The most obvious examples are the massive surveillance projects such as those undertaken by the National Security Agency since 9/11. As the Associated Press reported: “...shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations” (The Associated Press 2013). Both the Bush and Obama administrations have pursued a paranoid search for digital needles in a growing global haystack. This search is the result of what Masco calls a “mosaic theory of information” in which the State thinks it must, at all costs, piece together a complicated puzzle of data bits in order to determine when and where the next terrorist attack might take place (Joseph Masco The Theatre of Operations 130). He writes: “The extensive surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency after 2001 ­ involving digital surveillance, archiving telecommunications across platforms, and data mining on a newly comprehensive global scale ­ rely on this concept” (ibid). The State has thus been able to militarize inner space by virtue of the importance of consumer technologies in both their “mosaic theory of information” and in our everyday life. Masco notes: “...if you use the Internet [or] or use a cell phone, you become part of a counterror system that is interested in comprehensively archiving telecommunications...and accruing detailed knowledge about over 800,000 people on an ever­growing global watch list” (ibid 34­35). In militarizing these technologies, the State has found new ways to encroach upon an increasingly important facet of inner space: namely, it’s cyber­based dimensions. The State continues to lay claim to inner space by defining the world of cyber­exchanges as fraught with ever­more threats that only state intervention can prevent, relying on the same narrative that powers Department of Homeland Security posters. Knowledge about one’s digital activities, and thus about oneself, is produced at an amazingly fast rate and on a humongous scale in the form of splintered bits of digital data gained through invasions of privacy. This, all in the name of protecting Americans from the next 9/11. III. Commodified Inner Space

This simultaneously personal and collective realm known as inner space is also being commodified by capitalist forces in our present. To start, our relationship with an expanding field of pharmaceuticals has become a vital site for not only self­making, but also profit­making. As Emily Martin writes, the way that physicians prescribe ever­changing combinations of Lithium­P, Effexor, Prozac, Zoloft, and many others shows how these drugs “...can be bought and sold and combined on demand in many ways, more like the parts of a motor or the ingredients of a cake...” (Emily Martin Bipolar Expeditions 152). Since direct­to­consumer

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advertising opened up in 1997, the budgets for marketing pharmaceutical rose accordingly, and sales reached “...over $15 billion in 1999” (ibid 157). In the process, these neurochemical tools have given rise to a booming business. By making these emerging practices of self­alteration into commodified ventures, a peculiar attention to our moods and motivations is growing. One way in which this phenomenon has developed has been through the use of mood charts. Martin notes that “All charts I have seen have a section, often occupying nearly half of the chart, for recording what medicines the person takes as well as how much and when they take them throughout the day,” going on to refer specifically to a new software program called Mood Monitor (ibid 186). This program links the patients’ charts directly to doctors in real time, so that they can review relationships between moods and medications in a promptly manner (ibid). One’s notions of self­knowledge and self­care are squished into a rubric which is produced by the authority of Big Pharma and the doctor’s who prescribe their drugs. This type of constant self­examination and medicinal recalibration under the guidance of for­profit entities has predictably found specific expressions with regards to the relationship between moods and worker productivity. Martin writes that: “In 2001, the business news reported that Bank One, concerned about productivity losses because of depression among its employees, instituted programs to encourage education, screening, and treatment” (ibid 189). A number of similar studies in the early 2000’s showed that depression “cost employers $31 billion per year in lost productive time,” while Internet articles and other media such as 60 minutes began examining “...links between moods like depression and the inability to leave the welfare rolls by means of finding a job” (ibid). But such crudely drawn links between worker psychology and the economy are ultimately incapable of addressing the complexities of the scenario. Martin poses the question: “...how do we separate those who would be depressed whether rich or poor and those who are depressed because they are poor” (ibid 190). These and other similar inquiries into the way that one’s economic standing and state of mind are shaped by their social context, come to reveal that the types of links being made between productivity and psyche here are blind to other obstacles which may prevent certain individuals from obtaining certain markers of financial success due to factors such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and ableism.

