Modes Of Subjectivity Research Articles

O imaginário social <Mulher Brasileira> em Portugal: uma análise da construção de saberes, das relações de poder e dos modos de subjetivação

This article analyses in the social imaginary in Portugal through the Foucaultian analytical triad knowledge-power-subjectivation, combined with feminist and de-colonial perspectives. The article begins with a retrospective genealogy of media and touristic discourses, based on interviews and documents, in order to unveil the knowledge-power discursive order in the image of . The second part analyzes subjectivations of Brazilian immigrant women in Portugal, drawing on interviews and participant observation, to unveil situations of prejudice and discrimination and shed light on how the women confront the discursive order by resisting and re-existing as subjects. According to the conclusions, Brazilian women are seen as a body to the extent that they are defined, essentialized, and stigmatized through characteristics attributed to them ever since the historical colonial period and related to hypersexuality. Three modes of subjectivation are identified by which these women resist stigma and re-exist: passive, affirmative, and combative resistance.

In the Name of Love: Marriage Migration, Governmentality, and Technologies of Love

The past 10 years have seen an increase in legislation pertaining to marriage migration in Europe. Such attention betrays various concerns and anxieties that intersect not only with issues of risk management, rights, and citizenship, but also with less tangible dimensions such as emotions, which become embedded in legal as well as in surveillance practices. Emotions such as love are integral to the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that Foucault identified as part of governmental processes; the latter should not necessarily be equated with (and limited to) rationalized technocratic processes detached from emotional components. Technologies of love are central to the governmentality of marriage migration; as modes of subjectification and governing practice, they connect intimacy with citizenship. More than the manifestation of the rationalization of a specific emotion, technologies of love allow for an exploration of what an engagement with emotions such as love does to governmentality. Illustrations of the “attachment requirement” in Denmark, and the case of “Catgate” in Great Britain, show that technologies of love play a significant role in stirring and disciplining specific migration flows (what kind of marriage migrants the state welcomes or keeps at bay), but also in challenging, even if inadvertently, those policies and practices designed to gauge “true” relationships.

Neoliberal governmentality, subjectivity and the transformation of university. Scholars assessment as normalization technology

Taking the Foucauldian reading of liberalism and neoliberalism as a starting point, we analyze the modes of subjectivation of the current power devices. Comparing them with the disciplinary techniques, as the exam, we emphasize the managerial nature and the strategies of control of contemporary power devices, which normalization effects have a “formal-assessment” character and entail a permanent production of innovation. Then we analyze the assessment of the university teaching staff as a technique of great relevance in the transformation of the University within the framework of the neoliberal reforms. In the neoliberal context, this technique produces processes of individuation and overall effects at the same time. Considering the assessment as a technique genealogically linked with the exam, we analyze the subjective transformations that it entails and its global effects in the change of the value of knowledge as well as in the normalization effect of epistemic practices.

Towards a Foucauldian Methodology in the Study of Autism: Issues of Archaeology, Genealogy, and Subjectification

The remarkable increase in diagnoses of autism has paralleled an increase in scientific research and turned the syndrome into a kind of a new ‘trend’ within psychiatric and developmental conditions of childhood. At the same time, discursive technologies, such as DSM-IV, autobiographies, movies, fiction, etc., together with ‘educational’ interventions, such as TEACCH, PECS, Makaton, etc., seem to anticipate a form of an apparatus built around the condition named autism. Starting from this premise, the article proposes a new approach within autism studies, which treats the condition in Foucauldian terms and focuses on the emergence of the autistic subjectivity following Foucault's methodology of archaeology, genealogy, and modes of subjectification.

Artistic Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Ethics in Foucault and Benjamin

In The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault suggests that it is possible to read Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire as a contribution to a genealogy of ethics. This article experiments with reading Benjamin in this way. It shows that a distinctive analysis of each of the four elements of Foucauldian ethics (ethical substance, mode of subjectivation, ethical practice and telos) can be found in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the Paris arcades. Specifically, the article makes the case for reading Benjamin in terms of his valuable contribution to understandings of the role played by art in modern forms of ‘parrhesia’, or courageous truth-telling. However, whereas Foucault’s notion of ‘arts of living’ focuses on challenging actual relations of power, Benjamin’s focuses on activating potential forms of power. In this way, Benjamin’s ethical framework tests the limits of Foucault’s conceptualization of the government of self and others.

