Rose reading

Introduction
We understand our choices in terms of “who we are as a person”
- our autonomous selves is where we understand our passions and desires,
shape our life-styles.
- The kind of persons that we are determines the commodities we consume, act
out our tastes, fashion our bodies, display our distinctiveness.
We enact our social and political lives in terms of “our opinions and ways of
understanding” the world around us
- Our politics shows our commitment to respect for the rights and powers of
the citizen as an individual.
- Our ethical dilemmas are debated in similar terms, whether they concern the
extension of legal protections to same-sex couples, disputes over abortion,
- notions of autonomy and identity act as ideals or criteria of judgment in
con icts over national identities, in struggles over the rights of minorities, and in a
whole variety of national and international disputes.

This ethic of the free, autonomous self seems to trace out something quite fundamental
in the ways in which modern men and women have come to understand, experience,
and evaluate themselves, their actions, and their lives.
- The idea of the “self” is something that everybody agrees on
- Every opinion that we have is structured around the assumption that we all have
access/rights to “autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, choice, ful lment”

CSP questions the certainty that we have about our selfhood, and where this view of the
self comes from, and what/whose interests it might serve
'critical history’— aim is to explore the conditions under which the horizons of our
experience have taken shape
- to diagnose our contemporary condition of the self
- to destabilise and denaturalise that regime of the self which today seems
inescapable
- to explain the burdens imposed, the illusions entailed, the acts of domination and
self-mastery that are against the capacities and liberties that make up the
contemporary individual.

To speak of the invention of the self is not to suggest that we are, in some way, the
victims of a collective ction or delusion.
- an invention does not mean an illusion
- it constitutes our truth.
fl
fi
fi
Self as a modern invention
- though one human brain is necessary, insu cient for the development of a psychic
subject capable of mental processes.
- the brain must be connected with a particular language system, which is external
and exists prior to the birth of each human brain.
- This feeling of being able to express oneself didn’t always exist but rather we
created the language that allowed us to express(make sense) of the world
Brain needs a social setting to be born into in order to be away of its existence

Self-consciousness is the mental activity through which the subject feels a sense of being
or existing as a unique and total individual

The challenged self

The modern self: coherent, bounded, individualised, intentional, the locus of thought,
action, and belief, the origin of its own actions, the bene ciary of a unique biography.
- We possess an identity — constitutes our reality, holds our familial heritage and our
experience as individuals, which animates our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and
values.

- The self is characterised: inward — conduct, belief, value, and speech.

- The idea of the self exists due to linguistic re ection (the ability to use language
to conduct our lives, both internally and externally)
- Without language we cannot conceptualise the self
- This internal universe of the self is what allows us to conduct ourselves “normally’
and to distinguish between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ whether in the realm of gender,
sexuality, vice, illegality, or insanity.
- our lives are meaningful, to the extent that we could discover our self, be our self,
express our self, love our self, and be loved for the self we really are.

The meaning of life is tied to our idea of selfhood: self-ful llment, self-expression, self-
discovery, self-acceptance

The universal self — pure consciousness una ected by body-imperatives and mind.
- a version of the self that exists without being alerted by the concepts of society
(self that exists without including the external factors)
- The current self has a certain ‘systematicity, due to all these diverse projects that
have sought to know and govern humans as if they were selves of certain sorts.
- New tech — disturbs the naturalness of the self and its boundaries in relation to
what is termed, tellingly, its 'reproduction'
ffi
ff
fl
fi
fi
What is the problem with the modern self?
- the “self” is not as homogenous as the way it is described
- idea of the self is historicised and culturally relativized.
- The self is fractured by gender, race, class, fragmented, deconstructed,
- We are NOT all the same, and our experience of being alive is not at all the same
(across race, class, gender, culture, etc.).
As a result: the self is used as an element of the systems of power that make some of
us selves while denying full selfhood to others and thus performing an act of
domination on both sides.
- The ability to be a “self” in the way we understand “selfhood” actually relies on us
denying selfhood to many other people
- In other words, selfhood requires denying selfhood to others
And if that’s the case, why does psychology present humans as “all inherently the
same”?
Whose interests does this serve?
- The idea of the self being explained from a western point of view (the rise of
science and move away form a religious perspective)

