Rose, N. (1999) Governing the Soul: Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books Ltd)

Preface to Second Edition

Mind Maps:

http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/dimensions.htm

http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/true.htm

SCIENCE
Rejects “ideology-critique” of sociology of scientific knowledge
Focusing instead on “…the productive role of knowledges” (p.xiii)
“…reconstructing the epistemological field that allows certain things to be considered true at particular historical moments…” (p.xiv)

Rose’s methods focus on:
Regimes of truth “Material and practical conditions under which truths, facts, explanations come to be formulated and accepted” (p.xiv), and
“…an epistemology of assemblage…” (p.xv)
Focus not on truth claims, but on ways which truths produced and consequences of production
Not just disputes and arguments, but issues of prestige and cultural intelligibility

SUBJECT
“My interest here links up with the growing interest in questions of self and identity in contemporary sociology and cultural studies” (p.xvi)

Self-society evident in seminal social science writers
Adam Smith – theory of moral sentiments
Karl Marx – economic and ideological individualism
Durkheim – mechanical and organic solidarity
Weber – protestant ethic
Simmel – modern life=mental life
Norbert Elias – civilization/civility

“How have persons been shaped by prevailing ways of thinking about human beings and acting on them?” (p.xvii)

Genealogy of subjectivity “…confluence of a whole variety of different shifts and practices with no single point of origin or principle of unification…” (p.xvii)

Rejects Giddens/Beck’s epochalisation and sociological reduction of subjectivity, BUT (very broadly speaking), epochs of the English speaking (European?) concepts of self…
1st half 19th century – moral subject of habit
2nd half 19th century – normal subject of character/constitution
1st half 20th century – social subject of solidarity and citizenship
2nd half 19th century – autonomous subject of choice and realization
‘Making up’ people – Hacking (1986)
Argue that human beings actually live their lives as narratives (Eric Berne?)
“Culture provides us with life narratives couched in psychological terms” (p.xviii)
Subjectivities – ‘language games’
Hacking’s ‘human kinds’ that “…emerge and are transformed simultaneously with the language that describes them” (p.xix)
Danizigen (1997) “…psychological properties … actually shape and reshape the kinds of persons whom psychology has to deal” (p.xix)
BUT
“The linguistic turn here can also be misleading and restricting…” (p.xix)
“Language … is only one aspect of the ways in which the human beings relation to itself is shaped and reshaped historically…” (p.xix)
Techniques of the self
Ethics (in the Foucauldian sense) have been ‘psychologized’ but not to the extent that we have become ‘psychological man’ (as with Reiff, 1966)

POWER
Foucauldian concept of power – ‘governmentality’ – cf. Burchell et al (1991)
Government “the conduct of conduct” (p.xxi)
Programmes/strategies/techniques “…for acting upon the actions of others towards certain ends…” (p.xxi)
Multiple circuits of power
Diversity of authority and forces
(NB. Government at a distance)
Verdical discourses
“Advanced” liberalism – modern government
Citizenship “…there is a range of dispersed and non-totalizing practices within which games of citizenship must be played” (p.xxii)
‘Government through freedom’ which “…multiplies the points at which the citizen has to play his or her part in the games that govern them…” (p.xxiii)

CRITICAL APPROACH
Concerned about contemporary notions of selfhood, and the gains made by the growth in the notion of individual autonomy are matched by the losses concomitant on the decline of fraternity, self-sacrifice and dependency.
The “ethical paucity” (p.xxiv) of the individualistic life narrative!
 

Introduction

“Subjective experiences and intimate relationships offer themselves as the only place where we cannot locate our real private selves...” but this is the belief which is “…profoundly misleading” (p.1)

Our subjectivities are, “…intensely governed” (p.1)

"Thoughts, feelings and actions may appear as the very fabric and constitution of the intimate self, but they are socially organised and managed in a minute particulars” (p.1)

http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/trope1.htm

(Rose argues that these tropes are limited)

Management of Contemporary Self

Distinctive in that

1. All governments etc in policy, bureaucracy and action, seek to “…regulate the conduct of citizens by acting upon their mental capacities and propensities…” (p.2) eg education system "The ` soul' of the citizen has entered directly into political discourse and a practice of government" (p.1)