Le dire-vrai d’Alceste

Taking the assumption that, in The Misanthrope by Molière it is, more a matter of form rather than substance, more a matter of ways of being rather than absolute ideals, we propose to reexamine the play in the light of this modality of being, favored in Antiquity: parrhesia, usually translated as “outspokenness,” “truth-telling” (Michel Foucault), which Alceste claims to practice from the outset. However, if, the play seems to signify the banning of this outspokenness, by the final exit of the main character, we must still ask ourselves, first, if parrhesia - not only as an aesthetic principle of social representation, but also as a mode of subjectivation (ethics) -, does not continue, but in a different way, to feed the development of subjectivities in the seventeenth century, and, second, to what extent this new understanding of classical subjectivity may give us the opportunity to reassess our interpretation of morality at that time.

O biopoder e a gestão dos riscos nas sociedades contemporâneas

Tendo em vista as transformações no tecido social moderno e nos elementos do biopoder, característico deste período histórico, este artigo visa a contribuir com a reflexão acerca da dinâmica do poder sobre os corpos e sobre a vida na atualidade. Argumenta-se, baseando-se em estudos foucaultianos, que a centralidade da gestão dos riscos no mundo contemporâneo intensifica, não sem alterar, aspectos fundamentais do biopoder moderno. As políticas de assistência social brasileiras e as transformações no cenário da saúde pública, centradas na noção de risco, são analisadas como dispositivos de governo. Discute-se também como nesse processo a vida se torna, ao mesmo tempo, alvo de controle e espaço de resistência. Conclui-se que a análise das novas formas de subjetivação resultantes da integração do capital e da nova tecnologia do risco é fundamental na construção de uma nova estilística da existência e na criação de novos parâmetros analíticos para nossa atualidade. A nova situação abrange fatores complexos, contraditórios e em constante tensão, sendo possível falar da criação de uma infinidade de novos lugares de negociação, de poder, de alívio ou de desencadeamento do sofrimento, que necessitam da criação de outras mentalidades de análise.

Foucault, subjectivity and ethics: towards a self-forming subject

In this article, I examine self-formation through the activity of organic farming in a self-managing community. How do producing and consuming subjects organize their selves around the ‘false natural object’ (Veyne, 1997) that is organic? To inform this ethnographic account of self-formation, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault. A study is made of technologies of the self in the contemporary setting of a self-managing organic farming community without compromising the self-forming, self-regulating activity of the ethical subject presented by Foucault in his studies of Antiquity. I contend that the self is formed by the subject as a thinking and acting being through the modes of subjectivation and objectivation (Foucault, 2000a). The article contributes empirical support to theoretical studies that consider how Foucault’s texts account for the intervention of human subjects alongside sociological factors when exploring organizational issues (Bardon and Josserand, 2011; McKinlay and Pezet, 2010). It is recommended that a wider range of responses could be opened up in Foucault-inspired studies at other organizational sites, including the workplace, by exploring the self-formation of the subject as a starting point for understanding the importance of the individual alongside sociological factors.

Disrupting normal: Toward the ‘ordinary and familiar’ in fat politics

As a nascent movement, fat activism must look critically at the tactics and strategies it chooses precisely because the movement is helping to produce ‘Fat’ as a mode of subjectification and identification. I argue that the desire of some fat activists to bring fatness under the banner of ‘normal,’ particularly through attempts to link certain forms of fatness and health, is a losing battle. Further, this strategy may lead to an ethic of assimilation that leaves behind the very people that fat activism should most benefit and represent. By drawing the connections between queer theory, disability studies and fat activism, I suggest that bodily normativity is an unstable category that must be constantly re/performed because it is always, in effect, failing ( McRuer 2006 ). Given this, fat activism should resist the seduction of normal and instead develop a more critical politics of embodiment and more effective challenge to healthism. I suggest that Eli Clare’s (2002) notion of the ‘ordinary and familiar’ offers one such framework.

The Subject and Governmental Action: A Foucauldian Analysis of Subjectification and the 24 Year-Old Rule in Denmark

This article discusses the effects of the 24 year-old rule in Denmark utilising Foucault’s understanding of the ‘subject’ within a governmentality framework. The 24 year-old rule is a good example of how a gendered knowledge about immigration becomes a reality that steers biopolitics, enables practices of normalisation and subjectifies immigrants in various ways. The article foregrounds the subjectivity of immigrant women through a narrative analysis of the constitution of the subject within discourses and in an asymmetrical relationship to power in governance. This analysis reveals the complexity of empirical interactions between the ideational structure of legislative measures and personal meanings expressed by immigrant subjectivities. While I illustrate certain modes of subjectification in relation to the 24 year-old rule, I emphasise the ways subjects employ certain identity strategies by resisting, reworking or contributing to the practices of normalisation.