What they are fit for in a capitalist world, however, is an approach to moods and motivations that is “...apparently necessary for survival in the fierce economy of the present” (ibid 192). Optimizing motivation according to financial gain is a useful economic mechanism that coordinates the inner space of individuals with a shared, commodified space of market affect. As Martin writes: “In the individual as in the market, highs go naturally with speed, energy, and activity, and in the kind of society we inhabit, these states often mean vigorous circulation of our chief token of value: money” (ibid 237). Her ethnographic research at an outdoor education session for members of a Fortune 500 corporation shows that strategies for overcoming worker depression are being complemented by direct attempts to encourage manic states in employees with an eye towards their relationship to macroeconomic factors (ibid 239). Exercises such as high wire walking were meant to facilitate flexibility and fearlessness (ibid). She writes that “The goal of the employee training, which was subcontracted by the corporation to a small firm, was to enable workers to adjust rapidly to continuously changing conditions, especially if (or rather when) they were downsized” (ibid). Other firms she has researched are utilizing activities such as scavenger­hunts in order to “...generate high­energy experiences” (ibid). Considering such approaches together makes it clear that flexibility and manic productivity are becoming emblems of our economic present, emblems defined by their

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distinctly intense, creative, passionate, productive, and oftentimes, irrational character. Here we can see the notion of the unstable self as an integral part of present­day capitalism’s strategic framework in which the individual and the market are coordinated in a manic dance. Martin notes how a certain hypo­manic psychological orientation has become highly­sought after in Corporate America, one which she describes as “adaptive, scanning the environment, continuously changing in innovative ways, a creative chameleon” (ibid). This “...increasing demand for restless change and continuous development of the person at all times” creates a self which cannot be fixed in fear of losing the type of economic potency which is lauded in our current society. In this socio­economic climate, our moods and motivations are rendered amenable to constant change. This effectively dismantles the notion of a stable identity in favor of a productive malleability which must keep pace with manic markets.

The concept of optimizing the adaptability, passion, and motivation of workers for the sake of productivity is readily apparent in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s review of 1990’s French management literature from various firms (Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello The New Spirit of Capitalism 2005). Much of the discourse they reviewed follows “...a logic of ‘flexibility’ presupposing a series of engagements in, and disengagements from, various tasks and different jobs” on the part of workers (ibid 241). This burden of flexibility is faced upon entering job market, which is evident even from the beginning of the interview process (ibid 217 and 241). Boltanski and Chiapello describe how personal qualities such as “...openness, self­control, availability, good humour, composure” are being incorporated into the selection criteria of interviewers. Looking at an example of management literature from two authors named Gorgeu and Mathieu, they quote the following description of an ideal employee: “‘You do extra work even if the working day is over, you agree to come in on Saturday morning if required, you are mentally adaptable’” (ibid 241). This employee is necessary for the new realm of short­term, ever­changing occupational commitments. Consequently, the way one manages their moods and motivations becomes increasingly shaped by these economic expectations of passion and responsivity. Boltanski and Chiapello note a dominant concern throughout management literature from this period with:

“..a so­called network organization of work, wherein ‘lean’ firms seek the resources they lack from among a profusion of subcontractors [and] a labour force that is malleable in terms of employment (casual jobs, temping, self­employed workers), working hours, or the duration of work (part­timers, variable hours). (ibid 218)

One’s personality must be malleable and yet somehow fixed in its committed to work, even as subcontracting and other partial forms of employment destabilize the worker’s everyday livelihood. This new approach to the worker “...penetrate[s] more deeply into people’s inner selves ­ people are expected to ‘give’ themselves to their work” (ibid 98). Boltanski and Chiapello describe a collapsed separation between “...the qualities of the person and the properties of their labour­power” (ibid 155). The motivation to work and the ability to augment oneself are tied together in the image of the flexible, high­energy, passionate worker. Selfhood is undertaken in terms of adaptability to the market, hoisting insecurities upon the position of the wage­earner. Workers “...with restricted mobility, especially women with children, are especially vulnerable” as a result, since they must find a way to balance both the specific demands of motherhood and the volatile conditions of work (ibid 241). These wage­earners can be “...forced to resign following compulsory transfers, or changes in hours, or simply as a result of the

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abolition of the school bus” (ibid). Ultimately, present­day capitalism’s ideal of an intense, adaptable, hyper­productive employee fosters insecurities for certain workers who can’t immediately meet those demands.

