Prompting Spiritual Practices through Christian Faith Applications: Self-Paternalism and the Surveillance of the Soul

This paper examines the everyday use of applications designed for Christian spiritual practices, ranging from Bible reading to prayer to meditation to forms of personal and collective worship. These applications are designed to prompt and reinforce particular behaviours on the part of users to support them in their devotional efforts. As a technology that sits between the external workings of (divine) power and reaffirmations of power through personal examination, these spiritual applications seem to exemplify Foucauldian concerns about surveillance and the production of subjectivity. However, a considered examination of these technologies and an empirical investigation of their use suggests a more complicated story. Though these may be considered “technologies of the self,” their use seems to vary amongst adherents, surprisingly less used by those who may be seen as more spiritually committed. Rather than serving to “quantify” or even “gamify” spirituality fully, the use of these apps suggests a form of self-paternalism in which certain users willingly respond to features designed to encourage particular spiritual practices—a mode of governance that subtly promotes particular (personally) desired behaviours. Drawing in part on an international survey that examined users’ motivations and experiences with these applications, the contexts and results of spiritual applications raise several issues for surveillance studies more generally, including considerations needed for contextual norms, responses to and accommodation of social expectations, and a reorientation towards agency in relation to the production of subjectivity.

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Drafted into a Foreign War?

Rhizomata ◽

10.1515/rhiz-2020-0009 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 183-217

Author(s):

Matthew Sharpe

Keyword(s):

Ancient Philosophy ◽

The Self ◽

Spiritual Practices ◽

Way Of Life ◽

Technologies Of The Self ◽

Analytic Tradition ◽

Modern Conception ◽

The Past ◽

Rational Inquiry

Abstract This paper examines the central criticisms that come, broadly, from the modern, ‘analytic’ tradition, of Pierre Hadot’s idea of ancient philosophy as a way of life.: Firstly, ancient philosophy just did not or could not have involved anything like the ‘spiritual practices’ or ‘technologies of the self’, aiming at curing subjects’ unnecessary desires or bettering their lives, contra Hadot and Foucault et al. Secondly, any such metaphilosophical account of putative ‘philosophy’ must unacceptably downplay the role of ‘serious philosophical reasoning’ or ‘rigorous argument’ in philosophy. Thirdly, claims that ancient philosophy aimed at securing wisdom by a variety of means including but not restricted to rational inquiry are accordingly false also as historical claims about the ancient philosophers. Fourthly, to the extent that we must (despite (3)) admit that some ancient thinkers did engage in or recommend extra-cognitive forms of transformative practice, these thinkers were not true or ‘mainline’ philosophers. I contend that the historical claims (3) and (4) are highly contestable, risking erroneously projecting a later modern conception of philosophy back onto the past. Of the theoretical or metaphilosophical claims (1) and (2), I argue that the second claim, as framed here, points to real, hard questions that surround the conception(s) of philosophy as a way of life.

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Everyday learning in a public sector workplace: The embodiment of managerial discourses

Management Learning ◽

10.1177/1350507611427232 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 43 (3) ◽

pp. 275-289 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Kerry Harman

Keyword(s):

Organizational Learning ◽

Workplace Learning ◽

The Self ◽

Top Down ◽

Technologies Of The Self ◽

Negotiation Of Identity ◽

Learning At Work ◽

The Everyday ◽

Everyday Learning ◽

Prevailing View

This article uses a Foucauldian conceptualization of processes of subjectification to examine the everyday learning of a manager in and through their talk about work. A Foucauldian poststructuralist approach draws attention to the discursive mechanisms whereby people are turned into and turn themselves into subjects. This process is theorized by Foucault as the interplay of technologies of power with technologies of the self (Rose, 1996, 1999a). This perspective provides an account of subjectivity as integrally interrelated with power and knowledge, thereby challenging a prevailing view in much of the organizational learning and workplace learning literature of subjectivity as autonomous and essential. A Foucauldian perspective enables power to be introduced into accounts of everyday learning at work but in a way that avoids reproducing a top-down and monolithic view of power. Importantly, it provides the analytic space for re-presenting workplace learners as active in the ongoing negotiation of identity, rather than only acted on by top down forces.

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Partner Violence, Technologies of the Self, and Masculinity in Mexico

Culture Society and Masculinities ◽

10.3149/csm.0102.155 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 155-176 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Ana Amuchástegui

Keyword(s):

Partner Violence ◽

The Self ◽

Technologies Of The Self

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Back from the Future

10.1093/oso/9780190901226.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Catherine Rottenberg

Keyword(s):

Positive Affect ◽

Professional Women ◽

The Self ◽

Ivy League ◽

Younger Women ◽

Technologies Of The Self ◽

Successful Career ◽

Family Balance ◽

The Future ◽

Work Family

Chapter 4 examines two well-trafficked mommy blogs written by Ivy League–educated professional women with children. Reading these blogs as part of the larger neoliberal feminist turn, the chapter demonstrates how neoliberal feminism is currently interpellating middle-aged women differently from their younger counterparts. If younger women are exhorted to sequence their lives in order to ensure a happy work-family balance in the future, for older feminist subjects—those who already have children and a successful career—notions of happiness have expanded to include the normative demand to live in the present as fully and as positively as possible. The turn from a future-oriented perspective to “the here and now” reveals how different temporalities operate as part of the technologies of the self within contemporary neoliberal feminism. This chapter thus demonstrates how positive affect is the mode through which technologies of the self-direct subjects toward certain temporal horizons.

