The Critique of Mindfulness and the Mindfulness of Critique: Paying Attention to the Politics of Our Selves with Foucaul
This chapter examines the analytic of governmentality drawn from Michel Foucault’s work. It invites consideration of the analytical possibilities which might be developed through a twofold task: the critique of mindfulness and the mindfulness of critique.
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Edwin Ng
Introduction This chapter offers an account of a style of thought accompanying a mode of critical practice. This style of thought has enabled for me insight into how the adaptation of mindfulness across multiple domains has to negotiate the dominant logics of the present neoliberal capitalist order of things. It has also helped me to explore how mindfulness might function as a disruptive technology of the self within and against these dominant logics. I have found in the work of Michel Foucault, an incisive set of analytical tools and conceptual schemas with which to investigate the microphysics of power channeling through the contemporary mindfulness trend. I will demonstrate how Foucault’s analytic of governmentality has helped me to work through the ethico-political stakes in my coterminous personal and professional practice of mindfulness. I consider myself an Engaged Buddhist and I am developing a livelihood within the institutional space of the university, which is a key site for the production of knowledge on contemporary mindfulness. But because the analytic of governmentality is not strictly speaking a theoretical program but a style
E. Ng (&) Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
of thought, the critical purchase of this account of Foucault’s work is not restricted to Engaged Buddhist concerns. I hope this chapter will arouse curiosity among others who are exploring mindfulness in other areas of personal, professional, private, or public concerns. The chapter first unpacks Foucault’s genealogical analysis of neoliberalism as a historically contingent regime of truth about human nature and reality ‘as it is.’ According to this regime of truth, an array of knowledges, procedures, techniques, and expertise play out as social or institutional mechanisms and as individualizing practices. These mechanisms and practices facilitate the experience of ‘free choice’ in the production of a subject of interest: the neoliberal subjectivity of homo economicus. This will shed light on why mindfulness is so malleable and adaptable across diverse settings. The chapter then connects Foucault’s account of neoliberalism with his reevaluation of the ethical practices of spiritual self-constitution in antiquity. This will clarify how an analytic of governmentality hinges on a mindful interrogation of the potential consonance or dissonance that may be generated between, on the one hand, being ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence,’ and on the other, the cultivation of ‘identity by a conscience and self-knowledge’ (Foucault 1982: 781). With this dual understanding of subjectivity, we have to investigate the meanings and uses of mindfulness as the
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R.E. Purser et al. (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness, Mindfulness in Behavioral Health, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_10
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emergent and contested outcome of techniques of domination and techniques of the self. A Foucauldian understandi
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