The Government of Desire

Beistegui, Miguel de

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226547404.001.0001

Cited by 40 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…There is more to it than meets the eye, though. The modern desire to make social spaces ordered and visible according to a particular way of seeing is the desire to make them governable and manageable (Rose, 1996), that is, to categorise, territorialise, regularise and thus normalise subjects (de Beistegui, 2018: 225). The social vision of the South Korean state, at least as expressed in its flagship urban planning from Gangnam to Songdo, was partly predicated on this vision and can thus be seen as a special kind of what Scott (1998) called ‘seeing like a state’, which is declaratively conducive to ‘schemes to improve the human condition’.…”

Section: Questions Contexts and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fabrication of space: The design of everyday life in South Korean Songdo

et al. 2022

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Constructed from scratch on land reclaimed from the sea, Songdo was planned to embody new ‘smart city’ life. In reality, it has come to exemplify enclave urbanism that commodifies securitised living for upwardly mobile middle classes. While the political economy of this urban project is by now well studied, the sociological ethnography of the resultant space and its experiential correlates remains less developed and imperfectly contextualised. One needs to connect the dots of power and space. The present paper aims to do that and thematises the ‘design of everyday life’ which rests on (1) the intensification of privatised digital surveillance of mass housing compounds which in turn occasions (2) the remaking of spatial markers and symbolic boundaries between private/public, inclusive/exclusive, inside/outside. As such it is a combination of two different registers of visibility that gets jointly orchestrated by the public–private partnership of Korean state and corporate actors. In order to recognise these regimes as strategic visions of controlled social life we extend James Scott’s notion of ‘seeing like a state’ to include the corresponding regime that we call ‘seeing like a corporation’. This allows us to show that they are mutually elaborative in Songdo through a hybridised fabrication of its lived environment, particularly in the case of one branded housing typology located in the city’s centre called International Business District. This elucidates not only the local entrepreneurial urbanism that gave rise to the controlled environment of Songdo but also more general logics of the ‘compressed modernisation’ in the region which sets a global mode for production of space and re-territorialisation of power.

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Section: Questions Contexts and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fabrication of space: The design of everyday life in South Korean Songdo

et al. 2022

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“…Rather than insisting upon a sovereign subject at the site of drug use, this approach entails a degree of attention to and curiosity about how the body is, in a given situation -the queerness of its pleasures, their irreducibility to conventional predictions, scripts, and formulations. (p. 185) This irreducibility of the queer and high -or queerly high -subject to the sovereignty assigned to the idealised neoliberal subject (Beistegui, 2018;Rasmussen, 2011) raises productive questions with regard to the relationship between the drug-fuelled dancing queer subject and scripts of identity and belonging. In the queer club, music, sex and drugs work in tune and in synchronicity to erotically dilate the spatiotemporal coordinates of the self and of its consciousness of itself (Florêncio, 2020a(Florêncio, , 2021.…”

Section: As Race Arguesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drugs, techno and the ecstasy of queer bodies

Florêncio

2023

The Sociological Review

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In Cruising Utopia, José Muñoz writes that ‘drugs are a surplus that pushes one off course, no longer able to contribute labor power at the proper tempo’. Their pharmacology of unproductive time also interacts in a synergistic/synaesthetic manner with the hypnotic upbeat tempos of electronic dance genres like disco, house or techno. In the club, drugs enhance sensations and draw bodies close together, all while sound penetrates the ear, turning it into an erotic orifice. Central to countercultural histories of sexual liberation, the club is a temple of queer world-making, a laboratory carrying out experiments with a queerness-yet-to-come. In this speculative autotheoretical essay, I explore the ethics and political value – as well as political ambivalence – of drug-fuelled techniques of self-invention encountered in the queer club. At once pharmacological, sexual and biopolitical, these modes of becoming-queer of bodies flooded by sound, drugs and sexual pleasure allude to the possibility of kinds of subjectivity and social relations that resonate with a narcofeminist ethics and veer away from neoliberal regimes of identity and belonging.

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“…Miguel de Beistegui (2018) has identified a historical change regarding the role of desire in the rationale behind governing European societies. Since the 18th century, liberal economic and political theories have placed increasing emphasis on the fulfilment of the individual’s needs and desires as a central driver of the economy and society in general.…”

Section: Spatial Fantasies In Educational Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since the 18th century, liberal economic and political theories have placed increasing emphasis on the fulfilment of the individual’s needs and desires as a central driver of the economy and society in general. This has, in turn, intensified with the ascent of neoliberal discourses founded on the figure of homo economicus – an entrepreneurial subject who behaves according to his or her individual economic interests (De Beistegui, 2018; see also Bröckling, 2016). Such individualist discourses have also assimilated formerly countercultural demands of cultivating creativity, personal empowerment and emancipation in the management of work (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Cruikshank, 1999; Mouffe, 2013: 27).…”

Section: Spatial Fantasies In Educational Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Topologies of desire: Fantasies and their symptoms in educational policy futures

Saari

2021

European Educational Research Journal

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This article studies topological reflexivity in educational policy discourse, when policy is considered in terms of eradicating the distances involved and increasing mobility and commensurability. Topological reflexivity is critically evaluated from a Lacanian point of view as a form of political fantasy which structures reality within the coordinates of desire. The article also unpacks two prominent symptoms of fantasy – dislocation and paradoxical elements – that subvert the functioning of these very same fantasies. First, while heralding imminent fulfilment and the promise of pleasure in new learning environments, these discourses are also obliged to keep the object of desire at a certain distance. Second, while educational policy discourse is founded on subjective autonomy and a freedom to develop learning environments, it implicitly requires teachers and schools to implement new learning environments and to take pleasure in doing so. Attempts to grapple with these symptoms of fantasy take the form of denying not only the repetition inherent in such discourses, but also the othering of teachers who express resistance to such changes.

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The Government of Desire

Cited by 40 publications

References 0 publications

Fabrication of space: The design of everyday life in South Korean Songdo

Fabrication of space: The design of everyday life in South Korean Songdo

Drugs, techno and the ecstasy of queer bodies

Topologies of desire: Fantasies and their symptoms in educational policy futures

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