McMindfulness

by Ronald Purser

  Unlike previous ways of exercising power, which used harsh punishment to restrict forbidden behaviors, neoliberal “disciplinary power” reaches into people’s psyches through professions and institutions. It thereby induces free and enterprising people to govern themselves. According to Foucault, it is this link between enterprise culture and individual wellbeing that is most instructive: economic activity is said to be optimized by promoting entrepreneurship, while individuals are persuaded that their lives will be improved if they are free to conduct themselves entrepreneurially.

  This is very different from early forms of institutionalization that derived their authority from organized religions, where the clergy served as intermediaries between church doctrine and cultural codes of conduct. Despite the influence of secularization, remnants of the Catholic confessional remain intact, administered by the scientifically authorized priests of mindfulness. As Foucault points out, “the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us.”10

  In a typical mindfulness course, the teacher-cum-expert provides the instructions for various practices, such as watching the breath, scanning body sensations, paying attention to the moment without judgment, and so on. After the conduct of an exercise there is often a period of “inquiry” and didactic interaction between teacher and participants. Instead of confessing their cardinal sins, participants confess how their mind was wandering, or how they got lost in their thoughts and ruminations, or how they were carried away by an emotional reaction. In this respect, confession does not operate as a coercive, top-down power structure. Rather, mindful confessions work by presupposing a bandwidth of acceptable affects and styles of thought, from which a deviation must be confessed, revealing what participants “noticed” about their wayward attention. These subtle power relations give those in authority a means of imparting their requirements. Through confessions, people learn to shape themselves into dutiful mindful subjects who can monitor, care and govern themselves.

  The Mindfulness-Academic-Science Complex

  As a technique of the self, mindfulness draws heavily upon diverse forms of institutional expertise to govern and manage behaviors instrumentally. There are now numerous university centers studying mindfulness and related fields, in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, California and the United Kingdom, along with the pioneering Mind & Life Institute, which facilitates discussions between scientists and meditators, overseen by the Dalai Lama. These academic centers are not only the sites for the conduct of scientific studies of mindfulness interventions, but also include academic programs for the training and certification of mindfulness teachers. The burgeoning “science of mindfulness” has provided new technologies of subjectivity, new vocabularies for the self-regulation of individuals, and new means for normalizing and calibrating individual affects that are aligned with enterprise culture. As the latest addition to the psy-disciplines, this new mindfulness-academic-science complex disseminates expert knowledge and practices promising individual psychological freedom, wellbeing and happiness.

  These centers rely on, and compete for, large sums of government funding and grants for their existence. This inevitably encourages an entrepreneurial mentality, in which scholars try to spin multiple projects from each piece of research, maximizing returns by publishing and speaking about their work in the best shopwindows. The main aim of exposure is the chance to raise money, with little concern for where it comes from.

  In America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Wrecks, Ruth Whippman points out that the positive psychology movement, which is also led by academic centers, has been funded by some of the most right-wing conservative organizations.11 The John Templeton Foundation, founded by an evangelical Christian billionaire, has the ambitious mission of putting religion and science on an equal footing. It says on its website that it “aims to advance human wellbeing by supporting research on the Big Questions, and by promoting character development, individual freedom, and free markets.”12 This leads to funding for research that promotes the individual as the primary fulcrum for change and wellbeing. With an endowment of over $1.1 billion, the foundation has doled out tens of millions of dollars in grants and prizes to positive psychology professors. The Mind & Life Institute, one of the leading organizations promoting the scientific study of mindfulness, has also received over $1.2 million.

  By producing an organized body of knowledge, and institutionally transmitting scientific studies, practices, discourses and professional expertise, university mindfulness centers have forged a regime of truth that harnesses micro-fields of power to shape the mindful subject. Margaret Thatcher would be proud. They have become “engineers of the human soul,” to quote the British sociologist Nikolas Rose, playing an instrumental role in the neoliberal management of subjectivity, yet mindfulness is made to sound benignly therapeutic. In Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, Rose shows how the psy-disciplines have shaped the “self-directing propensities of subjects to bring them into alliance with the aspirations of authorities.”13

  Similar to the self-help genre, much of mindfulness discourse, both in scientific journals and in the popular media, valorizes individual autonomy, freedom, choice, and authenticity. The penetration of dominating power is well disguised, but it is not a mere coincidence that neoliberalism and the mindfulness movement both conceive of social wellbeing in individualistic and psychologized terms.