2. "The management of subjectivity has become a central task for more than organisation" (p. 2) Eg aptitude, psychology in Management Studies

3. Birth of a new form of expertise of subjectivities, Eg psychologists, social workers

Instead, Foucault's concept of ‘governmentality’ "The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, the to allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power" (p.5)

Governmentality "...transformation of the rationalities and technologies for the exercise of political rule" (p.5) bound up with the extension of governments into knowledge and understanding of its populations

http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/examination.htm

Two knowledges

1. Population as an isolated sector of reality

2. Latour’s concept of `inscription’ as if all of knowledge used by governments

Inscription "...translates the World into Material traces: written reports, drawings, maps, charts and, pre-eminently, numbers" (p.6)

17th to 19th centuries

Numbers-statistics "the science of state" (p.6) Eg delinquency rates "The capacities of subjects were becoming pertinent to and available for governments in a new way" (p.7)

"The human psyche itself has become a possible domain for systematic government... Educate, cure, reform, punish…" (p.7)

"... in rendering subjectivity calculable it makes persons amenable to having things done to them -and doing things to themselves - in the name of subjective capacities" (p.8)

"... human technologies... enable action from a centre of calculation... upon the subjective lives of men, women and children" (p.8)

But the actual technologies governing subjectivity have no single origin, the top of consequence of ‘small histories' out of which "...a larger pattern has taken shape in whose web we all, men and women, have become entangled" (p.9)

The heterogeneity of psychology has enabled it to "...operate within a diversity of contexts and strategies or the government of subjectivity" (p.10)

Expertise "...provides essential distance between formal apparatus of laws...and the shaping of the activities of citizens..." (p.10)

Persuasion/attraction as strategies so that citizens of liberal democracies "regulate themselves" (p.10) by self management, alliances of personal and institutional goals

http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/selfmanage.htm
 

1. The Psychology of War

"My concern [is with] how the experience of war has transformed our ways of thinking about and intervening in the organisation or human beings within military and non-military spheres alike” (p.16)“…many of the major figures of post-war psychology were involved in war work…” (p.7)
“The post-war transformations in the rationales and technologies for the government of the human soul or impossible to understand without recognising the ways in which the experience of warfare transformed the conceptual apparatus, practical techniques and professional aspirations of those involved”(p.17)

Experiences: two themes

• Need to systematically utilize the human factor

• The psychology of the group

World War One United States intelligence testing and specialised Personal System, "both render the human individual into the field of knowledge and the scope of management of institutional life” (p.17)
Germany War Ministry until 1941
Shell-shock, which precipitated the Mental Hygiene Movement and so, "Madness was now thought of in terms of social hygiene” (p.21)