‘individualisation' — the process of modernisation, the rise of the West, the

uniqueness of its values and its economic, legal, cultural, and moral relations

This reading is about exploring the idea of the “self”: because the concept of the “self” is
not obvious or natural, but actually quite recent and historically located
- Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated
motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion,
judgment and action, organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastively
against other such wholes and against a social and natural background

The gendered self

Feminists:
- cultural representation of the subject as a self is based on a repeated, motivated,
and gendered acts of symbolic violence.
- Beneath the apparent universality of the self as constructed in political thought and
philosophy since the seven- teenth century lies, in fact, an image of a male subject
whose 'universality' is based on its suppressed other.

“The self” is usually represented as male, and this representation is only accomplished
through suppressing the “Other” (in this case, females)
- male: owner of his own person and capacities
- Female: economically and politically dependent on men, prone to disorder and passion,
- When we think of a “complete” self, we envision a man: women only make sense in
relation to men
- The idea of the self is “dependent on the opposition” between males and females
and the denying of full selfhood to females

Judith Butler: we are never not gendered. By the time we can speak and relate to other
humans, we are already gendered subjects. We do not exist as “selves” outside of our
gender
- There is no part of a person that isn’t gendered. Even from the moment a person is
born they are already given a gendered self
- No ‘me’ that exists before the gender

- self is challenged and fragmented: heterogeneity is not a temporary condition but the
inescapable outcome of the processes through which 'the self' is 'socially
constructed'.

The unconscious self

- Only exists because of repressed material existing

Our ability to be “selves” who speak, act, think, depends on us having a part of our
“self” that we don’t have access to and that doesn’t have the consciousness that we
have
- We are thus always separate from our “real” self
- Not only this, but our experience of ourselves as real selves is dependent on our
separation from our unconscious
- (pre-language part, part the exists without language)

Selfhood & language

- Need language to be conscious
- The minute you have language you begin to separate yourself from your true self
- Allows us to ascribe to ourselves bodily feelings, intentions, emotions, and all the other
psychological attributes that have, for so long, appeared to ll out a natural and
given interior volume of the self

What is the ‘psy’

“Psy” is the set of disciplines that claim to have special knowledge about how humans
work
- played a part in 'making up' the kinds of persons that we are.
- is not a body of abstracted theories and explanations
- an 'intellectual technology’, a way of making visible and intelligible certain features
of persons, their conducts, and their relations with one another

The technologies of psychology in Europe and North America are intrinsically linked
with transformations in the exercise of political power in contemporary liberal
democracies.
- the growth of psy has been connected with transformations in forms of personhood
- our conceptions of what persons are and how we should understand and act
toward them

the history of the psy disciplines-

- it is part of the history of the ways in which human beings have regulated others and
have regulated themselves in the light of certain games of truth.
- It is a set of tools for governing ourselves and others: for “the conduct of conduct”
fi
 - The “conduct of conduct” is the way we act and get others to act in order to
achieve certain goals
- this regulatory role of psy is linked to questions of the organisation and
reorganisation of political power that have been quite central to shaping our
contemporary experience

What are we governing?

- programs, proposals, and policies that have attempted to shape the conduct of
individuals
- Not just to control or discipline them, but also to enhance them
- helps us understand that the practices of normativity that have shaped our present
are not in terms of the political apparatus of the state.
- In this way, our idea of ourselves as “free” selves, with free will and the freedom to
have our thoughts, opinions, political views, etc. relies on our willingness to
regulate and govern ourselves

How does it work?