Contesting citizenship: irregular migrants and new frontiers of the political

Irregular migrants complicate the boundaries of citizenship and stretch the parameters of political belonging. Comprised of refugees, asylum seekers, illegal labor migrants, and stateless persons, this group of migrants occupies new sovereign spaces that generate new subjectivities. Investigating the role of irregular migrants in the transformation of citizenship, Anne McNevin argues that irregular status is an immanent (rather than aberrant) condition of global capitalism, formed by the fast-tracked processes of globalization. McNevin casts irregular migrants as more than mere victims of sovereign power, shuttled from one location to the next. Incorporating examples from the United States, Australia, and France, she shows how migrants reject their position as illegal outsiders and make claims on the communities in which they live and work. For these migrants, outsider status operates as both a mode of subjectification and as a site of active resistance, forcing observers to rethink the enactment of citizenship. McNevin connects irregular migrant activism to the complex rescaling of the neoliberal state. States increasingly prioritize transnational market relations that disrupt the spatial context for citizenship. At the same time, states police their borders in ways that reinvigorate territorial identities. Mapping the broad dynamics of political belonging in a neoliberal era, McNevin provides invaluable insight into the social and spatial transformation of citizenship, sovereignty, and power.

Colonialism and orthodoxy in Greenland

In this article I follow the struggles between a Danish missionary, Niels Hveyssel, and a Greenlandic ‘heretical’ movement in the late eighteenth century in Greenland. The so-called Habakuk affair was the first unauthorized Greenlandic appropriation of Christianity. The movement lasted a couple of years and its demise is usually credited to the intervention and control of head catechist Frederik Berthelsen. After outlining some historical currents, I explore Hveyssel's reports to the missionary college outlining the turn of events, in order to examine and highlight the assumptions of gender, superstition, self-mastery, rationality and race underlying the correspondence. I thus trace how Hveyssel represents himself as master of the Greenlanders, especially the catechists who worked with him, and how he differentiates and makes preferences along racial lines. Finally, I place Hveyssel's representation within what I call the ‘Protestant pastorate’. The Protestant pastorate is the Protestant power structure in its Danish context, including its modes of subjectification and control.

(Information) Technologies of the Self: Personalisation as a New Mode of Subjectivation and Knowledge Production

Personalisation has increasingly become a concern in policy making, public service, information technology (IT) provision and academic traditions. This article is concerned with how personalisation and personalised learning are suggested to reform Swedish higher education. The empirical material is official documents from the Swedish policy process of flexible education from 1998 onwards, including the universities' replies to these proposals and the following government bill. Moreover, material on learning management systems from public instances has been included. Personalisation is regarded as part of a contemporary intensified mode of governing that makes use of liberal powers and self-government, where individuals are governed and preferably govern themselves through IT-based modes of learning. Specifically, the article examines how personalisation – as a mode of subjectivation inscribed in Swedish education policies – is constituted by two particular and intertwined technologies of government: the IT-based learning environment and self-technologies. The author's argument is that this creates a productive and personalised apparatus, made possible through ethical self-constitution in IT-mediated learning environments and an ideal performative knowledge production. Questions are raised about the possible limitations of the social and informational action of such an apparatus, and risks of exposure and connectivity in these self-governable learning environments.

A escrita como modo de vida: conexões e desdobramentos educacionais

Tomando por base as principais reflexões de Michel Foucault sobre o ato de escrever, o presente ensaio discorre sobre a correlação intrínseca entre os modos de escrita e de vida nas escolas, apontando para uma agonística em operação diuturna nas práticas escriturais levadas a cabo nesse quadrante. Isso significa que, no interior dos procedimentos de escrita, embatem-se forças superlativas, tanto no sentido da investida unificadora dos modos de subjetivação aí implicados, quanto na direção de uma transfiguração radical desses mesmos modos, tendo em vista a sua multiplicação. Adensando a discussão teórica, tematiza-se a escrita de si, tal como formulada por Foucault, como um esforço escultural desmedido em favor de uma dispersão, uma rarefação e, então, uma elisão subjetivas. Em seguida, interpelam-se analiticamente três argumentos recorrentes acerca da escrita escolar: sua categorização segundo gêneros, sua função examinatória e sua subordinação à leitura. Por meio de tal exame crítico, visa-se desestabilizar as bases de justificação de um tipo de apropriação representacional e cientificista dos fazeres escriturais escolares, bem como fabular cenários divergentes de seu mainstream. Por fim, intenta-se perspectivar a escrita como circunstância propícia à estilização existencial daquele que escreve, tendo em mente, com Foucault, o imprescindível esforço de resistência e de autocriação ética diante dos jogos subjetivadores típicos das práticas escolares. Trata-se do inextricável movimento de diferença e de variação que uma escrita não cativa das convenções pedagógicas da época faculta e, ao mesmo tempo, exige de todo aquele que por ela envereda.

