This post is a work in progress.
In a previous blog post I wrote about Nietzsche's genealogy of guilt in book 2 of the "Genealogy of Morality". In particular I spoke about how, at the end of book 2, Nietzsche urges that, rather than trying to do away with "bad conscience" we instead try to repurpose it towards higher ends.
Immediately after that discussion I write:
And speaking of moral genealogy, and of modern technology bringing about new moral environments: Foucault's concept of biopower. My first take-away from studying this was to notice just how many of the papers discussing it were deeply aware of cybernetics and the relationship between humans, machines, surveillance and statistics.
At the time of writing I had a stronger link between these three ideas in mind (that is: Nietzsche on genealogy, Foucault on biopower, and cybernetics). This is a blog post where I try to spell that link out a little more.
Brian Leiter (for example in his book "Nietzsche on Morality") gives an account of Nietzsche's moral psychology by making use of the concept of "type-facts" (Leiter's phrase). A type-fact is defined as the fixed constitution of a person that determines their behaviour and defines them as a type of person.
For Leiter's interpretation of Nietzsche, type facts are essentially fixed for a given individual, or at the very least are tightly coupled to their biology. Whether or not you agree with Leiter's textual evidence for this, I think that it is at least worth entertaining an alternative view, where type-facts depend more on history and culture rather than biology.
In order for this to be possible, there needs to be some mechanism by which cultural phenomena can be so strongly internalised by individual that they change the type of agent that they are. In book 2 of the "Genealogy of Morality" Nietzsche describes exactly such a process.
TODO (GM.II.21 quote)
Mathias Risse defends a reading of this passage that ties the "pushing-back" that takes place as a process of moving a socially defined phenomenon into an inner-realm. [TODO - relation to sovereign individual].
If you accept such a process is possible, that is the creation of new type-facts from cultural conditions, this ends up being very similar to Foucault's account of subject-creation. In other words Nietzsche's genealogy of guilt is a description of the process by which guilty subjects are created.
Foucault's account of subject creation does more than explain how subject-types are created though. He also explains how they are maintained. Specifically this is through processes of discipline, normalisation, surveillance and discourse. These processes can either be unstable, leading to the successive creation of further types, or stable, in which case a single type comes to prevail.
The open question I'm exploring currently is whether the question of which processes are stable or unstable maps to Foerster's concept of an eigen-behaviour in the field of second-order cybernetics. My current understanding of this concept is that it is the same as tying to take the fix-point of the subject/type-fact creation processes described by Nietzsche and Foucault above.