Driessche van, J. MA
Constructivism and subjectivity
Faculteit Wijsbegeerte
Afdeling Praktische Filosofie
Oude Boteringestraat 52
9712 GL Groningen
j.l.m.van.driessche@rug.nl
Background
- 2002 Architectuur (cum laude) (Associatie KULeuven Departement Architectuur)
- 2008 BA Wijsbegeerte (cum laude) (RUGroningen)
- 2010 MA Wijsbegeerte (cum laude) (RUGroningen): MA-thesis: Een woord, een ding. Een archeologie van het constructivisme.
Summary
My project contributes to establish a connection between Michel Foucault’s analyses of knowledge, power, and subjectivation, on the one hand, and on the other, Bruno Latour’s radical constructivist descriptions of science, technology, and society. (a) It will propose where Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ can be put to good use in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and shall address a normative dimension of practices of knowledge production that descriptive accounts of science, technology, and society have trouble coping with; (b) it will add to Foucault’s ‘ethical care of the (human, individual) self’ Latour’s uncertainty about the nature of action, about who or what really acts, and thereby widen the circle of moral agents from human individuals to incorporate collectives and non-humans as well.
The ‘ethical care of the self’ appeals to an ethics as aesthetics of existence. It is the practical care of the self, aimed at a certain transformation of the self. This ‘ethical care of the self’ is bound up with the knowledge (connaissance) of science and technology, yet the self that is being cared for is not an effect of knowledge. It leads away from prêt-à-porter notions of the subject, and ponders the possibility of different kinds of subjectivity.
The self, in this account, is modelled and imagined in the face of all kinds of practices. The project will inquire into conceptions of the good life by focusing on how the technologically and scientifically mediated formation of selves is explored by the literary imagination: what openings do literary texts provide for the formation of selves? How do subjects invent themselves in relation to new or possible developments in science and technology? How am ‘I’ as myself in the practices in which I live?
