This thesis aims to explore the aesthetics of existence through the reading of J. M.
Coetzee‘s Life and Times of Michael K. In the previous discussion of this chapter, I have presented an overview of how Michel Foucault‘s notion on biopolitics, truth-telling, and the aesthetics of existence can be legitimately applied to shed a new light on the book. In light of Foucauldian notion of biopower, one can analyze and recognize the relations between his or her life and the power exerted around and upon him/herself. As an enigmatic figure, Michael K demonstrates to us how an individual is able to ward off socio-politically obligatory responsibility imposed upon an individual, even in a ―passive‖ fashion sometimes. This ―passive‖ fashion is, however, an ethics of freedom, which leads to one‘s ultimate aesthetics of existence. In the paragraphs to come, I will divide my thesis into two chapters as follows:
In Chapter One, I intend to investigate mainly Michel Foucault‘s concept on biopower/biopolitics mainly from two books, History of Sexuality and Society Must Be Defended. I will provide some historical and political backgrounds related to the emergence of biopolitics. Then, I will compare and contrast how biopower is essentially distinctive from any of the previous power of politics, and how it permeates one‘s life in a most imperceptible way. The techniques of biopower will be discussed in detail, which will also be supported by textual examples from Life and Times of Michael K. Paradoxical as it can be, Michael K, I want to argue, serves to be both an epitome and an exception among people living under the shadow of apartheid.
Chapter Two will begin with Foucault‘s theoretical framework concerning to his notion on the aesthetics of existence. Then, I will demonstrate how Michael K has endeavored to forge his life into a unique piece of art, which is in accordance with Foucault‘s theoretical concerns pertinent to freedom, perrhesia, care of the self, aesthetics of existence, and the technologies of self. As someone whose life has been disdained on the very first day even by his mother, Michael K‘s existence is neither
anticipated nor welcomed by this world around him. Nevertheless, Michael K gradually finds his own rhythm in a hostile world, calling forth the potentiality of his life. His life is, I want to argue, a life of style which begins and blossoms out of turmoil and can best exemplify what Foucault puts forth in his speeches during the last few years of his life: the aesthetics of existence.
Chapter One
From Sovereign Power to Biopower
In this chapter, I aim to expose the possibility and profitability to read J.M.
Coetzee‘s novel Life and Times of Michael K in conjunction with Foucault‘s perception of biopower. To begin with, I will commence my discussion of biopower by briefly introducing the general aspects of Foucauldian genealogy of power. This will lead to a discussion on the sovereign power and the disciplinary power. In light of this cognizance in mind, I will provide the differentiation of biopower from the two aforementioned modes of power. An overview of Foucault‘s engagement with biopolitics will be enumerated from the first volumes of The History of Sexuality and Society Must Be Defended, along with some other lecture courses. Textual examples from this novel of Michael K will be provided to exhibit how biopower as well as disciplinary power impose and impinge imperceptibly upon Michael K‘s life.
2.1 Foucault’s Theory of Power
French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was acclaimed by Fernand Braudel to be ―one of the most dazzling minds of his era,‖ is perhaps best known for his innovative observation on the idea of power. Indeed, Foucault‘s analysis of power is Only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown.
─Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
conceptually distinctive from how people might generally conceive of it. To Foucault, power does not refer to ―a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state‖ (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction 92). Nor does he consider that power indicates ―a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects…pervade the entire social body‖ (92). Thus, rather than suggesting power as some specific and coercive systems or institutions which would inflict arbitrarily and unilaterally upon its prey, Foucault avouches, instead, that power is not only ubiquitous but dynamic, as he himself puts it explicitly in an interview:
It seems to me that power is ‗―always already there‖‘, that one is never
‗outside‘ it, that there are no ‗margins for those who break with the system to gambol in. But this does not entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of domination or an absolute privilege on the side of law.
To say that one can never be ―outside‖ power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what.‖ (Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77, 141-42)
Proceeding with the hypotheses of both Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), the conceptualization of power appears to be something akin to an outflow of energy that permeates all social relations, and it is
―the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate. . .‖
(The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction 92). In other words, the Foucauldian viewpoint of power comprises a bundle of assorted relations of forces twined together with numerous social organizations.
2.2 Sovereign Power and Disciplinary Power
As mentioned above, I will now provide a general overview on the sovereign power and disciplinary power respectively. By so doing, I intend to reveal the quite remarkable disparities between the two as a preliminary step to the successive discussion of biopower.
Chronologically, Foucault categorizes all power relations into three modes:
sovereign power, disciplinary power, and the focus of the current chapter: biopower.
The sovereign power, as Foucault explicates in the first part of Discipline and Punish and the last part of Society Must Be Defended, stands for the form of power involved with the monarchial sovereignty that is customarily exercised by kings, rulers, emperors or presidents—those who possess the right to take life or let live, or, the right of life and death. Such a right to decide life and death, however, has always been exercised asymmetrically, for ―the balance is always tipped in favor of death.
