PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
in collaboration with the Departments of Political Science and Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada
On Wednesday, March 23 at 3:30 p.m.
in H. M. Tory Building 5-15
Sam Binkley
(Emerson College)
will be speaking on
“Psychological Life as Enterprise: Neoliberal Transformations in the Government of Interiority”
Abstract:
This presentation theorizes the contemporary reinvention of psychological life as neoliberal enterprise. By drawing on Foucauldian critical social theory, and through a close reading of his lectures Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique (1972-3) and La Naissance de la Biopolitique (1978-9), it is argued that the constellations of power identified with the psy-function and neoliberal governmentality each reserve a special place for the work of critique as an institutional project. Each, in very different ways, seeks to overcome an institutional form it deems constraining, dehumanizing and antithetical to authentic livelihood and personal vitality, and it is this commonality that enables a folding together of these two apparatuses into each other, and through this their co-production of a distinctly neoliberal mode of psychological subjectification. Such an account of neoliberal governmentality as entailing the active, negative and critical work of the individual is proposed as a corrective to a tendency within governmentality literature to describe subjectification as a deterministic process.
Short biography:
Sam Binkley (PhD The New School for Social Research) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emerson College in Boston. He works primarily on Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault to understand contemporary cultures of consumption. He is the author of Loosening Up: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (2007, Duke University Press) and is currently writing a series of essays on the governmentality of intimacy.
Foucault News 