Rose

Question 1

If there is one value …

Answer 1

that seems beyond reproach, in our current confused ethical climate, it is that of the self and the terms that cluster around it - autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, choice, fulfilment. It is in terms of our autonomous selves that we understand our passions and desires, shape our lifestyles (…) It is in the name of the kinds of persons we really are that we consume commodities, act out our tastes (…) display our distinctiveness.

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Question 2

historical investigation can …

Answer 2

open up our contemporary regime of the self to (…) a kind of thought that can work on the limits of what is thinkable, extend those limits, and hence enhance the contestability of what we take to be natural and inevitable about our current ways of relating to ourselves.

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Question 3

That which is invented …

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is not an illusion; it constitutes our truth.

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Question 4

What justifies me in talking about a …

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regime of the self (…) is less an assertion of uniformity than a hypothesis that there is a common normativity that acts upon human beings, young and old, rich and poor, men and women, black and white, prisoner, mad person, patient, boss and worker: ideals concerning our existence as individuals inhabited by an inner psychology that animates and explains our conduct and strives for self-realization, self-esteem, and self-fulfilment in everyday life.

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Question 5

The essays have been …

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put together in a time and place in which a series of profound challenges have been directed toward an image of the self that appears , for so long, to have formed the horizon of ‘our’ thought.

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Question 6

The self:

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coherent, bounded, individualised, intentional, the locus of thought, action, and belief, the origin of its own actions, the beneficiary of a unique biography. As such selves we possessed an identity, which constituted our deepest, most profound reality.

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Question 7

As selves we were …

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characterised by a profound inwardness: conduct, belief, value, and speech were to be interrogated and rendered explicable in terms of an understanding of an inner space that gave them form, within which they were, literally, embodied within us as corporeal beings. This internal universe of the self, this profound ‘psychology’, lay at the core of those ways of conducting ourselves that are considered normal and provided the norm for thinking and judging the abnormal - whether in the realm of gender, sexuality, vice, illegality, or insanity. And our lives were 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 were.

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Question 8

If our current regime of the self …

Answer 8

has a certain ‘systematicity’, it is perhaps, a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of all these diverse projects that have sought to know and govern humans as if they were selves of certain sorts.’

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Question 9

within social theory, the idea of the self is…

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historisized and culturally relativized. More radically, it is fractured by gender, race, class, fragmented , deconstructed, revealed not as our inner truth but as our last illusion, not as our ultimate comfort but as an element in circuits of power that make some of us selves while denying full selfhood to others and thus performing an act of domination on both sides.

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Question 10

Why, if human beings are as heterogenous and situationally produced …

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as they now appear to be, did a disciple arise that promulgated such unified, interiorized, and individualized conceptions of selves, males and females, races, ages. Whose interest did such an intellectual project serve?

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Question 11

what is involved is the creation (i) of ‘interests’ …

Answer 11

the forging of novel relations between knowledge and politics, and the association and mobilization of forces around them.

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Question 12

PSY: all those disciplines which…

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since about he middle of the 19th C have designated themselves with the prefix psy - psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis.

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Question 13

I want to suggest that psychology …

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in the sense in which I will use the term here, has played a rather fundamental part in ‘making up’ the kinds of persons that we take ourselves to be. Psychology, in this sense, isn’t a body of abstracted theories and explanations, but an ‘intellectual technology’, a way of making visible and intelligible certain features of persons.

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Question 14

Psychology is never purely academic …

Answer 14

it is an enterprise grounded in an intrinsic relation between its place in the academy and its place as ‘expertise’ (Danzinger, 1990). By expertise is meant the capacity of psychology to provide a crops of trained and credentialed persons claiming special competence in the administration of persons and interpersonal relations, and a body of techniques and procedures claiming to make possible the rational and human management of human resources in industry, the military, and social life more generally.

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Question 15

growth of psy intrinsically linked with …

Answer 15

transformations in the exercise of political power in contemporary liberal democracies.

I also suggest that the growth of psy has been connected, in an important way, with transformations in forms of personhood.

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Question 16

Inspired by Foucault …

Answer 16

1 - attempts to explore “the games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience; that is as something that can and must be thought” (Fouc, 1985, 6-7).

2 -By experiencing, Foucault refers to “the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture” (p.3)

3 - contribution type of work described by Foucault as an analysis of the “problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed (p.11)”

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Question 17

From this perspective the history of psy …

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is much more than a history of a particular and often somewhat dubious group of sciences - 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.