2. The Government of Morale

Edward Glover, birth of social psychiatry (Lancet, 1940)
"In the early decades of the 20th century, government was extended to the petty details of personal life” (p.22)
New social medicine
" As the Royal Commission of 1926 put it the problem of insanity was essentially a public health problem to be dealt with on public health lines” (p.23)
Morale - prospect of air war
“The report [of 1938] … encapsulated the dominant expert view. Psychiatric casualties of air-raids would, it seem, exceed physical casualties by three to one… a complex organisation must be set up… as Hugh Crichton Miller put it, 'There's a real danger that the civilian ill seek, not security, but infantile security'… these anxieties proved to be unfounded…” (p.24)
The main problem was bed-wetting among first children who had been evacuated!
"But the anxiety about a possible epidemic of neurosis produced its own consequences. A sustained effort was made to chop the neurotic topography of the population." (p.25)
"The mental state of the population was beginning to be translated into a calculable form: inscribed, documented, and turned into statistics, graphs, charts, and tables that could be pored over in political deliberations and administrative initiatives." (p.25)
The British leadership went in for practical organisational measures rather than scientific government.
"Additionally, some psychologists argued that the lack of panic in neurosis be explained if one reversed the pre-war analysis made by the experts … [s]ocial solidarity and psychological relations were becoming the central terms in accounting for mental health"(p.25)
Ministry of Information
Influence of psychologists and psychiatrists on the Ministry was through terminology and concepts and direct influence was uncommon.
Morale propaganda issue declined after 1941 after a change in leadership.
This contrasted with the “…American enthusiasm or the scientific study and regulation of morale….” (p.29)
UK and also elsewhere: "...The emergence of subjectivity as a key concern of government of the problem to psychology that it would later strive to claim for its own” (p.26)
United States Gallup poll
Earlier ideas about irrational mobs “…gave way to a notion of the populace as an aggregate of individuals with views and wishes to be investigated by precise techniques and communicate is to govern by experts” (p.27)
"The new science and democracy also drew on a new ways of thinking about individual will" (p.27)
Attitudes
"...bridged the internal world of the psyche and the external world of conduct..." (p.27)Attitude survey or moral survey"
The public will could be turned into numbers and charts could be used in formulating arguments and strategies … where individuals were to be governed 'by consent'..." (p.28)
“…the programme for the management of consent through the monitoring and channelling of opinion was greatly elaborated in the conditions of war...” (p.28)
USA
“…American enthusiasm or the scientific study and regulation of morale….” (p.29)
Rensis Likert – Likert scale
The success of administrative decisions came to be construed as “…dependent upon information about the public mind" (p.30)
UK Wartime Social Survey
Slimmed down after 1941, becoming a "…more limited but precisely targeted set of inquiries" (p.30) and after the war was incorporated into the Office of Population Census and Surveys."
The survey provided the means for translating the psychological state and well-being of the population into the calculations of government agencies” (p.30)
"Information and happiness go together in the new science of government as much as in the old Science of police” (p.31)
Propaganda: "Maclean suggests that, for the most part, the [UK] Ministry studiously avoided consulting psychological experts" (p.31)
Post-war, citizenship had acquired subjective form and the citizen had become actively engaged in the social and political process.
This involved the "…shaping of wills, consciences, and aspirations, to forge social solidarity and individual responsibilities in the name of citizenship and democracy" (p.32)
"As citizenship became a psychological matter, the psyche of the citizen was discovered as a new continent for psychological knowledge and the deployment of the professional skills of the technicians of subjectivity" (p.32)

Quick note: What has this got to do with Islamic masculinities? Well, quite a lot. This text is about the way in which Western governments and ‘governmentality’ has influenced our self-understanding. This begs so many questions, including the extent to which such pervasive and implicit understandings have influenced Muslim discourse about the self in the West. To understand how to be a 'Western' Muslim, we don't a history of philosophy (as Tariq Ramadan seems to be implying, although I admit I have only gleaned this from interviews), but genealogies of culture. It's the deep stratas around the Muslim-European borderland that interests me...
 

3. The SykeWarriors
WWII = ‘Black’ propaganda and ‘white’ propaganda
White propaganda eg UK dropped 2 billion leaflets on Continental Europe!
Black propaganda eg ‘rumour’
Dicks and Shills study of German POW’s politics, enabling propaganda to target specific populations
“The personal and interpersonal characteristics of population were made thinkable and calculable; they could now enter into the strategies of war and peace” (p.36)

"Indeed, as far as the United States is concerned, but the end of 1942 the majority of social scientists in general the social psychologists in particular were in government service, either full-time or acting as consultants on particular projects" (p.36-37)

"The investigation of morale, the analysis of attitudes, interpretation of the dynamic relationships between individual and group - these formed the matrix for a plethora of distinct but interrelated investigations but blurred disciplinary boundaries…” (p.37)

Kluckhohn and Leighton’s concluded that behaviour in times of stress were related to deeply ingrained attitudes originating in childhood and conceived of the morale of Japanese soldiers and civilians in these terms. The notion of national character was thus remodelled as a psychological conception, translated into set of psychological technique useful for providing expert advice in political calculations.
Studies drawing on psychoanalytic and anthropological notions in the same vein influenced the character of later research into Native American and Soviet cultures.
"The social importance of this psychologization of childhood and personality was to go far beyond the military concerns that had provoked it" (p.38)

The interdisciplinary nature of the studies carried out during WWII was carried forward through the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University (established 1946) and in Parson’s general theory of action.
“…psychologization of the polity, of its attitudes, solidarities, and oppositions, its interpersonal transactions, was to establish the platform for the most significant developments of psychological expertise... In the post war years” (p.39)