- psy has infused the shape and character of what we take to be liberty, autonomy,
and choice in our politics and our ethics; in the process, freedom has assumed an
inescapably subjective form.
- Controlling the way people act on the inside — the use of psychology and
institutions for individuals whose behaviour is abnormal but not criminal
- The language of the “psy” disciplines has created a new “meaning of life” that is only
achievable by being a “psy”chological self

We take on a governmental role of regulating ourselves in accordance to the norms of

society and rationalising it by saying it comes from the inside (Self)
- And that this freedom to choose is so important to our sense of self that we
regulate ourselves and oppress ourselves (and others) in order to keep feeling like
we are free
- Demand to be free encroaches on other peoples demand and freedoms
The rules and norms existing in society are in their way equally as oppressive
Autonomies we have been provided with democracy are in a way their own oppressive
mechanisms

Why does it work?

- Because it operates at such an intimate level that we believe we are choosing it
ourselves
- We must interpret our past and future as something that we have chosen and not
because our choices have been limited because of rules and norms that we believe
come from within

The programs and projects that we are ful lling are crafted in order to look like they
emanate from our own free will, from our desire for self-ful llment
- Their choices are, in their turn, seen as realisation of the attributes of the choosing
self - expressions of personality - and re ect back upon the individual who has
made them.
fl
fi
fi
 Hooke reading
How subjectivity is political
how subjectivity itself may be thought to have a profoundly political dimension.
- Marxist assertion that our selves are little more than ensembles of social relations
- presented with the materialist suggestion that structures and relations of power are at
the basis of our own individual experience.
Power is internalised in self-monitoring, self-knowing ways, that it has come to be
implemented and applied exactly through the production of subjectivity.
- Hence, what we are – at least in the sense of being subjective individuals – is very di cult to
separate out from the e ects that power has had upon us

We understand our subjectivities – the sense of our own individuality, our own self-
understandings – as independent of structures of power,
- as existing before them,
- and outside their reach.
- We tend to see such aspects of ourselves as the basis of our own independence and
autonomy,
- As our most vital points of resistance to the workings of power
- such notions of individuality, of subjecivity, may themselves already be the outcomes, the
object-e ects of power.

Power may, in a sense, make our subjectivity

- produce us and our individuality at the same time that it works upon us.
- the illusion of autonomy from such structures, which is fundamental to the vast majority of
psychology, is enabling to power.
- What best conceals and facilitates the functioning of modern power, a form of power
which, must take psychological or subjective forms if it is to function e ciently or e ectively.
- where psychology is at its most ideological,
- when it depoliticises the realm of human experience
- when it cuts o questions of social, political, economic and historical power from
questions of who and what we are.
It is a process of governmentality

How does psychology supply political subjectivities?

Not only do we intuitively think of our own psychologies as ‘coming before’ power, as existing
beyond it; we also understand the practice and knowledge of psychology as benevolent.
- view the knowledges and practices of psychology as out to help us, to improve our lives
- but it does not diminish the fact that it is still a mode of control to ‘government us

technologies’ of subjectivity
- practice of psychology is not only a way of understanding, of making sense of our selves;
- it is also a means of ordering, regulating or controlling ourselves.
- self-discipline
ff
ff
ff
ffi
ff
ffi
What is governmentality?
Questions about government usually involve the macro-politics of the state.
- large structures of social power, to the state, its policies, the structural conditions of day-
to-day life

But there is also the existence of micro-politics — multiple ‘lower-order’ categories of

government
- government of the family,
- of the workplace,
- functioning of power at individual or inter-personal level
In this context
- Government is a way of acting upon the lives and conduct of subjects, of shaping them in
desired ways, through the use of various techniques and devices
- government include a focus on the smaller micro-politics of day-to-day life in addition to
macro-political issues.
- This notion of government in this way ‘gives particular emphasis to issues of the
government of human conduct in all contexts’

Despite the fact that micro-political forms of government may be separable from macro-political
forms of government, these two typically work together, in conjunction, in combination
- the micro-politics of government nonetheless typically work to support and extend the
overarching agendas of macro-power.

Governmentality — an awareness of how the conjoined e ects of lower-order (micro-

political) forms of government work to support the broadest agendas of the state.

