Intentional communities are formed by a group of people who have voluntarily chosen to live together for a range of reasons in the creation of a shared lifestyle. They concern practical forms of living that may reflect diverse structures and distinct philosophies. The intentional community literature is both broad and unique in its representation of intentional community living. Intentional communities may also be considered sites that form the basis for resisting mainstream forms of living and representations of subjectivity. Through an (...) active process of self-constitution, participants engaged in communal forms of living may construct different identities and styles of life. Although the term ‘intentional community’ is fairly recent, notions of utopian living have a long history. Forms of utopian living can be found in early biblical times, while Foucault’s domain of ‘ethics’ is also derived from what the intentional community literature considers to be early utopian communities. Despite an extensive literature, very little research explicitly focuses on communal living as a form of ethics as praxis. This may be due to the characterisation of ethics as a form of rules, duties and consequences, rather than ethics as a relationship that a person cultivates with their ‘self’. Foucault’s domain of ethics provides a valuable context to explore whether intentional community living can be theorised as a Foucauldian form of ethics. Although there is contemporary interest in Foucault’s domain of ethics, relatively few texts have sought to use Foucault’s ethical conceptualisation as a qualitative methodology in the context of empirical research. Even fewer studies have drawn on Foucault’s theoretical framework in the context of empirical research on intentional communities. This is despite a number of themes that the literature shares concerning notions of resistance, identity as a form of selfconstitution and the potentially transformative effect of communal living. This research therefore seeks to make a significant contribution to a relatively underresearched and under-theorised area of the literature. Drawing on Foucault’s ethics as a theoretical framework, this thesis explores twenty-eight narratives of participants who live on five rural communities in northern NSW, Australia. Fieldwork was conducted over a nine-month period between 2004 and 2005, with periods of time spent on each community. One community was revisited for the purpose of collecting further empirical data. Foucault’s ethical analysis and Foucauldian constructionism are used in the analysis and interpretation of the interviews that resulted from this fieldwork. Where individual interviews were not undertaken, a document analysis of former empirical research serves to affirm participant observations. Ethical issues concerning confidentiality and representation were addressed through the attendance at communal or ‘tribal’ meetings where required. The findings suggest that intentional community living may be theorised as a Foucauldian form of ethics, with an analysis of the empirical research providing further insight into each of the four aspects of Foucault’s ethics: the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, the self-forming activities and the telos. The findings also indicate that communal, or co-operative, living may reflect the dominant form of ethics for intentional community members by the way it permeates all other aspects of ethics. In this light, it can be said that intentional community living is an ethics as praxis—a truly practical philosophy. The implications of these findings suggest that through their very practice of an ethics, intentional community participants may be ethical, or ‘individualising’, subjects. That is, through notions of personal choice, acts of resistance and the performance of practices on the self that effect transformation, participants may construct both a ‘self’ and ‘styles of life’ that they both like and affirm, thereby positioning themselves differently against mainstream representations of ‘suburbia’. (shrink)

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...) of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory. (shrink)

Brain imaging is a persuasive visual rhetoric by which neuroscience is articulated as relevant to the construction and maintenance of desirable selves. In this essay, I describe how “brain-based self-help” literature disseminates neuroscientific vocabularies to public audiences. In this genre, brain images are an authoritative visual resource for translating neuroscience into a comprehensive program for living. I use Foucault’s discussion of biopower to describe the ways in which brain-based self-help literature enables self-constitution in a biosocial age where health is a (...) central means of communicating personal worth, social value and political order. The implications of this continuous self-fashioning are not limited to the personal realm but have important political consequences. (shrink)

This article outlines Foucault’s conception of critique in relation to his writings on Kant. In that Kant saw Enlightenment as a process of release from the status of immaturity in that we accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for, it is claimed in this article that Foucault’s notion of critique reveals his own conception of maturity. Whereas Kant sees maturity as the rule of self by self through reason, Foucault sees (...) it as an attitude towards ourselves and the present through an historical analysis of the limits, and the possibility of transgression, of going beyond. Critique is thus a permanent interrogation of the limits, an escape from normalization, and a facing-up to the challenges of self-creation while seeking to effect changes in social structures on specific regional issues of concern. The article concludes by suggesting that the problem of historical and epistemological relativism, which a conception of total critique gives rise to, may not be as insurmountable as some critics of Foucault have claimed. (shrink)

Concern with elective-death decisions usually focuses on individuals' competence and understanding of their situations and prospects. If problematic influences on individuals are considered, they almost invariably have to do with matters such as depression and the effects of medication. Too little attention is paid to how individuals, as subjects, are products of both external cultural and social influences on them, and of internal efforts and needs that determine their subjectivity.

In this thesis I argue that Foucault's dispersive historiography is a deepening rather than a purifying of historical existence. This emphasis upon dispersion as a critical principle is contrasted with, and delimited by the possibility of the narrative comprehension of historical existence exemplified by the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. Insofar as the responsibility to act is an important field where tfphis deepening takes place it cannot be subordinated to the responsibility to otherness which aims at dismantling the action orientated frameworks (...) of traditional ethics and politics. Ricoeur's promotion of narrative refiguration as a response to the aporias of time is thus, a timely rejoinder to dispersive genealogy. I argue further that Foucault's historiography exhibits the productive tension of history as both difference and meaning and that the ethical thrust of such writing is to address the concerns of the present in a way that metamorphosizes rather than challenges the narrative function. Insofar as it connects with the struggles of disenfranchised and marginalized groups, and discourses, it also echoes a powerful element In traditional emancipatory historiography which attempts to fully embrace the slaughtered possibilities of the past The emancipatory potential of dispersive historiography is examined further by comparison with the aims and values of traditional critical theory. Two positions are delineated: Complementarity, in which genealogy produces valuable insights into hitherto unacknowledged power structures; Delimitation, in which Foucault's work is seen to be an important limitation on the epistemological and ontological interventions of critical theory. This JOIns the philosophical hermeneutical critique of critical theory In its delimitation of the finite horizon of all emancipatory discourse. Finally I argue that Foucault's work is itself limited by its refusal to countenance the utopian dimension of social reproduction in which the social imaginary is to be considered not as a delusory projection of desire, but as a driving force behind the projection of freedom. Dispersive freedom sees the formation of political, cultural, and social identities as always constraints upon the real practice of freedom. It is this marginalisation of liberation as a process with ends that I seek to dispute. I conclude that Foucault's dispersive principles are belied by the important contribution his work has made to the necessarily ceaseless task of the refiguration of the concepts of history, freedom, power and truth. (shrink)