Some Consumption Links

Find out more about Don Slater here. Other useful/amusing websites include Global Consumer Culture, Adbusters, and Popcultures.com.

Richard Sennett on the Radio

Those of you who can use the BBC's 'Listen Again' facility (i.e. have access to web via a computer with sound) can follow this link to hear Richard Sennett discussing The Culture of the New Capitalism.

The Self at Work

I have been able to find surprising little of substance on or by Richard Sennett (left) on the web but try clicking here and here for some useful background.

For a taste of the way in which 'management' and 'personal development' are intertwined in the contemporary workplace visit the website of management guru Tom Peters. This is chock full of material but please treat as a topic not a resource! Tom shows us that corporate capitalism now dresses casual but cannot abide negative thinking (see picture below).

Frank Furedi Links

Find out more about the author of Therapy Culture. To go to Frank Furedi's own web pages click here. Go down to the bottom of this link to find lots of useful Furedi references, many of which are web-based.

Lecture on Nikolas Rose

The Government of the Self

Examples that make us think critically about the reflexive individual of late modernity. We make choices about our lives, invest much in the active construction of own biographies but:

• The influences on ‘our’ choices. Also aware of agencies and institutions that set out to channel our desires and choices e.g. advertising and marketing.
• The involvement of professional expertise in providing ‘guidance’ on how we should lead our lives.
• What happens when we do not make the ‘right’ choices?
• Examples of being managed as individuals e.g. the Appraisal invites you to assess yourself and align your personal goals with the goals of the organisation.

Arguably there has been a weakening of social conventions, moral regulation and social stigma (more ‘permissive’) but has this external control of behaviour been replaced by internalised pressures to be the right sort of person. Has requirement to modify our behaviour according to external conventions and morals been replaced by a requirement on us to become certain sorts of people, to change the way we think and feel?

We are used to thinking equating individuality with freedom and autonomy - e.g. thinking of a ‘private self’ free of external control – but for some analysts the development of the experiences and values of individuality is intimately related to and is inseparable from the development of new systems and techniques of government and organisation. The history of the development of these systems and techniques involves nothing less than (Rose) “the shaping of the private self.”

Nikolas Rose and in particular his book Governing the Soul - offers an historical sociology of ‘subjectivity’ - the social shaping of the inner world of humans.

“ Our personalities, subjectivities, and ‘relationships’ are not private matters, if this implies they are not objects of power. On the contrary, they are intensively governed.”

The Preface begins:

“ This book is about the powers that have come to bear upon the subjective experience of people and their relations with one another: political power, economic power, institutional power, expert power, technical power, cognitive power.”

In the book Rose focuses on the rise of Psychology and associated disciplines such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. These ‘psy’ disciplines not only develop new ways of talking and thinking about the human subject. They develop knowledge, practical techniques and institutional arrangements that allow them to measure, evaluate, understand and act on the human subject in ways not previously possible. The expertise of ‘psy’ disciplines have had a key role in constituting ‘governable subjects’ – created individuals that can be governed in modern liberal democracies

• ‘Government’ is not just ‘the government’. Government = ‘the conduct of conduct’ and State is only one of a number of different authorities.
• These disciplines are not ideologies in the sense of being false – they are a ‘regime of truth’ - “our lives really do become psychological in form”
• Nor can they be seen as stifling the individuality– individual and sense of individuality is constituted through these processes

Rose considers four aspects of life in his ‘genealogy of the human subject’:

Warfare : in WW2 psy involved in – home front morale, psychological warfare, selection and placement of officers and men, rehabilitation of psychiatric casualties. New gaze on ‘attitudes’, ‘personality’ and group dynamics. This is an important shift in the conduct of war but for Rose, more importantly, Psy stakes claim to key role in management of individuals in institutional life that continued into peace time.

Workplace In post war period psy applied to questions of productivity, labour relations, integrating individual into workplace. Work imperative becomes psychological as well as economic.

“ Employment has become construed as an essential element in individual psychological health, family stability and social tranquility.”

“ Work itself is a means to self-fulfilment, and the pathway to company profit is also the pathway to individual self-actualisation.”

Family and Child Psy links the ‘private’ realm of the family with the objectives of the government – for example it provides language for expressing concerns about child rearing and established norms of desirable childhood development and behaviour.

