Strand Sheldahl-Thomason

This paper examines the role of self-documentation in the care of the self. As is well known, Michel Foucault exposes how disciplinary power functions in hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutions to train the living for productive use. An important tool of disciplinary power is documentation, or the recording and cataloguing of the living that constitutes them as objects of knowledge. I show how documentation creates and extends knowledge to individuals. At the same time, documents become physical appendages of the lives they record, which, while separable from those lives, nevertheless affect those lives. Despite these apparently negative functions, Foucault finds that documentation can also be the means by which the living take over their own disciplining. In writings about both fiction and ancient ethics, Foucault points to self-documentation as a way of objectifying the self before the self, so that the self may train itself according to self-imposed standards. Although disciplinary power may be inescapable, self-documentation offers a technique of counter-discipline that functions alongside and against institutional discipline.

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