4. Groups as War

"The birth of the group constituted the most profound effect the experience of war upon the government of subjectivity” (p.40)
“…procedures of selection, allocation, and promotion increasingly deployed psychological and psychiatric criteria…” (p.40)

A project directed by Eli Ginzberg on the war, published work in the 1950s, concluded that "...organisational policy could improve the performance of large organisations by taking account of personality and motivation” (p.41)

Stouffer’s surveys, of the attitudes of American troops, published in four volumes in 1949 and 1950, incorporated the concept of attitude as a link between the efficiency of an organisation and individual morale as a subjective relationship comprehendible in terms of the small number of dimensions.
Fundamental to this calculable measure was the scale: Renis Likert and Louis Guttman. Attitudes could therefore be "…investigated, measured, inscribed, reported, and calculated, and administrative decisions made in that light" (p.44)

Stouffer’s work also highlighted how crucial the maintenance of morale and efficiency was to the group. The upshot was that the management of the army (and factory) was seen as achievable through "…acting upon the bonds that or regroup and aligning individuals through this mechanism with the objectives of the organisation” (p.45)

"At a more mundane and immediate level, psychological investigation could inform very detailed military decisions. For motivation and contentment appeared to be a product of the issues and exigencies of everyday existence … psychological expertise had become the key to organisational harmony" (p.45)

Officer recruitment: “….the United States provided the techniques for the standardisation of personality … Britain innovated in the use of real life situations for the assessment of capacity - the observation of candidates while they performed the various tasks set them…” (p.47)
Britain – field theory of Lewin and Moreno: traits “… were not constant qualities of the individual were all successful officers possessed, which existed independent of context” (p.47)

"From the wartime years onward, social and institutional life was increasingly to be conceived as intersubjective emotional relations, the interplay between social solidarity is an individual personality dynamics” (p.48)

Emphasis on psychological bonds and group solidarity

There was a similar impetus towards group based understandings from the work done with soldiers with psychoneurotic symptoms and returning POWs, with the development of the therapeutic community alongside parallel developments which led to the birth of group psychotherapy.

"The relational life of the group had become both the field of the illness and the domain of the cure" (p.51)

"In the years immediately following the end of the war, the problems of economic reconstruction would insert these issues of the group into the art of economic debate, managerial practice and psychological innovation … Solidarity and morale could be produced by administrative means. The group had become a crucial means of conceptualising the social behaviours of the individual, or analysing the efficiency of all manner of social practices, of promoting individual contentment and organisational efficiency, and of conducting the business of the cure" (p.52)

Afterthought: Is the Islamic ummah sometimes represented in terms of the 'sick group'?
 

5. The Subject of Work

Marxist critique of work :“Workers work because they have to, they work at the behest of others in a process they do not control, to produce goods or services which they do not enjoy…” (p.55)
Obedience, self-denial and deferred self-gratification, “…entails an essential subordination of subjectivity” (p.56)
But workplace reforms, with the help of numerous agencies, including psychology
"these different attempts to transform work see the subjectivity of the worker not only as a value to be respected rather than subjugated, but also as a central determinant to the success of the company” (p.56)
Success of company comes from, “…engaging the employee with the goals of the company at the level of his or her subjectivity” (p.56)
Worker’s subjectivity viewed as “…a complex territory to explored, understood and regulated” (p.56)
Also numerous private organisations, eg management consultancies
Humanizers of work “…have represented themselves as liberal, democratic and egalitarian…” but these representations have been criticized for being “…disingenuous or politically naive…” (p.58)
Focus on theories/techniques of appeal to managers, “…psychological expertise has inevitably adopted a managerial perspective” (p.58)
eg F W Taylor (1913) = “Taylorism”
However, by defining the expertise as an ideological tool, the implication is that it is false and the result of single social process of worker exploitation…
Rose sees the development of this expertise as “…part of a wider family of political Programmes to use scientific knowledge to advance national efficiency through making the most productive use of material and human resources…” (p.59)
Programmes incorporated pressures of democracy and demands for rational legitimization of managerial role in promoting efficiency