Sovereign power‘s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill . . . . The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill‖ (Society Must Be Defended 240). Accordingly, the right to let live has always been entirely neglected, for it would be preposterous to expect the sovereign power to ―grant life in the same way that he can inflict death‖ (240). Also, the sovereign power is exercised substantially by the principle of what Foucault calls deduction (prélèvement). To be more specific, the sovereign power is ―essentially a right of seizure‖ (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction 136), a mechanism which deduces or subtracts
―things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it‖ (ibid.).
Aside from the sovereign power, a new mechanism of power emerged in the eighteenth century, namely, the disciplinary power. Foucault analyzes explicitly in detail about this new technique of power in one of his representative works,
Discipline and Punish (1975). Stepping into the splendid autumn of his life, Foucault canonizes this book confidently as his ―first book‖ that witnesses the zenith of his academic career. The American philosopher James Miller who authored the biography of Foucault, elucidates the historical background as well as its value of the masterpiece in The Passion of Michel Foucault:
Conceived during the most militant period of Foucault‘s activism with the French Maoists and the Groupe d‘Information sur les Prisons, it was composed between 1972 and 1947, at a time when the French ultra-left found itself in retreat and disarray. Foucault‘s most important essay in political theory, the text stages ―multiple impossibilities,‖ condemning humanism, implicitly justifying popular violence—and forcing the reader to grapple with the problematic role of hate and aggression in modern society, and in the modern psyche. (208-09)
Foucault‘s attempt at ―condemning humanism,‖ then, is conducted by his comparison between the modern and premodern modalities of punishment. It has been widely hailed and celebrated to abandon the violent and savage way of punishment utilized to exert on ―the body and blood‖ (Discipline and Punish 16) in the premodern societies.
A more ―humanized‖ form seemed to be adopted with ―less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‗humanity‘‖ (16). However, such a display of ―humanity‖
is, according to Foucault, a sheer camouflage of a more subtle and astute artifice. In tandem with the disappearance of brutal torture inflicted on the body comes the disciplinary power, which intends not only to regulate the body but, with constant surveillance, to rectify the soul.
With its concerns mainly upon the individuals, the disciplinary power aims not to return blow for blow but to restrain and remodel every individual, as Foucault asserts
explicitly, ―the chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‗train‘, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more‖ (170).
The individual body ―which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces (136)‖ turns out to be the ―docile body,‖ a body which has been thoroughly
―ameliorated‖ under such an insidious coercion. Here, Foucault seems to suggest that the disciplinary power will always undertake its incessant and imperceptible task of transforming the individuals into docile bodies so that those disciplines may one day be imbedded, internalized, and even intensified by the individuals. In ―From the Repressive Hypothesis to Bio-Power,‖ Dreyfus and Rabinow account for the scheme of disciplinary power by claiming that its goal ―was to produce a human being who could be treated as a ‗docile body.‘ This docile body also had to be a productive body‖
(134-35). It is in this regard that Foucault relates the docile body to its utility as well as its productivity, indicating that the docile bodies will then cement the power which molds them, as they all become ―political puppets‖ and ―small-scale models of power‖
(Discipline and Punish 136). In other words, the individual serves not merely as
―objects‖ of the disciplinary power but also ―as instruments of its exercise‖ (170).
Accordingly, since the individual appears to be forged out of the disciplinary power, Foucault stoutly proclaims that ―discipline ‗makes‘ individuals‖ (170) in virtue of ―the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; not only on what they do, but on what they are, will be, may be‖
(18). Or to put in another way, it is the power that ―acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations‖ (16). Once the soul internalizes the disciplines, it will be able to discipline itself through and through. In this regard, Foucault reverses the traditional conceptualization of the relations between body and soul, proposing that the soul is the prison of the body‖ (30), for ―a ‗soul‘ inhabits him and brings him
to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body‖
(29). In a similar vein, Alan D. Schrift elucidates in his article ―Discipline and Punish‖
(2013): ―Where the body of the condemned had been the focus of the earlier approach to punishment, modern penalty is directed not primarily at the body but at the soul‖
(140). Here, Schrift echoes what Foucault claims about the relations between human bodies and their souls by reiterating that it is the human souls, rather than the human bodies any more, that the modern disciplinary power intends to intervene and inflict its punishment on. Once those disciplines have been implemented and internalized with success, the souls would indeed confine the human bodies from any future deviation.
2.3 Biopower
Aside from the sovereign and disciplinary power, Foucault coined another mode of power: biopower. Biopower does not serve as the sort of power that contradicts or repels disciplinary power; in effect, they complement each other. If disciplinary power aims at taming each individual body into a docile one, biopower is then responsible for the management and distribution of the births, deaths, and illnesses of a population.