In considering the ways in which inner space is being commodified by this present­day capitalism, we must return once again to the site of consumer telecommunications technologies, where the emergent focus on worker enthusiasm and flexibility is allowing more and more profit to be squeezed from the efforts of workers. Following Boltanski and Chiapello’s thoughts on the collapsing barrier between personal and professional worlds, this barrier has been increasingly weakened by the types of 24/7 communication made possible in what Jacobin Magazine writer and editor Nicole M. Aschoff refers to as “The Smartphone Society.” In her article, titled after the aforementioned phrase, she describes how:

“Neoliberal demands for flexible, mobile, networked workers make [this technology] essential. Smartphones extend the workplace in space and time. Emails can be answered at breakfast, specs reviewed on the train home, and the next day’s meetings verified before lights out. The Internet becomes the place of work, with the office just a dot on the vast map of possible workspaces.” (Nicole Aschoff “The Smartphone Society” Jacobin Magazine Spring 2015)\

She goes on to refer to the new, exploitative and insecure types of temporary work like courier services like TaskRabbit in which workers must monitor their phones and respond to incoming demands for odd­jobs and deliveries. Through ventures like TaskRabbit and other similar outfits, the smartphone is facilitating “...contingent employment models and self­exploitation by linking workers to capitalists without the fixed costs and emotional investment of more traditional employment relations” (ibid).

But the exploitation doesn’t end there. Iphones and other smart­devices have also allowed companies to mine our desire for curating and communicating our identities, reaping massive profits all the while. Instagram, Facebook, snapchat, and others of a similar ilk invite us to take part in a digital cultivation of self­image. These rituals of self­expression, however, are also huge sources of money for those behind the innovations. Aschoff writes: “Regardless of intention, when a person uses their smartphone to connect with people and the imagined digital community, the output of their labor of love is increasingly likely to be sold as a commodity” (ibid). Facebook provides just one striking example of this dynamic, with “945 million users accessing through their smartphones” in 2013 and “89 percent of its revenue that year [coming] from advertising, half of which came from mobile advertising” (ibid). Just like the State (with whom many telecommunications giants from Apple to Verizon have worked in programs like the NSA’s PRISM operations), capitalism has seized upon our affinity with these technologies in order to track our states of mind and our interests. It can then turn this information into profit by selling it to advertisers. Moreover, these technologies channel our self­expression in such a way that pushes us to update our sense of selfhood with every “new” product: as new ways of sharing our emotions with others become available through consumer telecommunications, the experience of sharing those emotions must change while remaining profitable. This is different than the old model of standardized, mass­produced commodities with their accompanying massified populations. The shared stability between capital and consumers has been replaced by a system in which consumer goods transform constantly but still in concert with the demands of profit.

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Thus Smartphones and their software accoutrements are, instead, what Boltanski and Chiapello call an example of “codified” authentic products. They write:

“Codification is distinct from standardization, which was a prerequisite for mass production, in the sense that it permits greater flexibility. Whereas standardization consisted in conceiving of a product from the outset, and reproducing it identically in as many copies as the market could absorb, codification, element by element, makes it possible to operate on a combinatory, and introduce variations in such a way as to obtain products that are relatively different, but of the same style. In this sense, codification allows for a commodification of difference that was not possible in the case of standardized production.” (Boltanski and Chiapello 445)

Based on this model of codification, our personal experiences through such technologies as consumers becomes codified in an ever­evolving manner as well. Our attempts to communicate and represent ourselves on the Internet take place on a constantly changing platform, producing not a standardized subject­position for the consumer but rather, an experience of selfhood which is constantly updated with every new Iphone.