6. The contented worker

Early 20th century – most employers/employees in the UK bound by statutory requirements/constraints “Work became a key element in the social economy” (p.61)Socialization of work:
“In the interwar years … psychological factors were to become the basis of a new matrix of relations between economic regulation,
management of the enterprise and psychological expertise…” (p.65)
Charles Myers – National Institute for Industrial Psychology
Myers: “…his pupils included virtually all the central figures in British psychology in the Interwar period” (p.66)
Myers – opposed behaviourism, subject matter of psychology consciousness not conduct
Personality assessment, aptitude testing, vocational guidance, personnel training, etc…
Bad manager = poor psychodynamics
Key notions:
Individual difference – individuals with complex subjective life (the maladjusted worker);
Mental hygiene;
Productivity/efficiency/contentment understood in terms of: attitudes of workers to work; workers feeling of control over pace/environment; sense of cohesion within small working groups; beliefs about bosses views of their work and personal concerns

“The minutiae of the human soul – human interactions, feelings and thoughts, the psychological relations of the individual to the group – had emerged as a new domain for Management” (p.72)
Management = expert = neutral, adopting humanitarian concepts within a sensibility articulated by Sidney Webb, ‘Under any social order from now to Utopia, management is indispensable and all enduring’ (Webb, 1917, cited p.74)
Welfare Workers Association (1913)
Became – Institute of Labour Management (1931)
Became – Institute of Personnel Management (1940s)

7. The Worker at war

“…new political contact between opened between government and citizen during World War II…” (p.76)
…Corporatism? (…vs. the illusion of constitutionalism)
Efficiency, rationality, productivity
But the corporatism analysis obscures some of the positive outcomes from this contract, such as “…the elaboration of a new rationale of government, a new way of formulating the task of public authorities, a new way of conceiving and regulating the links between citizen and his or her productive activity” (p.76)

8. Democracy at Work

“Through work, the worker obtained psychological and social benefits: fulfilment and a feeling of belonging” (p.81)
Not soft-soaping – although perhaps development of consensus towards the hegemony of capitalist organisation of labour.
More significant for the values they perpetuated and also for their impact on productivity
Writings influential, eg J. A. C. Brown
Unit of observation = social relationships, thus developing the idea of group over mob
Working group with common purpose viewed as source of personal satisfaction for worker
The management of the enterprise “…was becoming an exercise in the management of opinion” (pg 86) rather than autocratic
Communication and leadership as vital to effective management – foremen
Style of leadership crucial to morale
“The internal world of the factory was becoming mapped in psychological terms … inner feelings of the workers were being transmuted into measurements … [t]he enterprise thus became a microcosm of democracy” (p.88)
Mental hygiene…
Spectrum of views
Psycho-physiological science of work (ergonomics)
…to…
“…psychoanalysis of the organisation” (p.89) Tavistock, ‘Human relations’, the socio-technical system
 

9. The Expertise of Management
“The link between democracy and productivity, between justice and contentment, began to be displaced in the Britain of the 1960s … what was necessary for economic health, it appeared, was the reconstruction of the rational relations between pay and production, and the reconstitution of proper relations of authority and responsibility in the life of the workplace.” (p.93)

Decline of human relations in psychology of work; resurrection of ‘economic man’
Human relations translated into skills-based management approaches, along with notion of tools for developing ‘human potential’ (in the quasi-religious sense) whereby managers could “…transform their own modes of personal existence in order to be adequate to wield responsibility and to lead effectively” (p.102)

Problems ensuing on the rise of the shop steward movement – over-manning, irrational demarcation, etc… Response - rise of a ‘new economic calculability’


10. The Production of the Self
“The primary economic image offered to the modern citizen is not that of producer but that of consumer” (p.103)

‘…purchasing power…’
‘…lifestyle choices…’

“The image of the citizen as a choosing self entails a new image of the productive subject” (p.103)
“The worker is an individual in search of meaning, responsibility, a sense of personal achievement, a maximized ‘quality of life’ and hence of work” (p.103/4)
“The individual is … fulfilled in work, now construed as an activity through which we produce, discover and experience ourselves” (p.104)
“…production takes as central the values of adaptability, innovation, flexibility, excellence, sensitivity to consumer pressures and the demands of the market” (p.104)

