“There’s no money left” So in case you hadn’t heard, there’s no money left. A profligate Labour party frittered it all away and, just like any household that had done the same thing, we now have to ‘tighten our belts’. However my interest in this presentation isn’t the erroneousness of the household finance metaphor, the political uses … Continue reading »
Filed under Realism and Discourse …
The government of an ‘economy’ and the emergence of a ‘bioeconomy’
As Peter Miller and I have argued elsewhere, the government of an “economy” becomes possible only through discursive mechanisms that represent the domain to be governed as an intelligible field with its limits, characteristics whose component parts are linked together in some more or less systematic manner (Miller and Rose 1990). For the bioeconomy to … Continue reading »
The transition from psy discourse to neurochemical discourse
The psy discourses that took shape across the twentieth century brought into existence a whole new way of relating to ourselves – in terms of neuroses, trauma, unconscious desires, repression, and, of course, the theme of the centrality of sexuality to our psychic life. To say we have become “neurochemical selves” is not to say that this … Continue reading »
The creation of the ‘mind’
In psychoanalysis, and in the whole array of psychotherapies that accompanied it, the eye gave way to the ear: it was the voice of the patient that was the royal road to the unconscious. Madness, as mental illness, neurosis, and psychosis, came to be located in a psychological space – the repository of biography and … Continue reading »
Nikolas Rose on the Reflexive Imperative and Health
Today, we are required to be flexible, to be in continuous training, life-long learning, to undergo perpetual assessment, continual incitement to buy, constantly to improve oneself, to monitor our health, to manage our risk. And such obligations extend to our genetic susceptibilities: hence the active responsible biological citizen must engage in a constant work of … Continue reading »
Explaining personhood in the neuroscientific age
The new style of thought in biological psychiatry not only establishes what counts as an explanation, it establishes what there is to explain. The deep psychological space that opened in the twentieth century has flattened out. In this new account of personhood, psychiatry no longer distinguishes between organic and functional disorders. It no longer concernes … Continue reading »
If you’re going to talk about subjectification you need a theory of the subject…
When Miller and Rose (2008: 1 – 25) describe the general trajectory of their work on governmentality, they elaborate upon the questions that have guided their inquiry over the last two three decades. Most notable for my purposes is the question relating to human self-understanding and its utilisation within governmental practices: What understandings of the … Continue reading »
Dave Elder-Vass on Normativity
Although only a single chapter of this book deals explicitly with normativity, it is a credit to Elder-Vass that much of the book either supports or proceeds from his arguments about norms. In this post I will only engage with this one chapter but it’s worth noting that the book as a whole is excellent, … Continue reading »