  The rhetoric of “self-mastery,” “resilience” and “happiness” assumes wellbeing is simply a matter of developing a skill. Mindfulness cheerleaders are particularly fond of this trope, saying we can train our brains to be happy, like exercising muscles. Happiness, freedom and wellbeing become the products of individual effort. Such so-called “skills” can be developed without reliance on external factors, relationships, or social conditions. Underneath its therapeutic discourse, mindfulness subtly reframes problems as the outcomes of choices. Personal troubles are never attributed to political or socio-economic conditions, but are always psychological in nature and diagnosed as pathologies. Society therefore needs therapy, not radical change. This is perhaps why mindfulness initiatives have become so attractive to government policy-makers. Societal problems rooted in inequality, racism, poverty, addiction and substance abuse and deteriorating mental health, can be reframed in terms of individual psychology, requiring therapeutic help. Vulnerable subjects can even be told to provide this themselves.

  Mindfulness as a Disimagination Machine

  Neoliberalism divides the world into winners and losers. It accomplishes this task through its ideological linchpin: the individualization of all social phenomena. Since the autonomous (and free) individual is the primary focal point for society, social change is achieved not through political protest, organizing and collective action, but via the free market and atomized actions of individuals. Any effort to change this through collective structures is generally troublesome to the neoliberal order. It is therefore discouraged.

  An illustrative example is the practice of recycling. The real problem is the mass production of plastics by corporations, and their over-use in retail. However, consumers are led to believe that being personally wasteful is the underlying issue, which can be fixed if they change their habits. As a recent essay in Scientific American scoffs: “Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper.”14 Yet the neoliberal doctrine of individual responsibility has performed its sleight-of-hand, distracting us from the real culprit. This is far from new. In the 1950s, the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign urged individuals to pick up their trash. The project was bankrolled by corporations such as Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and Phillip Morris, in partnership with the public service announcement Ad Council, which coined the term “litterbug” to shame miscreants. Two decades later, a famous TV ad featured a Native American man weeping at the sight of a moto
rist dumping garbage. “People Start Pollution. People Can Stop It,” was the slogan. The essay in Scientific American, by Matt Wilkins, sees through such charades:

  At face value, these efforts seem benevolent, but they obscure the real problem, which is the role that corporate polluters play in the plastic problem. This clever misdirection has led journalist and author Heather Rogers to describe Keep America Beautiful as the first corporate greenwashing front, as it has helped shift the public focus to consumer recycling behavior and actively thwarted legislation that would increase extended producer responsibility for waste management.15

  We are repeatedly sold the same message: that individual action is the only real way to solve social problems, so we should take responsibility. We are trapped in a neoliberal trance by what the education scholar Henry Giroux calls a “disimagination machine,” because it stifles critical and radical thinking.16 We are admonished to look inward, and to manage ourselves. Disimagination impels us to abandon creative ideas about new possibilities. Instead of seeking to dismantle capitalism, or rein in its excesses, we should accept its demands and use self-discipline to be more effective in the market.

  The depoliticized nature of mindfulness means its therapeutic ethos of individual action supports neoliberalism. When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external conditions. To change the world, we are told to work on ourselves — to change our minds by being more mindful, nonjudgmental, and accepting of circumstances. In this way, neoliberal mindfulness functions as a machine of disimagination. The self is inter-pellated to make (or make-over) a project out of its own identity, constantly monitoring its conduct, and refashioning it in ways that feed fantasies of unfettered agency, aspiring to be free from the constraints of social conditioning. Yet this is never quite possible. Fully “being in the moment” is always elusive when one is a neoliberal actor, since part of one’s attention is monitoring the project of the self.

  Many are therefore skeptical of unsubstantiated claims that mindfulness courses will transform society. The Buddhist studies scholar Richard Payne notes that neoliberal imperatives mean modern meditators often get preoccupied with emotional states, and their duty to manage them in search of a hazy conception of happiness. Yet the practice of looking inside oneself is heralded as a daily “bold and heroic act” that creates peace and harmony, one individual at a time. The fantasy that this will create a mindful world rests on the assumption that social action is merely the sum of individual actions, which involves what Payne describes as “ignoring the massively entrenched power of capitalist institutions in favor of a mystical notion of all wisdom being inside oneself.”17

  This brings us to a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads. This has been accentuated by the pathologizing and medicalization of stress, which then requires a remedy and expert treatment — in the form of mindfulness interventions. The ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances. In some ways, this can be helpful, since many things are not in our control. But to abandon all efforts to fix them seems excessive. The notion that “as long as I am mindful, I’m OK,” is in itself a form of magical thinking. It hypnotizes people into submission by presenting stress as a maladaptive psycho-physiological reaction. Hence, there is no need for critical inquiry into its systemic, institutional and structural causes. But the question of how we explain and respond to suffering — individually and socially — is ultimately both ethical and political. Mindfulness practices, as currently conceived and taught, do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to “accept things as they are” while practicing “nonjudgmental, present moment awareness” acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo.