<b>Tecnologias de gênero, masculinidades e apriosionamentos na execução penal</b><br>doi:10.5007/1807-1384.2011v8n1p185

The study articulates the relations of power / knowledge in the production of crime and operationalization of the law, the subtle way in which technologies of gender naturalize actions and reactions in relationships, partnerships and daily struggles between staff and prisoners and the processes of subjectivity in contemporaneity . This study has as epistemological matrix the genealogy proposed by Michel Foucault, who has allowed diverse pathways as document reviews, semi-structured interviews, performance groups and courses. The interweaving of the forces and discourses has engendered the impact of technologies on gender, especially masculinity, in the present relations between staff and prisoners. The impact of this relationship puts on display the modulations of subjectivity in a continuum of oscillation between normalizing and singularizing modes of subjectification.

As novas tecnologias legais na produção da vida familiar: Antropologia, direito e subjetividades

In this article, we explore the possible dialogue between legal anthropology and the theory of biopolitics. We formulate our contribution on the basis of research on the uses of DNA technology in paternity investigations carried out in different spaces of the Rio Grande do Sul judicial system. Ethnographic observations in these institutional settings help us to understand how certain situations produce (reinforcing or modifying) sentiments associated with family life. After presenting an initial ethnographic scene through which we mean to give color and life to the subjects who populate the courtrooms, we follow an agenda traced out by Rabinow and Rose (2006), in order to throw light on the chain of influences between new forms of knowledge, shifting hierarchies of power, and new “modes of subjectivation”.

The Ungovernable

This article seeks to deepen Giorgio Agamben’s brief investigation of the Foucauldian technical term dispositif, by locating it (and the triple structure which articulates it) in the larger context of his own contribution to the genealogy of “governmentality.” Following Agamben’s reconstruction of the Christian paradigm for the divine government of the world, it explores the singular relation between governmental dispositifs and concurrent modes of subjectivation. It argues that the contingency of human action must first be secured for the governmental machine to be able to operate.

Ethnography and Incommensurability in the Aftermath of Insurgency

Does ethnography in some way enact and perform what it names? If one foregrounds this performative dimension, what exactly does ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency do? The article explores these questions as they emerge in the context of ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency ( insurgencia) in Guatemala, and in relation to debates in social and cultural theory. It is argued that ethnography activates—and is responsive to—performative modes of subjectification and desubjectification discussed, inter alia, with reference to notions of ‘the archive’ and ‘testimony’. The article shows that ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency conjures up insurrectionary modalities of action. It establishes realignments and relations, enacts substitutions, and arouses modes of cross-identification between subjects, directly referencing how the insurgency was sustained during the Guatemalan conflict. However, rather than crystallizing or stabilizing an account of the insurgency, ethnography deals specifically with incommensurability and the slips— or gaps—that result from oscillations between representation—as in the multiply populated archive that holds the voices of many speaking subjects—and non-representation—as in the indexical domain of the subjectless archive that is all that there is that can speak.

Dialogue and its Conditions: The Construction of European Citizenship

The Council of Europe's White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue provides an example of the way in which dialogue has become part of the current mode of governance in Europe. Throughout current policy, the terms ‘dialogue’ and ‘voice’ inform the introduction of practices and tools that constitute the citizen, or active learning citizen. Notions of voice and dialogue operate through educational and social practices today that are constitutive of a particular mode of subjectivation that renders the individual – through their freedom to speak, to participate and to be critical – governable. Current policy frames citizenship as a learning problem. In order to facilitate the development of competences for lifelong learning and active citizenship such policy seeks to establish ‘a common language’. The concern with seeking a common language in respect of education and of citizenship is taken up in the discussion in this article, which places the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue into the context of current related European policy, and indicates how dialogue operates in the current mode of governmental subjectivation. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Stanley Cavell, this article draws attention to the governance of dialogue itself – the inculcation of the individual in to a language of culture, citizenship and democracy that is depoliticised and which, it is argued, denies disagreement and conflict as central aspects of political life.

Autoria e esquiva: pensamento, ética e subjetivação em Michel Foucault

Este artigo se fundamenta nos argumentos de Richard Bernstein em defesa da postura crítica de Foucault, contextualizados a partir do debate com Habermas, para quem a teoria foucaultiana do poder se ressentiria da explicitação de seus fundamentos normativos. Procuramos indicar, baseados na conferência sobre a função do autor, de 1969, o modo como tal postura se materializa precisamente na recusa em assumir uma posição de enunciação vinculada à proclamação tanto da Verdade quanto do Bem. Tal recusa, aqui denominada esquiva, faz com que a crítica seja permanente e se constitua como entrelaçamento entre trabalho filosófico, problematização ética e formas de subjetivação