The encroachments made possible by these technologies will most likely increase in the future, if Google exec Eric Schmidt is right at least. Though he doesn’t particularly frame it in those terms, Schmidt recently stated that “The evolution of Google is to go from you asking Google what to search for, to Google helping you anticipate, to make you smarter...You let Google know things, Google will help you. Will you use it? Absolutely, because it will be cheap or free” (Logan Whiteside “Google: We’ll make you smarter...if you share your data” CNN Money 2014). What this essentially means is that Google will be asking you to provide more and more personal information in order to respond to (and in the process, shape) your desires. More and more of one’s practices of self­knowledge and self­care are will be funneled through the profit­making mechanisms of corporate America. No matter how cheap or free it appears on the surface, the advertising dollars and other revenue streams will certainly bolster a system which continues to reject interests which do not fit with the market’s. The bottom line: smartphones and the larger Internet revolution which characterize our everyday life are turning the individual into a malleable interface for profitable intervention. IV. Reclaiming Self Knowledge and Self­Care

These aforementioned types of encroachments into inner space, in which anxieties and insecurities fragment selfhood along State and corporate interests, can only be adequately responded to by critique if it at first realizes that the self cannot simply remain hopeless deconstructed. Presented with a deconstructed self, the State has developed contemporary techniques for colonizing the fragmented psyches of by proliferating uncertain vulnerabilities throughout inner space. At the same time, a new approach to managing the psyche for economic ends is emerging, one in which the individual is continually re­optimized for manic engagement with the market. Thus critique must find a way to do more than just deconstruct such militarized and commodified frameworks for self­knowledge and self­care: it must also help construct a new space in which subjects can collectively develop their own means for self­understanding and self­care. If we want to resist the State and capitalism in their attempts to mold our fears, inspirations, passions, and overall states of mind for their ends, then this will also mean that we will have to increase the attention paid to the ways in which such techniques are tied to their claims to enable practices of protection, security, and care. Since the strategies by which the

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government and corporations are rendering individuals into citizen­soldiers and consumer/workers are strategically indebted to poststructuralism, it would be largely ineffective to approach the militarization and commodification of inner space without positing a way to deal with the self in a better way. I don’t mean to suggest that we need to find ways to place ourselves in new straitjackets of bourgeois morality or conformist systems of faith: this would simply make us docile and vulnerable once more. However, in the remaining space of this essay, I will be trying to answer the following question: can a self­governed, subjective ethics in our present engage productively with social change? I will then move to follow the insights gained from this question towards some practical applications based in the realm of inner space as a test­trial of sorts for rethinking our contemporary politics.

I take my inspiration for this question from a number of thoughts put forth by Michel Foucault in lectures, interviews, and short writings from the later end of his career. Following some of his (to this day) most well­known works such as Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish, Foucault started turning towards Greek Antiquity for his point of departure on a historical journey concerning the ways that individuals have engaged in the cultivation of their own selfhood. The following passage from Foucault in an interview published as “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” illuminates the details of this transition in his career:

“I had conceived the problem of the relationship between the subject and games of truth in terms either of coercive practices­such as those of psychiatry and the prison system­or of theoretical or scientific games­such as the analysis of wealth, of language, and of living beings. In my lectures at the College de France, I tried to grasp it in terms of what may be called a practice of the self; although this phenomenon has not been studied very much, I believe it has been fairly important in our societies ever since the Greco­Roman period. In the Greek and Roman civilizations, such practices of the self were much more important and especially more autonomous than they were later, after they were taken over to a certain extent by religious, pedagogical, medical, or psychiatric institutions.” (Michel Foucault “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth 281­282)

He also gave an in­depth account of these ancient practices of selfhood in a lecture at the University of Vermont in October of 1982. In it he follows a transition which occurred from “...Greco­Roman philosophy in the first two centuries A.D. of the early Roman Empire [to] Christian spirituality and the monastic principles developed in the fourth and fifth centuries of the late Roman Empire” (Michel Foucault “Technologies of the Self” 1988). Foucault’s historical examination develops some resources for understanding why, though it was applied only to property owning men in practice, we may still be well­served to reclaim more autonomous forms of epimelesthai sautou and gnothi sauton as the Greeks once valued.

To start, Foucault develops the claim that methods for self­knowledge and self­care were once united in a political sense in that they were considered essential to political engagement. These intertwined concepts would come to imbue a general maxim of Greek life: to become the “...the doctor of oneself” (ibid). Take the following passage for example:

“In Greek and Roman texts, the injunction of having to know yourself as always associated with the other principle of having too take care of yourself, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim into operation. It is implicit in all Greek and Roman culture and has been explicit since Plato's Alcibiades I. In the Socratic dialogues, in Xenophon, Hippocrates, and in the Neoplatonist tradition from Albinus on, one had to be concerned with oneself. One had to occupy oneself with oneself before the Delphic principle...” (ibid)

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The relationship between the ideas of self­knowledge and self­care changes with the rise of Christian practices of confession and self­examination, which begin to stress self­knowledge over self­care and eventually arrive at the principle of self­renunciation (ibid). Such a move from self­care to self­renunciation as guided by a peculiar form of self­knowledge is relevant to the position many individuals are in with regards to the State and capitalism today (see: sections II and III of this essay). Foucault explains the thinking behind contemporary calls for self­renunciation as follows: “We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self­renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self­renunciation” (ibid). This Christian morality also stressed an external authority, something which our contemporary understanding of morality also puts forth (ibid). Foucault then offers this summary: “Therefore, it is difficult to see concern with oneself as compatible with morality. ‘Know thyself’ has obscured ‘Take care of yourself’ because our morality, a morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that which one can reject” (ibid). We have given up responsibility over our own selfhood, first in the face of God, and now in the faces of both the State and capitalism. The fragmentation and instabilities which are produced for the subject by the counterterror state and contemporary capitalism amount to a form of self­renunciation: one’s sense of self withers under the threat of imminent terrorist attacks and corporate managerial demands for flexibility and personal investments. Under these pressures we give in to the narratives of threats, state violence, profit, and capitalism instead of identifying problems and solutions on our own. Though Foucault’s lecture ends with the notion that the human sciences he has long criticized have broken with the Christian tradition of self­renunciation in order to facilitate the construction of subjects, I would say that the situation in our present world is one in which the self has effectively been renounced in both the majority of critical circles and by the powers­that­be: a pragmatic post­structuralism rules the day in government buildings, corporate boardrooms, and academic wings alike. Much of the legacy of some of Foucault’s own writing (especially earlier works such as “A Preface to Transgression”) are in fact prime examples of the kinds of limit­despising, transgressive self­obliteration which has come to define the resistance efforts of the Left since May of ‘68. This doesn’t mean that his later thoughts on a more autonomous and ultimately ethical approach to selfhood cannot be applied to our present situation. In fact, they seem particularly important as potential tools for responding to a situation in which his earlier concerns with the construction of fixed subject positions have been superseded by different techniques of power.

With this impression of our own historical moment in mind, it is nonetheless fruitful to consider the ancient Greek link between epimelesthai sautou and gnothi sauton. Whereas Foucault was himself more concerned with what may be considered a structuralist or even poststructuralist approach (who really cares?) to critiquing institutions of power at times, his turn towards the practices through which a subject may autonomously and ethically constitute their own selfhood is ultimately a useful point of departure for the spirit of this project: namely, the thinking through of a new ēthos for critique in which imposed structures are still criticized without leaving the subject lost in a theoretical realm of meaninglessness. Freedom from institutions can no longer mean simply eradicating authority. What comes after that? How do we then live with others without these institutions between us? By outlining more specifically the methods­in­action which characterized the Greek model, Foucault points us in a promising