  Privatizing the causes of stress dovetails nicely with neoliberal priorities, undermining the concepts of a public sphere and body politic. In neoliberalism, public discourse gives way to private gain. Depoliticized practices of self-care can diminish our capacities for political citizenship, collective action and civic virtues. The mindfulness movement’s promise of “human flourishing” (which is also the rallying cry of positive psychology) is the closest it comes to defining a vision of social change. However, this vision remains individualized and depends on the personal choice to be more mindful. Mindfulness practitioners may of course have a very different political agenda to that of neoliberalism, but the risk is that they start to retreat into their own private worlds and particular identities — which is just where the neoliberal power structures want them.

  A Therapeutic Turn Inward

  The rhetorical strategies of mindfulness missionaries are seductive. Like self-help authors, they are adept at luring people in by sounding critical of modern society while offering solutions. In The Therapeutic Turn: How Psychology Altered Western Culture, Ole Jacob Madsen uses the example of the popular TV show host and author Dr Phil, who often prefaces his books with dire warnings that “society is going downhill,” while citing a litany of problems.18

  The same scare tactics are used by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is fond of telling acolytes that our whole society suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, that we are addicted to our smartphones, disconnected from each other, and losing touch with the natural world. As a leading figure of the mindfulness movement, Kabat-Zinn has framed and presented mindfulness as individualistic, not collective. Even his chapter “World Stress” in Full Catastrophe Living defines both the problem and a “solution” in such terms. “To have a positive effect on the problems of the larger environment,” Kabat-Zinn writes, “we will need continually to tune and retune to our own center, cultivating awareness and harmony in our individual lives.”19

  The diagnosis is really quite simple: our thoughts are the culprit, every time! We undermine ourselves by being mindless, emotionally reactive and lost in rumination. We have therefore implicitly failed and been morally judged. Critical thinking is pathologized in mindfulness. It is seen as a diversion from the practice. Yet repeating this message has political outcomes. As the philosophy professor Chris Goto-Jones observes, the dominant narrative of mindfulness has reached an odd conclusion: “It is the majority in society that is somehow muddled-headed and sick.”20

  Rather than actually talking about ways of addressing social problems, or even suggesting this might be required, promoters of mindfulness stick to their mantra. For Kabat-Zinn, like Dr Phil, the answer is to turn inward, to work on the self, and personal growth — whether as a means to improve self-esteem or become more mindful. Through mindfulness, we are told, we can “reperceive” our conditions and miserable lot in life. Whatever the merits of this as a step in crisis management, it is wholly inadequate as a bigger-picture answer. Kabat-Zinn’s expert prognosis of our cultural malaise is that we simply need to shift from a “doing” mode to “being,” all together. Yet there is never a suggestion of altering the framework within which “being” has to function.

  Mindfulness might sound like a buffer against life’s challenges — a return to a more noble state, not unlike Rousseau’s romantic notions of a natural self that social conditioning tends to corrupt. But there is a high political cost to this dreamy vision. By valorizing “pure awareness” in the “being” mode, mindfulness displaces the practice of public debate on which democracy depends. “Doing” is effectively demonized as a distraction. Yet this is cloaked in descriptions of mindfulness as our “natural birthright,” a universal state to which we all have access. That of course sounds more appealing than capitulating daily to neoliberal needs.

  The implicit political vision is one of retreat into the “authentic” private self. The autonomous individual is free to seek elusive happiness alone. The neoliberal self is always being encouraged to “go a little deeper” into the in
terior, to take better care of itself. As this self-management moves to the foreground, collective lives become less important. Mindfulness therefore squares nicely with political stories that keep us attached to competition. As described by Julie Wilson in Neoliberalism, these narratives “prompt us to turn our disaffected consent inwards toward ourselves, to double down on the present in order to protect and secure ourselves against others.”21

  Mindful Correctness

  In an essay on “structures of feeling” in the 1970s, Raymond Williams explained how broader historical, political and economic forces shape the “affective elements of consciousness and relationships.”22 With the flattening of the political landscape under neoliberalism, a certain neoliberal affect is engendered by mindfulness practice. Since stress is pathologized, mindfulness programs step in with an individualized focus on a subject’s inner life. Emotional reactions are problematized, and subjected to mindful scrutiny. According to mindfulness science, certain emotions — such as anger, disgust, sadness, contempt, frustration and aggression — are “destructive,” negative affects requiring emotional self-regulation. But what if one is angry, even enraged, about injustice? Just let it go. Focus on your breath. Bring your attention back to the present moment. Of course, mindfulness practitioners still have thoughts outside of practice, but they are conditioned to see these as problems if strong emotions get involved. This has a disempowering impact on political thinking. Even if it helps not to act with anger, we still need to act if we want things to change outside our heads. Instead, as Joshua Eisen notes, the platitudinous instructions of mindfulness programs treat emotions as “free floating” and “cut loose from any kind of ideological grounding,” except of course for the dictates of the prevailing social order: