How does self-care in 21st-century late capitalism differ from that of classical Rome, early medieval Europe, the Renaissance, or even the Civil Rights era? A Synthesis.

In our seminar at Wayne State University August to December 2018–Self-Care with the superb alternate title, Treat Thyself–the Magnificent Seven of us have trans-historically approached/applied the concept of “self care” or, as the syllabus alternatively puts it,

‘What Michel Foucault terms the ‘technologies of the self’–practices that ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Fox 1)

We have come together not as seven gunman to help a poor village against savage thieves, but our Foucaultian inquiry is meant to help provide ways to guard against the fascist tendencies of the state to rob our livelihood by invading our interior territory and forcing us to “self-care” to their own ends. This is a dorky analogy, to be sure. But it is one that helps me to think about what we are doing and to what end, and I do believe that it is essential for our spiritual, or however you wish to put it, survival in the face of societal looters. We have been examining the various “operations on … bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being” throughout western civilization, starting in ancient Rome in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (160-180 A.D.), Ancius Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (525 A.D.), “King Alfred’s” translation of it (900 A.D.), Dhuoda’s Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son (841 A.D.), Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1553), Annibal Guasco’s Discourse of Signor Annibal Guasco to Lady Lavinia His Daughter: Concerning the Manner in which She Should Conduct Herself when Going to Court as Lady-in-waiting to the Most Serene Infanta, Lady Caterina, Duchess of Savoy (1586), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (1807), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), Stephen Greenblatt’s “At the Table of the Great: More’s Self-fashioning and Self-cancellation,” Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (republished in 2005), Foucault’s essays “Technologies of the Self” and “Truth, Power, and Self,” published in Technologies of the Self, (1988), Saidiya Hartman’s “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom,” Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (1997), Foucault’s “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” (1993), Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010), and Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light and Other Essays (2017).
In our inquiry ranging from Marcus in 160-180 A.D. to Lorde who was re-published posthumously last year, we have explored “how theories or technologies of the self posit the individual as part of or in opposition to larger political and cultural structures” (Fox 1). The key questions that we have been considering have been: “How, for example, is self- care a transgressive or radical act? How is it used to produce ideal citizens? How does self-care in 21st- century late capitalism differ from that of classical Rome, early medieval Europe, the Renaissance, or even the Civil Rights era?” (Fox 1). In this synthesis, I will respond to “How does self-care in 21st- century late capitalism differ from that of classical Rome, early medieval Europe, the Renaissance, or even the Civil Rights era?”
When Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations (160-180 A.D.), self-care could be referred to as “taking stock”; a mental cleaning-up of thoughts to take control of one’s thoughts, and harness the power of them to better one’s own, and others’, physical, mental, emotional, and social situation. A key descriptor of this is:

Men seek retreats for themselves–in the country, by the sea, in the hills–and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning. But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself. No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease: and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life. The doctrines you will visit there should be few and fundamental, sufficient at one meeting to wash away all your pain and send you back free of resentment at what you must rejoin (Aurelius 23).