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direction: “The Greeks problematized their freedom, and the freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem. But ethical in the sense in which the Greeks understood it: ēthos was a way of being and of behavior. It was a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others” (Foucault “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” 286). Freedom is not detached from other people. Foucault also pushes back on our contemporary perception of concern with oneself as essentially immoral and self­indulgent: “What makes it ethical for the Greeks is not that it is care for others. The care of the self is ethical in itself; but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ēthos of freedom is also a way of caring for others” (ibid 287). A concern with oneself is essentially a concern also in part with how one relates to others as made concrete through their actions. Here the space opens up for an ethical subjectivity which is not a radically arbitrary, ultimately questionable veil for selfishness but is, instead, a concern with the prototypical existential notion of oneself as a task that also necessitates awareness of the effects that one’s actions have regarding others. Perhaps Hell is not Other People, as Sartre would have it. Regardless, freedom in the actually existing world occurs for the subject as it is enmeshed in events other people. It remains up to individuals to build their own ēthos while still navigating coexistence. As Mark G.E. Kelly writes: “It remains an open question whether a reactivation of ethics cannot or will proceed from this quarter; Foucault leaves us only with some possible avenues for the renewal of ethics, via a new conception of subjectivity, rather than articulating an ethics himself” (Mark G.E. Kelly “Foucault, Subjectivity, and Technologies of the Self “523). From here, it is up to us to theorize and put­into­action our own particular approaches for developing self­knowledge and care of the self in a free and ethical fashion. This is what I will be starting in the next section of this essay by animating the notions of epimelesthai sautou and gnothi sauton further via Søren Kierkegaard’s subjectivity and by considering some examples of these insights­in­action against the militarization and commodification of inner space. V. The Self, Irony, and Repetition: Towards a Subjective Ethics in Action

Kierkegaard’s entire philosophical oeuvre is concerned with the dilemmas of subjectivity and selfhood. His commitment to the importance of the individual existing person is evident throughout his work, but he by no means glosses over the difficulties that one must face on their own. For the sake of specifically considering a reclamation of self­knowledge and self­care in inner space, his view on selfhood is an especially potent resource. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript for example, he writes: “...knowledge has a relationship to the knower, who is essentially an existing individual...for this reason all essential knowledge is essentially related to existence” (Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript 177). This is the basis of Kierkegaard’s commitment to the individual self. Knowledge about oneself most truthfully comes about for Kierkegaard when the individual can take this up in their own way, ensuring that it remains based upon a strong consideration and care for oneself, the knower, as a particular existing individual. He writes in a letter to the reader at the end of Repetition that: “...the exception grasps the universal to the extent that it thoroughly grasps itself. It works for the universal in that it works through itself. It explains the universal in that it explains itself...it will present everything much more clearly than the universal would” (Søren Kierkegaard Repetition 78). Arriving at self­knowledge entails action, which brings the particular in relation with the universal in a meaningful way. Kierkegaard writes:

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“...the ‘how’ which is thus subjectively accentuated precisely because the subject is an existing individual, is also subject to a dialectic with respect to time. In the passionate moment of decision, where the road swings away from objective knowledge...in the same moment the existing individual finds himself in the temporal order, and the subjective ‘how’ is transformed into a striving…” (ibid 182).

What is being said by Kierkegaard through his idiosyncratic, post­Hegelian philosophy is that the individual does not just become infinitely interested in their own selfhood when taking on subjectivity. The individual, like other selves in this world, exists in time and thus must make decisions with the knowledge that they cannot go back in time and try again no matter how awful the consequences are for oneself and other people. One does not simply live inside their own thoughts: they put them into action, essentially putting them in relation to other people in the world.

The individual is thus, in fact, well­equipped to challenge the militarization and commodification of their emotions and concerns without devolving into selfishness. More specifically, we can test out Kierkegaard in the present by seeing how some of his more specific notions of subjectivity­in­action, such as irony, are being utilized in attempts to undermine the counterterror state today. Irony is not singularly defined by Kierkegaard at any point in his writings, but we may consider the following passage to be a strong representative of his basic conception of it: “Irony arises from the constant placing of the particularities of the finite together with the infinite ethical requirement, thus permitting the contradiction to come into being” (ibid 448). On a more pragmatic level, irony consists of purposely utilizing words, symbols, or gestures in order make a point which contradicts their usual functions. For example, when Joseph Masco spoke of his colleagues purposefully using the supposed “keywords” the NSA looks for in telecommunications (enriched, extremism, etc) as a symbol of defiance, he was speaking of an ironic tactic for resisting the militarization of inner space (Joseph Masco “Boundless Informant” 2015). Similar approaches may be noted outside the practices of critical academia on websites such as Buzzfeed with their ironic memes. One such example features a picture of the main character of the popular Dos Equis commercial with the following text: “I don’t always antagonize the NSA. But when I do I Target Organization Enriched Incident Extremism Plume Recruitment Quarantine Plot Infrastructure Methamphetamine” (Buzzfeed “37 Hilarious NSA Memes & Jokes” 2013). Though it may seem petty to turn to the personal email practices of academics and low­rate pop culture humor as a source of serious resistance against the State and Capitalism, the point is that these practices show how individuals are not completely dominated by external forces. They are already formulating their own challenges to external forces on a variety of scales, beginning with these seemingly simple examples. These specific strategies neutralize the supposedly threatening content of these words which have been pumped­up with paranoia by the counterterror state. They also work to put a stick in the spokes, so to speak, of the State’s technocratic surveillance wheels by disrupting the reliability of the keywords as being linked to any particular types of threatening communication.