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Question 18

‘Government’: understood in a much broader …

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sense - as a way of conceptualizing all those more or less rationalized programs, strategies, and tactics for the ‘conduct of conduct’, for acting upon the relations of others in order to achieve certain ends (Fou 1991).

This perspective draws our attention to all those multitudinous programs, proposals and policies that have attempted to shape the conduct of individuals - not just to control, subdue, discipline, normalize, or reform them, but also to make them more intelligent, wise, happy, virtuous, healthy, productive, docile, enterprising, fulfilled, self-esteeming, empowered, or whatever.

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Question 19

Role of knowledge in the contemporary …

Answer 19

conduct of conduct – where any legitimate attempt to act upon conduct must embody some way of understanding, classifying , calculating, and hence be articulated in terms of some more or less explicit system of thought and judgment.

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Question 20

In the history of power relations in the liberal …

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and democratic regimes, the government of others has always ben linked to a certain way in which ‘free’ individuals are enjoined to govern themselves as subjects simultaneously of liberty and of responsibility - prudence, sobriety, steadfastness, adjustment, self-fulfillment, and the like.

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Question 21

These are studies in the way in which persons have been invented -

Answer 21

‘made up’, as Ian Hacking has put it, at the multitude of points of intersection between practices for the government of others and techniques for the government of oneself (cf,Hacking 1986).

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Question 22

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Britain and United States …

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the expertise of psy was intrinsically bound to eugenic strategies in which the liberty of the majority was to be safeguarded by coercively constraining the reproductive capacities, freedom of movement, and even the life of all those who would threaten the well-being of the race (+eugenics Rose, 1985)

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Question 23

I suggest, psy has infused the shape and character of …

Answer 23

what we take to be liberty, autonomy, and choice in our politics and our ethics; in the process, freedom has assumed an inescapable subjective form.

What is at stake in these analyses at their most general, therefore, is nothing less than freedom itself; freedom as it has been articulated into norms and principles for organising our experience of our world and of ourselves; freedom as it is realised in certain ways of exercising power over others; freedom as it has been articulated into certain rationales for practicing in relation to ourselves (Rose, 1993)

How have we come to define and act toward ourselves in terms of a certain notion of freedom? How has freedom provided the rationale for all manner of coercive interventions into the lives of those seen as unfree of threats to freedom: the poor, the homeless, the mad, the risky, or those at risk?

Invention of a range of psy technologies for governing individuals in terms of their freedom.

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Question 24

For the first time the arts of government …

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were systematically linked to the practice of freedom and hence to the characteristics of human beings as potentially subjects of freedom.

From this point on, to quote John Rajchman, individuals “must be willing to do their bit in maintaining the systems that define and delimit them; they must play their parts in a ‘game’ whose intelligibility and limits they take for granted” (Rajchman, 1991, p101).

The forms of freedom we inhabit today are intrinsically bound to a regime of subjectification in which subjects are not merely ‘free to choose’, but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice under conditions that systematically limit the capacities of so many to shape their own destiny.

Their choices are, in turn, seen as realisations of the attributes of the choosing self - expressions of personality - and reflect back upon the individual who has made them.

The practice of freedom appears only as the possibility of the maximum self-fulfillment of the active and autonomous individual.

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Question 25

In the 19th C, psycology invented …

Answer 25

the normal individual. In the first half of this century, it was a discipline of the social person. Today, psychologists elaborate complex emotional, interpersonal, and organisational techniques by which the practices of everyday life can be organised according to the ethic of autonomous selfhood.

Freedom has come to mean the realisation of the potentials of the psychological self in and through activities in the mundane world of everyday life. The significance of psychology here, is the elaboration of a know-how of this autonomous individual striving for self-realisation. Psychology has thus participated in reshaping the practices of those who exercise authority over others.

It has invented what one might term the therapies of normality or the psychologies of everyday life, the pedagogies of self-fulfillment disseminated through the media …

And it has given birth to a range of psychotherapies that aspire to enabling humans to live as free individuals through subordinating themselves to a form of therapeutic authority: to live as an autonomous individual, you must lean new techniques for understanding and practicing upon yourself.

Freedom, that is to say, is enacted only at the price of relying upon experts of the soul. We have been freed from the arbitrary prescriptions of religious and political authorities, thus allowing a range of different answer to the question of how we should live. But we have been bound into relationship with new authorities, which are more profoundly subjectifying because they appear to emanate from our individual desires to fulfill ourselves in our everyday lives, to craft our personalities, to discover who we really are. Through these transformations we have ‘invented ourselves’ with all the ambiguous costs and benefits that this invention has entailed.

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