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Stylizations of Being: Attention as an Existential Hub in Heidegger and Christian Mysticism

Open Theology ◽

10.1515/opth-2020-0018 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 206-220

Author(s):

Bernardo Manzoni Palmeirim

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

Spiritual Practices ◽

Karl Rahner ◽

Existential Phenomenology ◽

Causal Relations ◽

Christian Mysticism ◽

Philosophy And Religion ◽

Simone Weil ◽

Key Factor ◽

Philosophical Framework

AbstractThe assimilation of phenomenology by theology (namely of Heidegger by Karl Rahner) exemplifies how a pre-existing philosophical framework can be imported into a theological system by being suffused with belief. Although one would imagine that the incommensurability between philosophy and religion would thus be overcome, the two disciplines risk to remain, given the sequels of the ‘French debate’, worlds apart, separated by a leap of faith. In this paper I attempt to uncover what grammatical similitudes afforded Rahner formal transference in the first place. Uncovering analogous uses of contemplative attention, namely between Heidegger and Simone Weil, I hope to demonstrate the filial relationship between existential phenomenology and Christian mysticism. I propose that attention is a key factor in both systems of thought. Furthermore, I propose that: 1) attention, the existential hub between subject and phenomena, provides a base for investigating methodologies, as opposed to causal relations, in philosophy and religion; 2) that the two attentional disciplines of meditation and contemplation, spiritual practices designed to shape the self, also constitute styles of thinking; and 3) the ‘turn’ in the later Heidegger’s philosophy is a strategic point to inquire into this confluence of styles of thinking, evincing the constantly dynamic and intrinsically tight relation between philosophy and theology.

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Alternative Forms of Spirituality and the Socialization of a Self-Enhancing Subjectivity: Features of the Post-Secular Religious Space in Contemporary Romania

Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia ◽

10.1515/subbs-2016-0012 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 61 (2) ◽

pp. 97-124 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sorin Gog

Keyword(s):

Spiritual Development ◽

Religious Community ◽

The Self ◽

Traditional Religion ◽

Religious Transformation ◽

Technologies Of The Self ◽

Counselling Services ◽

Distinctive Type ◽

Self Discovery ◽

Development Literature

AbstractMy paper focuses on the shift in religious values in post-socialist Romania and explores the emergence of alternative spiritual beliefs and practices among the younger generations socialized during the post-communist period. It analyses some of the changes that occurred in the wider traditional religious field and looks at the various spiritualized technologies of the self that produce a distinctive type of religious subjectivity and an immanent ethics of authenticity. By departing from the idea of an integrated religious community and from the relational understanding of religious transformation, the field of alternative spiritualities operates a radical break with traditional religion and emphasizes the possibility of spiritual self-realization and self-discovery. It is this process of the individualizing sacralization of the self that constitutes the object of various workshops, blogs, personal and spiritual development literature, courses, spiritual retreats and counselling services. My research looks at how innovative technologies of the self are developed within these spaces that emphasize creativity, wellbeing and a new understanding of subjective interiority that learns how to find in itself the resources it needs to live in a spiritualized ontology of the present.2

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The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body

Cultural Politics an International Journal ◽

10.1215/17432197-8947893 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 193-211

Author(s):

Ashjan Ajour

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

The Self ◽

Political Prisoners ◽

Decisive Factor ◽

Political Strategy ◽

Colonial Power ◽

Hunger Strike ◽

Technologies Of The Self ◽

Principal Tool ◽

A Site

Abstract This article explores the body as a site of subjectivity production during a hunger strike in Occupied Palestine. It further explores the former political prisoners’ theory of subjectivity as it emerges through their praxis and philosophy of freedom. Although the body is the principal tool that the hunger strikers use, they don't consider it the decisive factor in attaining their goal. For that they build on the immaterial strength that develops with the deterioration of the body and from which they construct the concept of rouh (soul). This is expressed through the formation of contradictory binaries: body versus soul and body versus mind. The article shows that the hunger strike not only is a political strategy for liberation; it also moves into a spiritualization of the struggle. It uses and problematizes Foucault's “technologies of the self” to theorize the specific formation of subjectivity in the Palestinian hunger strike under colonial conditions, and it contributes to theories of subjectivation. The hunger strikers, in their interaction with the dispossession of the colonial power, invent technologies of resistance to transcend the colonial and carceral constraints on their freedom and create the capacity for the transformation from a submissive subject to a resistant one.

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Technologies of the Self and Ethnographic Praxis

Medical Anthropology ◽

10.1080/01459740.2015.1050491 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 36 (1) ◽

pp. 77-82 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Paul Brodwin

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

Technologies Of The Self

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The enchantment of archaeological sites and the quest for personal transformation

Ciencias Sociales y Religión/Ciências Sociais e Religião ◽

10.20396/csr.v23i00.14912 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 23 ◽

pp. e021012

Author(s):

Yael Dansac

Keyword(s):

Personal Transformation ◽

The Self ◽

Spiritual Practices ◽

Archaeological Sites

Ethnographical studies increasingly testify the conversion of archaeological sites into places used for a myriad of spiritual purposes associated to the culture of personal transformation. Analyzing data gathered at contemporary spiritual practices held in Carnac, a megalithic site located in northwest France, this article argues that the resignification of ancient places as ‘sacred’ and ‘energetic’ is a strategy to develop and enact inner search and work on the self. Collected data provides understanding on the actor’s conceptualizations and uses given to this place, while also suggesting further inquiries to assess the relations between spirituality, personal transformation and the enchantment of archaeological sites.

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