Of Marcus’ Meditations, I argued that such of his passages as above are useful for us “(as post Romantic period products) to view the world not just through language–the narrow chinks in Plato’s allegorical cave (credit: William Blake)–literary methods are a way to enhance language to transport us not simply into the mind, but into the soul” (Plante, “Response: Marcus”). In writing out “meditations,” Marcus shared “his thoughts–with himself–but the subsequent, unbeknownst-to-him publication of his Meditations opens up the mind of an emperor for readers to examine 1,838 years later, and counting. Thus his writings between 121-180 A.D. serve as the “translator of a full speech which was fully present (present to itself, to its signified, to the other, the very condition of the theme of presence in general), techniques in service of language, spokesman, interpreter of an originary speech itself shielded from interpretation” (Plante, “Response: Marcus”).
Moving from Marcus to Boethius’ Consolation (525 A.D.) and “King Alfred’s” translation of it (900 A.D.), one perceives a shift from stoic self-care, “taking stock,” using a mental taking-stock in service of not just cleansing the mind, but cleansing the soul to feel a sense of “consolation” even in the midst of suffering, specifically, in prison while awaiting death. In this way, the mental practice serves both the mind and the emotional and physical body. I saw a key parallel between Boethius’ early Christian consolation and the self-care practice of writing for “consolation” as in Mary Karr’s Lit, her memoir of her recovery from suffering (alcoholism) to serenity “while working in a lit department, getting lit/drunk often and becoming enlightened (conversion to Catholicism and acceptance of a ‘higher power’).” In her memoir, Karr channels Boethius’ “‘Their eyes are used,’” Philosophy said, “‘to the dark and they cannot raise them to the shining light of truth’” (99) when she writes that her eyes, accustomed to the darkness of addiction, squinted when bursts prevailed to come through, i.e., struggling against other people’s insistence on prayer on your knees to recover. If King Alfred Catholicized Boethius, then his Consolation has successfully adapted to suit our self-care needs now.
Dhuoda’s in her Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son (841 A.D.) shows that Foucault’s (Hermeneutics) unification of the sense of self, and the self-realization through techniques, can be seen “in the corollary behaviors of repetition through writing in Dhuoda, Aurelius and present-day practices of self-care,” I wrote (Plante, “Response: Dhuoda”): “On closer examination of self-care practices, one sees that though one end is future- (after-life-) oriented and the other is present-day oriented, both use the same means (writing, self-examination, repetition) to accomplish a similar end: an at-peace mind in the midst of suffering/temporality” (Plante, “Response: Dhuoda”).
In Elizabethan self-care as shown in Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1553) and Annibal Guasco’s Discourse of Signor Annibal Guasco to Lady Lavinia His Daughter (1586) through the Lens of Stephen Greenblatt’s “At the Table of the Great: More’s Self-fashioning and Self-cancellation,” Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (republished in 2005),” it is evident that self-care methods during that time were specifically gendered. More’s self-fashioning is very different from Lavinia’s, as per the recommendation of her father in his letters. I wrote that:
More’s Dialogue is meant to “comfort” himself against tribution, and part of that “comfort” is that he is providing this comfort to others—inserting it into the reader’s “breast” and “heart.” Even in comforting himself and others, in his writing as a form of self-care while facing a very public death in the Tower, More can’t help performing. … More identifies in his performance a common enemy against which all Christians, Catholics and Protestants, could agree to fashion themselves against. In the Tower, he is still fashioning—he giveth the world his sense of self, and by God, he can taketh it away—by honoring that self-fashioned creation to his bodily demise. (Plante, “Response: More”).
In (stark) contrast, Guasco writes to his daughter: “you will need to cultivate politeness and charm of manner as a gateway to people’s favor, and to note in the other ladies whatever seems to become them, endeavoring to copy it, and if there is anything in which they seem to be wanting … then you must avoid in yourself what you judge to be unbecoming in the others” (Guasco 101). More adhered to those qualities of himself which he judged “to be unbecoming in others (the King of England)”; he “performed” the self he had fashioned in such a way as to be completely inflexible, to the point of death and self-cancellation. Guasco does not want his daughter to do this (understatement). Conversely, she is not to fashion any sense of self that is unique or individual to her in order to rise from mid to upper class; she is in fact to quelch any “self” by “copying” those qualities she finds favorable in others, looking to the outside to bring objects/behaviors in and in deciding what behaviors to cancel out. Female self-fashioning, in this way, is about preservation through determining what others want from you–i.e., as psychologists would put it, codependency.
The contrast between Lavinia’s and More’s internal and external senses of self (respectively), and thus self-care, orients us toward the Romantic turn as seen via the voices of privilege [Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (1807), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859)] versus the ultimate voice of non-privilege–namely, that of nineteenth-century American slaves as shown in Saidiya Hartman’s “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom” (1997). Coleridge writes of a “new Earth and a new Heaven”—an individual-yet-simultaneously-communal experience of “we in ourselves” rejoicing–that occurs through physics of light and sound: in Dejection: An Ode, he concludes his poem with the joy emanating melodic echoes, and suffusing all colors of light and by simply hearing and seeing this joy, “we” experience it not as “thoughts” around our mind—but “in ourselves.” Wordsworth’s poetic wandering in the woods, and wondering about the leech-gatherer–”how is it you live, and what is it you do?”–are a critique of his contemporary society in which capitalism dictated breaking-up of tasks to the lack of fulfillment for the laborer. Such practices might have been practiced in the crafting of Wedgwood’s Am I Not a Man and a Brother medallions/early protest art at that time, and they surely were practiced by those people who were treated as slaves at that time.
Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light and Other Essays (2017) shows that joy was not an entitlement as natural as “all colors of light”; it was rather cultivated through work, in fashioning her Burst of Light and Other Essays and other “works” that live on, tools those who have been disenfranchised might sharpen to dismantle the master’s house. Of this transition which is still being worked-out today, I wrote:
While the Romantic and anti-slavery sentiment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century insisted upon the liberal individualism, this liberalism succeeded in extending to a specific class of people in power: namely, white male property owners. According to Hartman, the language of slave emancipation articulated a “double bind of freedom” that separated and made “freedmen” responsible for their own integration into the “body politic. … While the modern sense of self was coalescing, male-dominant figures such as Wedgwood, Blake, and the above-quoted plantation owner, though instrumental in dismantling the house of slavery, due to using their own tools–i.e., overt sexual/other-ization of the recently-deemed free people–also were complicit in upholding the structure by sharpening the tools that enabled it in the first place” (Plante “Response: Lorde”).
In Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) which critiques our contemporary “happiness industry,” it is clear that post John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the liberalist notion of the individual’s “responsibility” to be happy–which was even extended onto people recently freed from slavery (as seen above) and continues to dominate the discourse of the present. To return to the question of “How does self-care in 21st-century late capitalism differ from that of classical Rome, early medieval Europe, the Renaissance, or even the Civil Rights era?” my response is this: we have subsumed into our capitalist regime certain self-care methods–those which have stood the test of time to survive–from classical Rome [taking stock (see: Life-changing Magic of Tidying up)], the Renaissance [see: More’s inflexible, “masculine” (giving) self-fashioning versus Lavinia’s flexible, “feminine” (receiving) self-fashioning of the self through and for others], to the post Reconstruction and Civil Rights era (see: the responsibility, and burden of “work” placed on the individual/liberal self for change to occur). The technologies have changed, and the dominant discourse has stayed the same: in subsuming ideas of self-care and moving from societies of discipline (Foucault) to today’s Internet-driven society of control (Foucault) in which politics and consumerism have manifest in online marketing (Twitter, polls, et al). What also remains the same is this: to bring conscious awareness to those Foucaultian technologies of the self, the “operations on … bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being” and to consciously choose which operations we apply, and which we do not. And this is much, much more complicated than I can describe in this (supposed-to-be) two-page synthesis of one self-care class. But it is a start.

