What we are attempting to accomplish is to marry our concerns to a way of life that allows their realization, a way of life about which we can be wholehearted, investing ourselves in it with each personifying its requirements in our and unique manner. Hence we gain and maintain some governance over our own lives. … Continue reading »
Filed under Personal Morphogenesis …
Explanatory Methodology
What cultural resources play a role in the lives of participants? How do they enable and constrain the commitments, projects and modus vivendi of participants? This constraint and enablement is mediated through internal conversation. Which cultural resources under which circumstances lead to personal morphogenesis? How do the former and the latter relate in leading to this outcome? Which cultural resources under which circumstances lead to personal morphostasis? How do … Continue reading »
Some thoughts on personal morphogenesis…
If we intend to conduct biographical research, it raises the obvious question: what is a biography? Our answer to this should ideally involve both theoretical and methodological considerations I.e. it should be orientated towards thinking through the practical consequences for a researcher thinking in terms of a given concept of biography. One tendency I find … Continue reading »
Being one’s organism, one’s experience
Therapy seems to mean a getting back to basic sensory and visceral experience. Prior to therapy the person is prone to ask himself, often unwittingly, “What do others think I should do in this situation?” “What would my parents or my culture want me to do?” “What do I think ought to be done?” He is thus … Continue reading »
From sexologists to sex columnists…
In advanced liberal democracies - the geographical and political regions with which I will be concerned in this chapter – genetics takes its salience within a political and ethical field in which individuals are increasingly obligated to formulate life strategies, to seek to maximize their life chances, to take actions or refrain from actions in order to increase the … Continue reading »
Nikolas Rose, “Governing Conduct in the Age of the Brain”
Nikolas Rose, “Governing Conduct in the Age of the Brain” from Clinical Ethnography on Vimeo. How did we go from understanding and acting upon ourselves as psychological selves with inner depths to understandings and acting upon ourselves as corporeal beings with biological characteristics? Two main epistemological shifts: The emerging of a neuromolecular gaze (the brain becomes seen … Continue reading »
Cosmetic psychopharmacology, selfhood and the underdetermination of our being by our bodies…
The cultural hype about designer drugs, like that of designer babies, deserves analysis. But while cultural representations may be of “designer moods,” what is sold to the patient is a dream of control. Take control of your moods, treat anxieties that are the symptoms of illness, feel like yourself again, get your life back: these … Continue reading »
The techno-politics of self in late capitalism (part 2)
Over the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, human beings came to understand themselves as inhabited by a deep interior psychological space, and to evaluate themselves and act upon themselves in terms of this belief (Rose 1989). But over the past half century, that deep space has begun to flatten out, to … Continue reading »
The techno-politics of self in late capitalism
Enhancement, like susceptibility, is future orientated. Almost any capacity of the human body or soul – strength, endurance, attention, intelligence and the lifespan itself – seems potentially open to improvement by technological intervention. Of course, humans, at almost any place and time one cares to investigate, have tried to improve their bodily selves – using … Continue reading »
Some thoughts on socialization and personhood
The traditional conception of socialization rests on the assumption that socialization is simply a matter of internalization. Dispositions which ‘fit’ the subject’s social placement are internalised from the social. Exactly what the socialising agent is called varies e.g. family, schooling, class. Behind this divergence about socialising agents is a convergence about how the subject is … Continue reading »
