Abstract

Through a unique reading of Michel Foucault's late studies in "ethics" and "experience," I argue in this dissertation that culture is organized and technologized in contemporary AIDS prevention as an experience by which individuals are governed through their constitution as subjects of culture. I read Foucault's studies in ethical subjectivation as the third domain in an "analytic of experience," a mechanism for analyzing experience in its historical appearance and for describing it in such a way as to make it open to political intervention. Experience is considered as a discursive and technological formation that may be analyzed along three axes: in terms of forms of knowledge, relations of normativity, and techniques of ethical self-formation. Based on this reading, I argue that culture is an experience that is technologized in contemporary AIDS prevention in three ways: First, culture emerges as a positive object in response to a unique problematization of human existence and danger. The concept of culture provides a theory of risk behaviors and, in tying behaviors to individuals, a rationality for behavior-modification therapeutics. Second, in linking individuals to their behaviors, culture is activated as a technical domain through which experts intervene in order to govern HIV transmission risk. Culture thus becomes the principle for coding and organizing relations of power and for attaching individuals to strategies of social regulation. Finally, culture is understood as an element of the self toward which one is asked to form oneself as an active and ethical subject of AIDS prevention. Increasingly, one engages in AIDS prevention through practices which cultivate and modify the relationship one has to one's culture in order to form oneself as an ethical and responsible subject of one's own behaviors