Sovereignty vs governmentality
Governmental activity: Power is di used amongst multiple institutions; a network of
practices
- heterogenous, pervasive and multiple, coming to apply, to a complex of people and things.
- improving the condition of the population, in increasing its wealth, its longevity, its health as
a whole
- wields power through their assumed responsibility to advance and improve the standard,
quality and longevity of their subjects’ live
- Modern power works to organise, incite, monitor, optimise, reinforce, control and organise the
forces within its domain
-
Sovereignty: Power is found in a single gure; power extends the sovereign’s will
- focused on the sovereign’s possessions, territory,
- maintaining the authority of an unquestionable, nal and categorical law
- wielding power through the threat of punishment and recrimination,

Types of power
Disciplinary Power
- Functions at the “capillary” level of individuals
- Increases docility, optimises capabilities, integrates individuals (through their own self-
regulation) into systems of e cient and economic control
Population — emerged as a focus of governmental attention, as a means of conceptualising a
body of people that needed to be regulated and controlled.
ffi
ff
fi
fi
ff
 Bio-power
- The State’s control and modi cation of all life processes
- Instead of focusing on death like in sovereignty we focus on life
- The “administrating of life”: including propagation, birth, mortality, disease, life expectancy
(all vital biological processes)
- Biological existence is re ected in political existence
- Regulating populations by gathering information on resources, capacities and problems of
the population

Disciplinary bio-power
- links together the various political technologies of the body, the knowledge -producing
e orts of the human and social sciences, and the structures of state domination

The intersection of bio-power and disciplinary power

- Biology and power, have become inseparable: life and power themselves have become
inseparable – it is exactly through the regulation of life and life-processes that power
exercises its in uence, that it guarantees its hold upon us.

Apparatuses
Government would have to rely on a range of di erent and semi-autonomous techniques and
apparatuses.
- Apparatuses: essential technical means of governmentality.
- autonomous
- heterogenous ensembles of discourses, institutions ... regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scienti c statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic
proposition
- notion of an ensemble – that is, a group of diverse yet complementary parts that all
contribute to a single or overriding e ect.
- we need to apply just such a model (of the ensemble), to be aware of
- how di erent types of thing, such as values, common sense and professional
knowledge,
- how popular discourse,
- recurring or dominant kinds of representation,
- come to join up with actual rules and laws, with actual kinds of practice, or
prohibition, to form broad patterns of power across di erent levels of society.
- ‘go-betweens’ that join together micro- and macro- functionings of power
Needed for disciplinary bio-power to work

- Through apparatuses, power ows down (from systems to individuals) and up (from
individuals to structures)
- power is reciprocally interrelated and mutually dependent
- Work together in a way that produces a certain kind of ideology that humans live by
- Managing the relationship between people and the other aspects of society in a way that is
mutually reinforcing (markets, territory, etc)

Example: Police
- People and systems who manage “the relationships between men, property, produce,
exchange, territory and the market”
The police have a positive function within society: to keep the population healthy and
happy and to improve the quality of life
- However, the higher aim is to enable “the state to increase its collective power, to
exert its strength in full”
ff
ff
fl
fl
fl
fi
fi
ff
ff
ff
Psychology gives us the language that allows us to describe the objects of
government (the inner lives of the population) and to implement practices to cure and
treat them
- They do this through the invention of diagnostic categories, evaluations, assessments,
tests: to increase ef ciency and satisfaction, productivity and contentment

Psy-complex as an apparatus
- ‘operates as a network of speculations about the behaviour and mental states of
individuals and as a range of attempts to regulate how people behave and think’
- regulates human behaviour and thought

Individualising and totalising power

One cannot understand the functioning of large structures of power – such as those of the
state – without understanding the technologies, procedures and understandings of
individualisation used to create the power of the state (disciplinary mechanisms, pastoral and
police apparatuses)

- aim of modern government lies in developing those constitutive elements of individuals that
foster the overall strength of the state.
- what makes individuals – precisely that part of power that individualises and
personalises – is exactly what extends the powers of the state.
state is not seen as structural mechanisms of control.
- Modes of individualising its citizens are just as crucial in its functioning.
- This is also not a simply input-ouput relationship

Self-government is an essential component of any successful form of governmental power.