Works Cited

• Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.
• Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. 160-180 A.D. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2680/2680-h/2680-h.htm. Accessed 4 Dec. 2018.
• Boethius, Ancius. Consolation of Philosophy, Revised Edition. Penguin Classics, 1999.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Dejection: An Ode.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43973/dejection-an-ode. Accessed 4 Dec. 2018.
• Dhuoda. Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son, translated by Carol Neel. Medieval Texts in Translation. The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1991.
• Favret, Mary A. “The Pathos of Reading.” PMLA vol. 130, no. 5, pp. 1319-1331. The Modern Language Association of America, 2015.
• Foucault, Michel. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self.” Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 2, , pp. 198-227. Sage: 1993.
• —. “Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, pp. 16-49. University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
• —. “Truth, Power, and Self.” Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, pp. 9-15, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
• Fox, Hilary. “Syllabus.” Self-Care, Wayne State University, Aug.-Dec. 2018.
• Gisborne, Thomas. An Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. London, 1797.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “At the Table of the Great: More’s Self-fashioning and Self-cancellation.” Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Guasco, Annibal. Discourse of Signor Annibal Guasco to Lady Lavinia His Daughter: Concerning the Manner in which She Should Conduct Herself when Going to Court as Lady-in-waiting to the Most Serene Infanta, Lady Caterina, Duchess of Savoy. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Hartman, Saidiya. “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom.” Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press, New York, 1997.
• Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light and Other Essays, foreword by Sonia Sanchez. Ixia Press, 2017.
• Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty: The Second Edition. London, John W. Parker and Son, West Stand, 1859.
• More, Thomas. Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, edited by Mary Gottschalk, Center for Thomas More Studies, 2014.
• The Old English Boethius, translated by Susan Irvine and Malcolm Godden. Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Wordsworth, William. “Resolution and Independence.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45545/resolution-and-independence. Accessed 4 Dec. 2018.