‘…humanization of work…’
‘…the management of excellence…’ (Peters and Waterman – USA)
‘…Quality of Working Life (QWL)…’ (UK)

Source of new vision of work: Europe, links between socio-technical expertise at Tavistock and Scandinavian corporatism
QWL still minority concern in UK – ideas “…reabsorbed into a managerial technology for promoting worker commitment and contentment” (p.107)
UK – influence of Japan, etc ‘…self esteem of employees…’

In USA, reaffirmation of protestant ethic as a ‘social ethic’
William H. Whyte’s 'The Organisation Man'
Management of worker based on conceptions of human nature derived from Maslow, Rogers, Frankl, Fromm, etc
Peters and Waterman 'In Search of Excellence'

Model II learning, where the stress is on “…striving for information, collaboration, facilitation, openness, trust, risked taking, shared responsibility, choice learning, open competition – in other words a Model II organisation can learn and change” (p.114)
‘…intrinsic motivation…’
“The citizen, at work as much as outside it, is engaged in a product to shape his or her life as an autonomous individual driven by motives of self-fulfilment” (p.116)

‘…psychological consultants to the organisation…’

Both in the USA and UK, realignment of human relations theory “…sought to reshape the internal world of the organisation so as to release the autonomous subjectivity of the worker in such a way that it aligned it with the aspirations of the enterprise, now construed in terms of innovation, flexibility and enterprise” (p.112)
Work as part of a path to self-fulfillment

“There is no longer any barrier between the economic, the psychological, and the social. The antithesis between managing adaptation to work and struggling for rewards from work is transcended” (p.109)
 

Final thoughts

I had done a fair amount of close reading of Rose, and the only remaining details I want to draw attention to are the link made by Rose between behaviourism, social skills training and performative (consumer ) culture (chapter 17) and Wendy Brown's thesis on the way political identity is linked to suffering and social exclusion. The latter is interesting, in the light of how Islamophobia has proved more of a uniting point for British Muslims than Allah himself, or so it seems.

In reading the final sections of this book, however, what has become clear to me was the significance of its presiding theme - which is the way that a whole range of institutions, quite unconspiritorially, have sought to align political, social and institutional goals with the way people think about themselves. Rose demonstrates this governmentality through exploring (in detail) the way psychological sciences have created 'psy spaces' in each of us, and the consequent tangible, far reaching and profound impact this has had on our lives, from work to mothering to how we socially interact with one another.

There are several important issues raised within this thesis that have pertinence to TGP.

First is the moral contradictions which have arisen from this pervading governmentality - especially between freedom and choice and self-regulation. Freedom and choice, in this context, is the freedom and choice of the consumer. What Rose is suggesting, and I think quite rightly, is that corporate consumerism is the defining theme of contemporary culture.

This raises the question as to what extent Islam can ever be 'integrated' into such a culture, or indeed, whether one of the defining ethics of Islam should be rejection of this ethic. The core morality common to all governmental discourses - consensuality and excess, as well as the ethic of authenticity versus hypocrisy, further highlights this question.

Rose's work presses one to ask of any idea not, 'What are its origins?' but rather 'How has it been shaped by evolving historical understandings of the self?' But what about the self, anyway? If it is such a historical entity, if it is so patently socially constructed, how do TGP (and should TGP) seek to 'Islamize it'? Is this what is at the heart of becoming a Muslim man? Similarly, how to avoid imposing consumerist conceptualisations of self onto, say, a reading of the Qur'an?

These are all notes of caution, but there are also some clear directions forward. One is the idea that action, rather than person, is what is crucial. Becoming a Muslim (man) is about what one does, not who one is - ie. praxis. I would assert knowledge is also praxis, if it leads to action. And the kind of praxis knowledge I am seeking to develop is one that deconstructs the whole idea of Muslim identity, and reconstructs the idea of a Muslim as an agent.

That would seem to be the way forward, and at this juncture, I think the focus of my studies should turn from social sciences to Islamic Studies, in order to build a foundation upon which this new praxis can be built, insha Allah

In the Name of Allah...

the pen/index

© Tasneem Project 2004