A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism: Reclaiming the Mindful Commons by Peter Doran

Author:Peter Doran [Doran, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Ecology, Political Science, Nature, Environmental Policy
ISBN: 9781317743422
Google: xAgqDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35583588
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Relation to the self: the first moment of opposition

Mindfulness training is associated with practices such as Zen Buddhist meditation and, in therapeutic or advanced research settings, mindfulness-based cognitive behaviour therapy (MCBT). Studies of practices pursued by individuals and communities engaged in mindfulness training can contribute new insights to our debates on the relationship between consumerism and well-being, because they not only call attention to the role of subjective states and their importance for articulating new measures of quality of life (Layard 2005; Alkire 2009), they also demonstrate that practitioners can significantly influence their subjective states and, thereby, their way of knowing and relating to the ‘world’, including their relationship to consumption.

Michel Foucault (1999) took a practical interest in Zen Buddhism, a contemporary practice of askēsis, and wrote extensively on ancient Greek and Christian practices, concluding that ‘care of the self’ can be a form of resistance to forms of biopolitical power, which have come to structure ways of perceiving space and time, bodies and minds.

Mindfulness training and practices are now the regular subject of in-depth studies in neuroscience and branches of the psychological sciences. Studies of practices pursued by individuals and communities engaged in mindfulness training can contribute new insights to hedonic research on subjective well-being and the argument that a decoupling of consumption and an improvement of wellbeing is possible. Mindfulness practices demonstrate that practitioners can significantly influence their subjective states (askēsis) and, thereby, their way of knowing and relating to the material world in ways that appear to match emerging societal demands for reduced ecological impacts alongside enhanced subjective well-being or flourishing.

The current era of economic, social and environmental uncertainty has given new prominence to a number of debates that converge around the theme of sustainable consumption. Questions about the effectiveness of traditional measures of national economic output such as gross national product or gross domestic product, the ambivalent relationship between consumerism and life satisfaction, and improvements in our ability to measure ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ are placing the quality of subjective experience centre stage.

I want to frame mindfulness training as an opening to contemporary forms of askēsis (Foucault 1985, 1987; McGushin 2007) in the context of biopolitics as consumerism. The governmentalization of lifestyles implies a shaping of desire and morality so that people want to do what they believe is good for them according to a prescribed biopolitical logic. Mindfulneness is associated with the cultivation of enhanced states of concentration, awareness and moment-by-moment intentionality. In some settings it is also associated with alternative materialist and embodied systems of knowledge/discipline; and an articulation of individual freedom that might be reconciled with notions of sufficiency and limits, and thus potentially, with support for public choices compatible with sustainable consumption.1

As lifestyles are already being reshaped in preparation for a low-carbon future (Lipschutz 2009: 3) it is imperative that we keep the door open to research and insights that not only direct our attention to alternative governmentalities in pursuit of sustainable development, renewable energy services and green products, but direct our attention to the quality of attention itself and the prospect of a new materialism.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.