To Lose Interest in Self-Improvement—or Organisation on Other Terms
To Lose Interest in Self-Improvement—or Organisation on Other Terms
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Research statement
Background This work was composed and presented as part of a series of Keynotes offered through University of Melbourne’s Critical Research Associates Melbourne (CRAM network). The work engages with the phenomenon of an increasingly normalised pseudo-health / mental health vocabulary deployed in management speak and organisational communication styles. It responds to proliferation of terms such as mindfulness, wellness, reaching-out and other ambiguous markers of “care” that have become commonplace in recent years, used at the junction of the prescriptive and preventative. Contribution It offers analysis of this phenomenon, noting possible or likely resistance or immunity to these trends among critically astute employees and recipients of these communications. Acknowledging the slippery terrain wherein these ideas and sets of terms operate, it calls on Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and Byung-Chul Han as theorists who think organisation on terms beyond neoliberal virtue and managerialism. As hybrid nonfiction/theoretical oration, it tests the rhetorical uses of theory + humour + storytelling as means to move audiences to critical reflection & potential action. Significance The work makes a timely intervention into discussions around wellness, its place and its “speak” in the contemporary socio-economic moment, providing an advance in analysis of a pressing and ambiguous trend. The latter demands incisive thinking to clarify the role of the organisation of the self and means for discerning its various modes. It provides ways to contesting and spot stealthy discursive practices of domination without forgoing the methodologies of self-organisation which subtract themselves from the purely economic and transactional.Publication classification
JL4 Live Performance of Creative Works – OtherScale
NTRO OtherPublisher
CRAM networkPlace of publication
University of MelbourneUsage metrics
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SCCA Research190402 Creative Writing (incl Playwriting)160609 Political Theory and Political Philosophy970119 Expanding Knowledge through Studies of the Creative Arts and Writing970122 Expanding Knowledge in Philosophy and Religious Studies360201 Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting)440811 Political theory and political philosophy280122 Expanding knowledge in creative arts and writing studies280119 Expanding knowledge in philosophy and religious studies
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