- There is in government then an undeniable aspect of ‘self power’, an acting of self upon self.
- our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs are all vital targets of government
The work of psychology supports the overall functioning of the state by:
- increasing the individual health and capabilities of its individual citizens
- Certain ideas, values and principles are prominent, and often link back up to the
ideologies of the state
- Psychologists “implement treatment regimes on unproductive or problematic subjects
so they will better conform to the demands and or requirements of society

Technologies of subjectivity
Subjectivity is an indispensable component in the maintenance and spread of power of
populations

How does it function?

- Our “self” is the basis of our personhood: the most fundamental thing about us
- This is why psychology is such a powerful apparatus: it is the discourse of the self
- The self becomes a mechanism of power through enacting the State’s ideology through
own desires
‘technologies of subjectivity’: broad set of self-regulative practices
- attempts to adjust or to shape ourselves according to the techniques of experts.
- involve the operating of a kind of power which connects the normalising objectives of
certain authorities to the ideals we have for ourselves.
- focus on the inner psychology of its subjects,
- This explains their conduct and strives for kinds of self-realisation and self-ful lment.
- internalised and individualised by an individual, or used as a way of regulating and knowing
themselves
fi
fi
Interiority (our “inner” or “psychological” existence) has been given to us; and is an invaluable
territory of power:
- it is the origin of all our emotional activities
- makes people willing to have things done to them – and do things to themselves – to
improve their “self”

Technologies of self
All the technologies of subjectivity that are “enfolded” into the person
- Through self- schema: self-inspection, self-suspicion, self-disclosure, self-decipherment, and
self-nurturing’

‘governments of subjectivity’
- must act upon the choices, wishes, values and conduct of the individual in an indirect
manner
- Subjectivity of citizens is hence actively shaped, cultivated, produced in an encouraging
manner rather than being stymied, constrained, repressed.
- Uses experts
- provides an important distance between the formal apparatus of laws, courts, and
police, on the one hand, and the shaping of the activities of citizens, on the other.
- speaks to our truth as human beings instead of imposing morals on us
- Practices: e.g. confession, diary, group therapy, AA)
- Practiced under actual or imagined authority of a system of truth
psychological expertise is deeply enmeshed with the objectives of government,
- such expertise provides a means for shaping, sustaining, and managing human beings not
in opposition to their personal identity but precisely in order to produce their identities

Psychology provides language for discourse of self

- This sense of internalising the governments ideology are what allow us to believe that these
desires and motives are our own (Intimate personal desire for happiness and meaning)
- Motivation coming from outside is not as strong as those coming form within
- We are more willing to do things that we believe have come from within (less resistance)

Contradictions of freedom
Freedom is not the negation of power, but one of its vital elements”

- when we exercise our subjectivity, we do so by drawing on the values, norms and ideas
already set in place by broader structures of government
- Through technologies of subjectivity
- There is no level of subjectivity that is not already saturated by the norms and values of
governmentality
- as we ‘practise’ ourselves in these ways, we are also participating in our own subjugation.
- illusion of ourselves as choosing is actually a vital element that keeps society
functioning

“For every top-down strand of power there exists a reciprocating bottom-up in uence”
- apartheid implemented racial policies (top-down)
- Black people internalised this as part of their identity (bottom-up)
- That is why it is dif cult to eradicate. It is apart of people’s identity
- Psychotherapy
fi
fl
How psychology and power work together
- Modern citizens are subjecti ed, educated, and solicited into an alliance between personal
ambitions and socially valued ways of living
- Psychology — one of the technologies of subjectivity: supplies us with concepts,
languages and procedures of self
- Psychology thus provides the links and the means of implementing the ideals and norms of
government on an individual level
fi