In opposition to the sovereign power which lays stress on the necessity to deprive of one‘s life, biopower serves to be the power to ―foster life‖ to the extreme instead of terminating it. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault proposes,
For the first time in history, no doubt, biopolitical existence was reflected in political existence . . . .Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate domination was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more
than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body.
(142-43)
Such a conversion can be deemed as ―one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century‖ (Society Must Be Defended 241). In this regard, life itself and the existence of each individual becomes highly political and mutually related. As a result, ―politics … became bio-politics‖ (Deyfus &
Rabinow138).
Through Foucault‘s observation, the mechanisms of power in the West underwent a tremendous change in the eighteenth century; it neither regulates nor intervenes in one‘s life. It is because the manipulation of a population requires the power to control one‘s life or death, and such a power was regarded at that time to be beyond the power of human beings. One‘s birth, illness, old age as well as death were considered to be parts of the natural law, and thus one could do nothing but let nature take its course. Since the eighteenth century, however, all the impossible have gradually been made possible due to the outgrowth of a new technique of power.
Deductive—the leading mechanism of the sovereign power—ceased to be the main concern. Instead, it was gradually supplemented and surpassed by biopower, a power
―working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow…rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them‖ (The History of Sexuality 136). In a nutshell, the primordial objective of biopower is no longer to deduce life, but to produce it to the extreme.
A rather explicit and direct example to demonstrate the differences among sovereign power, discipline power, and biopower can be found in Foucault‘s 1977-78 Collège de France lectures, in which he hypothesizes a conceivable consequences a
person might confront when he or she commits crimes such as stealing or murder.
Sovereign power hinges mainly on ―the system of the legal code with a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited‖ (Security, Territory, Population 5).
Under sovereign power, the most primitive mode of power of the three that prevailed before the eighteenth century, criminals who desecrates the laws or regulations would not only be admonished against stealing or killing but also be fined, banished or executed in public, hoping to engender fear of its people and thus dissuade them from violating any laws again. The kings or the central authority figures who are always the ones that possess the sovereign power demand their people to be completely obedient to the laws or any regulations. One‘s punishment would be expected to fit the crime, and the crime only. Nothing other than the crime itself would be taken into consideration.
Under disciplinary power, the budding power which took shape during the eighteenth century, criminals would still be penalized for their infraction of the laws.
However, ―punishment will not just be the spectacular, definitive moment of the hanging, fine, or banishment, but a practice like incarceration with a series of exercises and a work of transformation on the guilty person in the form of what we call penitentiary techniques: obligatory work, moralization, correction and so forth‖
(4). In other words, the disciplinary power is concerned not only about what the criminal did, but also the reason why he or she committed the crime, for the information gathered from each distinctive case is reckoned crucial for the prediction and prevention of any possible recidivism. People endeavor to answer questions such as: ―What are the reasons that impel the criminals to steal or to kill? Are the thieves or murderers consciously aware of what they did? What about their psychological assessment? Are they people with "normal" psychological states? Is it possible to
preclude those crimes from happening again?‖ Under such mindset, the criminals are strongly encouraged or required to undertake thorough examination in attempts to be
―fixed,‖ for criminality is deemed a serious deviation from the norms. Accordingly, the disciplinary power is characterized as ―an anatomo-politics of the human body‖
with its center ―on the body as a machine‖ (The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction 139) that can be adjusted back to its normal status. In this regard, biopower appears to lay special stress on the conservation and stability of one‘s body in lieu of the menace of death.
Also, different from the previous two modes of power, a criminal‘s punishment or motivation ceases to be the focal point under biopower. Instead, the interests reside in questions pertaining to the average rate of thefts or murders, the statistical number of thefts or murders among the population in a certain place, the social cost of such criminality, the possible regulatory controls to abate the rate of thefts and murders…to list just a few. As Foucault himself expounds, under the monopoly of biopower, ―[t]he general question basically will be how to keep a type of criminality, theft for instance, within socially and economically acceptable limits and around an average that will be considered as optimal for a given social functioning‖ (Security, Territory, Population 5). In other words, under the governance of biopower, any unstable or perilous element that might menace the ostensibly holistic harmony of the state will be under observation and domination by the government in power in order to fit in the ―socially and economically acceptable‖ category.
What, then, are the relations between biopower and disciplinary power? Do they operate separately and independently under their own operating mechanism? At first glance, biopower and the disciplinary power seem to be irrelevant or, at some point, be contrary to each other. Yet in effect, the two modes of power appear to be ―two
poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations‖
(139). That is to say, the disciplinary power and biopower do not fall into the opposite
(139). That is to say, the disciplinary power and biopower do not fall into the opposite