Thus this capacity to ironically challenge the counterterror state’s definition of threats, along with its mosaic theory of information, may provide traction for taking more seriously the agency of subjects against the State and capitalism alike. As Kierkegaard writes: “In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there” (Søren Kierkegaard “On the Concept of Irony” The Essential Kierkegaard 29). Barry Stocker in his book Kierkegaard On Politics elaborates on the mechanics of irony’s value for political resistance: “The significance of the ‘negatively free subject’ is that it is the individual

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who is free from the constraints of the state...” (Barry Stocker Kierkegaard on Politics 121). The self is freed by its ability to bring subjectivity to bear on an imposed notion, bringing attention to the contradiction between what the counterterror state wants one to think and what one actually does think. Irony acts as a clever cleaver between what the State projects and what the self experiences.

This “negatively free subject” is not capable, however, of robustly resisting the militarization and commodification of inner space unless he or she can find ways to translate irony’s challenge into more constructive action. The “how” of subjectivity becomes prominent once again, as does the connection between self­care and self­knowledge. Kierkegaard writes: “...the ethical is not merely a knowing; it is also a doing that is related to a knowing, and a doing such that the repetition may in more than one way become more difficult than the first doing” (Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript 143). Repetition is the form that the striving of an ethico­subjective thinker takes. It consists of an approach in which one tries to remain concerned with one’s own existence while also engaging in a reliably ethical fashion with others. When Kierkegaard spoke of “the moment of decision” in Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, he was pointing to the tension between an individual and the rest of the world which results upon one’s encounter with the accountability that comes with the absence of do­overs. Faced with this accountability, the free subject must consider how to sustain its freedom without wreaking havoc in the lives of others. Consistently replicating an ethical stance is a daunting task that presents itself at the moment of freedom. The free individual is compelled to go through time alongside other individuals in order to survive, and so repetition opens the project of freedom up to considerable responsibilities. Stocker articulates this facet of Kierkegaard’s thought particularly in reference to Kierkegaard’s statements about the universal and particular in Repetition (see page 11 of this essay). He writes:

“We could also think about this passage, and Repetition as a whole, as an exploration of individual agency and responsibility. It does not offer a clear political direction for the individual and if there is a political lesson, it is that the individual cannot be reduced to collective goals. The individual is shown to have great difficulty in reaching a desirable form of ethical­subjectivity, but the failures and the struggles are shown to be the most important things about human life.” (Barry Stocker Kierkegaard On Politics 15)

Kierkegaard’s work may help us understand what a simultaneously subjective and ethical approach to politics might offer in terms of an alternative to institutional politics which directly confronts the difficulties of free and ethical coexistence. Thus repetition proves that Kierkegaard was not just concerned with self­indulgent introspection: like Foucault, he saw that in order to know oneself, one must be concerned with oneself and, consequently, concerned with one’s relation to others while avoiding homogenized codes of externally enforced morality.

We can see how this understanding of repetition, with its emphasis on individual agency and the tensions between the personal and the communal, is being used to resist the commodification of inner space through such initiatives as Emily Martin’s Live Crazy Network. This website, as a forum for posting and reading about individual experiences with mental health struggles, facilitates the type of space in which moods and motivations may be reclaimed from the commodifying forces of present­day capitalism. Live Crazy is “...a nonprofit organization for the writings of anyone who wishes to describe and analyze their experiences of the mind...” that “...focuses on those mind states involving moods, high, low, or in between, that people find interesting or problematic.” (“Living Crazy” Live Crazy Network). Live Crazy is a promising

