Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 16:00:50 -0500 (EST) From: heidi rimke <hrimke-AT-ccs.carleton.ca> Subject: Re: the will to know On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Anders Legarth Schmidt wrote: > I think they pretty much represent the view on the self in our > culture, almost quoting Rose: That the individual is to search for personal > fulfillment, to excercise choice, to find her true self and so on. What I find so interesting about Rose is his insistence that we are not only 'free to choose' but obliged to be free; we are governed through our freedom. And this is a predominant tenet of self-help. This notion of the free, autonomous, choosing self elucidates something quite telling about the ways through which modern subjects in neo-liberal societies have come to understand, experience, evaluate their lives. But I think this understanding of the subject is what Foucault argues againts in "The Subject and Power." The notion of the individual as sole/sovereign author of her own existence is a kind of enslavement dedicated to "well-being" or acquiring a "new and improved" self while simultaneously negating the social horizon against which these norms and codes of enslavement could be made visible. So, self-help, i think, can be likened to an insitution in a social order with a powerfully taken-for-granted truth: while appearing to be normal, neutral and natural it conceals the most deceptive of deceptions; self-helping enslavements remain invisible. best, heidi
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