Theraputic culture Can see again here the spreading influence of psy. Psy provides techniques for reshaping selves – not just curing pathology but reshaping subjectivity.

To sum up: The development of a social setting where:

• Rulers see it as part of their task to shape our inner selves
• The management of subjectivity becomes central to organisation
• New expertise of subjectivity - authorities become ‘engineers of the human soul’

This is not just the story of new forms of power, it also about the development of new forms of subjectivity. People are reconstituted as psychological beings with enhanced subjectivity.

“ These new ways of thinking and acting do not just concern the authorities. They affect each of us, our personal beliefs, wishes and aspirations, in other words, our ethics. The new languages for construing, understanding and evaluating ourselves and others have transformed the ways in which we interact with our bosses, employees, workmates, husbands, wives, lovers, mothers, fathers, children and friends. Our thought worlds have been reconstructed, our ways of thinking about and talking about our personal feelings, our secret hopes, our ambitions and disappointments. Our techniques for managing our emotions have been reshaped. Our very sense of ourselves has been revolutionized. We have become intensely subjective beings.” (p3)

By recasting people as autonomous actors with responsibility for their own lives, these new forms of subjectivity allow ‘government through freedom’.

“ These new forms of regulation do not crush subjectivity. They actually fabricate subjects – human men, women and children – capable of bearing the burdens of liberty.” (viii)

Interpreting recent developments

“ There is a sense of ethical paucity of the contemporary obligation to fulfil ourselves through the mundane achievements of our everyday lives, and to evaluate all aspects of our lives in terms of the extent to which they do or do not contribute to such an inexorable trajectory of self-improvement and personal happiness through career enhancement and lifestyle maximization.” (xxiv)

“ Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring, and confession, we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided by others. Through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease generated by a normative judgement of what we are and could become, and the incitement offered to overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of experts in the management of the self.” (p11)

Nikolas Rose Links

Click on this link to go to a list of Rose's recent publications. Scroll down for direct access to recent papers and chapters in edited collections. Much of this work relates to Rose's new interests in 'biological citizenship' and charting the rise of the 'chemical self'.

Arlie Hochschild

Find out more about the author of 'The Managed Heart' here.

Christopher Lasch Links

To find material by or about Lasch look here, here, and here.

Lecture 4 Handout

Lecture 4: Self-Identity and Social Change: The Making of the Modern Individual

Now moving into the next phase of the module. How have changing social conditions altered people’s sense of self? What are the consequences of recent social changes? How to interpret, for example, the growing preoccupation with Self-knowledge, development and fulfilment?

Following weeks considering recent developments but begin by looking at – in admittedly very general terms – how at the on-set of modernity we can see the making of the modern individual. It is here that we can see the beginnings of a long-running process:

INDIVIDUALISATION – increasingly in modernity people came to make sense of the world as individuals and to value their individuality.

Modernity and Self-Identity

What was the psychological impact of the Great Transformation? Pioneering work on this issue done by George Simmel around the turn of the C20th century,

“In modernity individuals move between a great number of social circles each of which only involves part of his personality. This segmentation of associations provides us with a greater sense of uniqueness and freedom - a consciousness of the self which encourages individualism.”

Simmel in his essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ described the emergence of a distinctive urban personality. He argued that the pace, complexity and segmentation of modern life increased the number of non-intimate, standard relationships such as ones based on legal rules or the exchange of money. They also fostered a more calculating and self-conscious state of mind, with city dwellers often adopting a blasé attitude to the multiplicity of sights and people they encountered. In other words, city life produced a greater sense of individuality and detachment.

Simmel along with many of the key sociological thinkers of the C19th and C20th is arguing at heart that the modern social environment presented people with novel problems and opportunities as they attempted to do two fundamental things - interact with others and maintain an identity. The following have all contributed to a transformation in the ways in which people understand themselves and relate to other people:

