I'm making a brief exploration of one of the most significant oppositions in Foucaut's thought, which has not been discussed that much in my experience, but I may well have overlooked some vast bibliography. In any case, there is a major polarity in Foucault between the style of living in antiquity, related to care of the self, and in which 'style' can be replaced by 'aesthetics' or 'techne', while 'living' can be replaced by 'existence', in ways I do not think make much difference to the current discussion. There is also a relation with the discussions of the government of the self and the use of pleasure. I am not getting into references and precise context, but outlining the general field.
The most obvious opposition to 'style of living' is the emergence of 'subjectivty' in the sense of some deep subject behind speech and action. Foucault's understanding of this refers in large part to the development of the confessional in Christianity, with the standard Catholic confession in private to a priest taken as the end point. There is a suggestion in this historical discussion of a historical preparation for the development of assumptions about the sıbject that come to inform Descartes, and what follows Descartes with regard to consciousness and subjectivity.
What is also at issue, if largely left to the reader (or listener since we are largely discussing posthumously published lectures here, is the historical preparation for disciplinarity. Disciplinarity can of course be followed up in Discipline and Punish, while the Cartesian Subject can be followed up in History of Madness. What is also emerging in Foucault's discussion of the rise of the 'subject' in late antiquity is a topic that was not at the centre of any of his published books, that is 'juridifcation', which could be taken as part of the background for Discipline and Punish, but covers ground that is not so much discussed in Foucault's account of the movement from spectacular punishment to prison.
'Jurdification' is the term Foucault uses for th growth of statute law in the Middle Ages, which was a process much discussed before Foucault, going back through Weber to Montesquieu, and I would suggest to a consciousness in Machiavelli that his era was codifying the Roman legal legacy. In Foucault's analysşs though, juridification begins earlier and is more pervasive. It comes into the discussion of the confessional and the evolution of church government, because of the increasing importance of Roman law to the church as well as to the medieval state. The shift towards Roman law is often dated to the thirteenth century, but was certainly in some way in process earlier than that given that knowledge of Roman law never completely disappeared from what had been the western Roman Empire, and the codification reached its height under Justinian in the east, in what was eastern Rome becoming 'Byzantium', the Hellenised version of the Roman Empire, which maintained a presence in Italy into the high Middle Ages.
For Foucault, juridification is a phenomenon that precedes the fall of the western Empire in the institutionalisation of Christianity, and the decay of republican self-government, or indeed 'parrhesia' or 'libertas', as republican discourse gave way to explicitly autocratic discourse. So the fall of political institutions in the fifth century and the new 'barbarian' forms of government and law, are laid over a continuing process in which individuals are defined as subects with a conscience to be revealed to the church, a church which disciplines and governs through laws rather than allowing style of living.
That is individuals do not create a self with its own way of encountering the ethics of social existence, but are expected to be guided by the punishments of laws enforced by the state, or para-state institutions such as the church. The possibilities for centrally organised violence to further uniform state-church power are revealed in the Cathar, or Albigensian, Crusades in southern France in the thirteenth century, the time at which the deliberate use of Roman law to further crown and church power, has become noticeable. It all stems from the confrontation between style of living and juridification. Style of living is predominant when laws are understood to be the writing down of custom, and are not considered to be part of the political process Juridification is predominant when the state innovates in laws and is active in enforcing uniform compliance.
I am sketching out a what is already a schematic approach in Foucault, and the intention is not to reduce Foucault to a schema to be further simplified. The relation between the more personally understood customary and the more command based state imposed form of law is evident in Sophocles' Antigone long before late Roman juridification, as is well known. The achievement I find in Foucault is to direct us to always be aware of the tension between a state legal code way of thinking and a way of thinking and a more individualised approach to living according to a combination of general respect for law and self-regulation. The edicts of Creon in Antigone still rest on assumptions of law restricted to big questions of sovereignty rather than the details of social life.
The meaning of Foucault's approach to antiquity can I believe be furthered by approaching the apparently awkward link between antique style of living and Romantic or post-Romantic ideas of self-creations that appears in Foucault. The anachronistic comparison draws our attention to how in antiquity the idea of a self-created social existence had a centrality it lacks in the nineteenth century, and since, when style of living is boınd to seem to be an exploration of marginality, alienation, or 'deep' inner experience.
Without idealising antiquity, or not as a deliberate project anyway, Foucault gets us to think about what is lost in a society in which detailed laws, inevitably backed up by a large scale administrative state with intrusive coercive powers, pushes the creation of a self not conditioned by administrative forces inwards, or to the margins. Of course Foucault was aware of the ways that antique states and religious forces tried to govern the soul, but his understanding of the limits to that government compared to a world of juridification, disciplinarity, and biopower, are a central part of his legacy.
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