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example of how inner space may be reclaimed from capitalism in our present through an approach to self­knowledge and self­care which also follows up on Kierkegaard’s insights. This project facilitates a space for individuals to define the nature and significance of their moods on their own terms, engaging with a process of self­care that is premised on the necessity for putting subjective perspectives in dialogue with the perspectives of others without institutional interference. Live Crazy does more than just challenge the mechanisms commodifying inner space. It also repeatedly puts freedom into action, as individuals articulate and structure their own approach to grappling with mental health struggles. Those who frequent the site express their own concerns while also responding to the concerns of others. Forms of resistance like this go beyond critical deconstructions of imposed frameworks towards the building of a thriving community in which individuals may work on self­knowledge and self­care together. VI. Conclusion

The ways in which the State and capitalism are currently militarizing and commodifying our moods, motivations, passions, and concerns cannot be resisted without the development of a more resilient conception of selfhood that is also capable of contributing to a new ēthos for actually existing political change. The notion of a deconstructed self has become essential to the strategic frameworks of both the counterterror state and present­day capitalism. No longer will it suffice to approach these institutions as though they are attempting to construct a stabilized form of selfhood for us. The proliferating threats and accompanying insecurities of the War on Terror, as well as the demands for flexibility and personalized investment on the part of workers, are fragmenting individuals along the lines of government and corporate interests. Inner space, along with the new technologies which are making the militarization and commodification of this psychological realm more possible, have to be recouped by individuals in such a way that will allow epimelesthai sautou and gnothi sauton to be practiced on one’s own terms with the support of other free individuals. This is why examples such as ironic gestures against NSA surveillance and dynamic forums for mental health discussion are good places to start for resistance in our present: they show how individuals can come together and challenge imposed approaches to producing knowledge about and ways of caring for themselves in inner space while also re­staking a claim over their own respective capacities for freedom.

Following these examples, critique must move in the direction of facilitating a reclamation of self­knowledge and self­care in such a way that is not channeled through the State capitalism, nor ill­fit models of pure poststructuralism. This can and should be taken up in our present if one wishes to engage in any sort of meaningful political change. Mark G.E. Kelly expounds upon this idea, writing:

“…any argument that we are powerless to produce an ethics today will only serve to be self ­fulfilling. We are not constrained only by social structures, but by our way of thinking about things, such as a conception of subjectivity which does not allow us to recognize the crucial question of the relationship of the subject to itself which is the condition of having a conscious exercise of freedom.” (Mark G.E. Kelly 522).

Such a task may be tackled with Kierkegaard’s insights on subjectivity in mind, allowing one to expand Kelly’s question to include not just the question of the relationship of the subject to itself, but also the equally crucial question of the relationship of the subject to others. Combining Kierkegaard’s ideas with Foucault’s in a political arena may seem odd at first given their differing personal responses to various social developments during their own lives. Kierkegaard

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was an outspoken critic of populist movements, whereas Foucault was an active participant in collective protests. But such a reading is superficial and glosses over the potential for us to use these two thinkers as resources for building a new a new ēthos for political change. Writing on the relationship between these two thinkers, Barry Stocker provides a great summary of what putting these two thinkers together may accomplish: “Replacing references to Christianity with something like 'self­affecting subjectivity' may get us quite close to Foucault, or maybe we can just think of Christianity in Kierkegaard as the kind of religion which has a style of living as something more than simple asceticism or obedience”(Barry Stocker “Kierkegaard’s Subjectivity and Foucault’s Style of Life­Juridification Distinction” 2014). Both thinkers can help us build tools for new ways of engaging with politics in our present by considering our relationship to ourselves as a revolutionary front of resistance which can subvert the channels of the State and capitalism. The end result (or perhaps, the starting point of real political change) is a call for a reclamation of epimelesthai sautou and gnothi sauton. Increasing our capacities to learn about ourselves, change ourselves, remain the same in some aspects, and to take care of ourselves can contribute to new formations of collective political engagement such as the choice examples mentioned in Section V. These formations will not guarantee a completely harmonious polis, but they most certainly can help give rise to valuable methods for engaging with politics today in such a way that values both subjectivity and ethics as powerful, intertwined notions.

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