Sam Binkley

Psychological life as enterprise: social practice and the government of neo-liberal interiority

This article theorizes the contemporary government of psychological life as neo-liberal enterprise. By drawing on Foucauldian critical social theory, it argues that the constellations of power identified with the psy-function and neo-liberal governmentality can be read through the problematic of everyday practice. On a theoretical level, this involves a re-examination of the notion of dispositif, to uncover the dynamic, ambivalent and temporal practices by which subjectification takes place. Empirically, this point is illustrated through a reflection of one case of neo-liberal psychological life: life coaching.

Everybody's Life is Like a Spiral: Narrating Post-Fordism in the Lifestyle Movement of the 1970s

What has been variously termed the post-Fordist turn in the social and economic organization of Western societies describes (among other things) the demise of a middle class professional culture and the emergence of a new lifestyle morality of expressive self realization. This study examines the role played by selection of lifestyle innovators in this process: through an interpretive study of narratives of moral change, the shift from the old professional morality to the new lifestyle morality is interpreted as a story of learned relaxation and impulsive release. Drawing material from over 83 lifestyle publications and 34 open-ended biographical interviews, the importance of this vanguard lifestyle movement is related to a wider historical consideration of the moral culture of the American middle class, and to an overview of theories of the post-Fordist turn.

The Seers of Menlo Park The Discourse of Heroic Consumption in the ‘Whole Earth Catalog’

This article considers the emergence of the postmodern reflexive consumer through an archival case study of one particularly influential lifestyle magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog. This publication is read in the context of the cultural and lifestyle innovations of the ‘new cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu, Featherstone) of the 1970s, expressed in a new print media of lifestyle advice. In this print culture, consumers were taught to cultivate a reflexive awareness of their lifestyles through an enhanced sensitivity to the deeper meanings of market messages and consumer choices. On the basis of the advice of non-traditional lifestyle intellectuals, market choices acquired a sense of ‘deep play’ (Geertz) in which the well-being of the self and the planet emerged as the specific stake of lifestyle choices. Combining archival research with theoretical and historical analysis, the findings of this study offer an alternative to postmodern studies of the new consumer culture, which focus on the depthlessnessof consumption as a form of ‘pastiche’ (Jameson).

Inventado: Between Transnational Consumption and the Gardening State in Havana's Urban Spectacle

This article presents a theoretically oriented photographic essay on consumer practices and urban spectacle, gathered from a visit to Havana in June of 2006. Employing Zygmunt Baumans conception of the modern state as a “gardening state,” and other widely theorized depictions of global consumer culture as a force of imaginary investment and ephemerality, the article considers the imbrication of state and market as illustrated in an impressionistic photographic study of everyday urban spectacle in the streets of Havana. The article concludes with a consideration of the plight of everyday Havanans in their effort to improvise survival strategies between the forces of a highly controlling state and a nascent culture in transnational consumerism.

The work of happiness: A response to De La Fabián and Stecher (2017)

Following is a critical response to De La Fabián and Stecher (2017). The authors contend that my book, Happiness as Enterprise (2014), is flawed in its attribution of the practice of positive psychology to a principally Calvinist paradigm of labor characterized by a deferred gratification—an error that ignores the ultimately neoliberal attributes of this phenomenon. I respond that, while this may be true, it is a contradiction that positive psychology itself grapples with, and it is also a methodologically necessary step if one is to avoid a determinist account of the practice of positive psychology.