1) Change of experience and the experience of change = detraditionalisation.
2) Relationships in premodern times took place in comparatively small-scale and stable contexts and rested on clear notions of social position, grounded, for example, in kinship or feudal hierarchies. Modern social environments are more fluid.
3) Many social practices in premodern societies rested on the relative similarity of background and outlook of all participants. Modern societies far more diverse.
4) In comparison with earlier social forms, there is a greater level of complexity and specialization in modern societies. The range of social roles has grown rapidly. Increasing fragmentation of society and of individual experience.
5) Greater range of social interactions. In premodern societies ‘others’ could be clearly categorized either as familiar or as strangers. Living in modernity requires a more subtle range of stances towards the many people we come across.
6) The fluid, large-scale and often impersonal character of modern societies make impression management - how we present ourselves to others - a highly significant but problematic endeavour. Difficulties arise out of "the pluralization of lifeworlds" - a diversification of both the contexts of social interaction and the types of encounter that can take place.(Peter Berger) This puts strain on our skills of ‘self-presentation’. Erving Goffman argues that acting is an appropriate metaphor for the conduct of modern life since this requires that we play a variety of roles each with a different stage and script. For Berger it also makes the decline of shared overarching symbols to provide the world with meaning.
7) Split between impersonal and personal worlds.
8) Role of mass media in providing interpretations and models of behaviour and experience.

To sum up this list of long-term developments - in different ways contributed to a modern experience of self, heightened awareness of individuality – of being an individual separate from the social contexts in which one operates - increased conscious reflection on self, behaviour and relationships. Paradox that it made a stable identity both more difficult and more important.

“... the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces...” [Simmel]

Individualisation: unanswered questions

1) A single experience of modernity or many?

2) Heightened individuality but what kind of individuality?

3) Another side of modernity. Environments and institutions which are designed to dehumanise us and to rob us of individuality and autonomy.

In the sessions that follow we will be analysing the continuation of these processes of individualisation. Have they advanced to such a stage that people are no longer able to appreciate the social constraint, interconnections and interdependency?

“ There have always been individuals with problems, but once these would have been seen as moral choices in the context of the community or as struggles with the forces of destiny; the change has been towards seeing them in terms of individual morality with individual solutions and in terms of mental illness, psychological problems.” [Ian Craib, The Importance of Disappointment (1994) p98]

“ If they fall ill, it is because they were not resolute and industrious enough in following the health regime. If they stay unemployed, it is because they failed to learn the skills of winning an interview or because they did not try hard enough to find a job or because they are, purely and simply, work-shy. If they are not sure about their career prospects and agonise about their future, it is because they are not good enough at winning friends and influencing people and have failed to learn as they should the arts of self-expression and impressing the others. This is, at any rate, what they are told – and what they have come to believe, so they behave ‘as if’ this was, indeed, the truth of the matter. As Beck aptly and poignantly puts it, ‘how one lives becomes a biographical solution to systematic contradictions.’ Risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is just the duty and the necessity of coping with them that has been individualized.” [Zygmunt Bauman, Individualized Society (2001) p47]

Lecture 3 Handout

Constructing the Self Lecture 3 Psychoanalysis, Self and Society

What can psychoanalytic approaches add to our understanding of self and society?

Psychoanalytic Approaches

“ … what is valuable in Freud, and the psychoanalytic theorists who followed him, is the always implicit, sometimes explicit, message that we can never quite be who we want to be.” (Ian Craib)

“ Psychoanalytic insights cannot offer us any precise solutions but they can enable us to see problems more clearly because they take account of the irrational as well as the rational elements that are inherent in them.” (Ros Minsky)

Two fundamentals of psychoanalysis

• Seek a detailed, clinically informed understanding of the processes whereby people come to be people. Focus on the importance of early experience (bodily and emotional) and the phantasies associated with that experience in the development of underlying personalities.

“ In contrast to other areas of knowledge, psychoanalytic theory rests fundamentally on how the baby and then small child comes, unconsciously, to discover a way of being rather than existing and to make sense of itself, its parents, its siblings and the non-sense of the world in which it tries to place itself.” (Ros Minsky)

• View of the self as being about the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious. This is not the sovereign individual of the Enlightenment – defined by internal coherence and the capacity for reason. Instead there is emphasis on a) things beyond reflection and reason – anxieties, fantasies, drives and needs b) internal conflict.

Psychoanalysis and the Social Self

How can psychoanalysis improve our understanding of the relationship between self and society?

• Artificiality of mind/body distinction – we have bodies that effect what we can and cannot do.

• Contribute to a better analysis of ‘identity’ and self as social product by looking at the processes of self-formation and acknowledging that individual circumstances and personality mediate social influences.

• Recognition that human behaviour is not simply the result of conscious, rational reflection