Constructing the mindful subject

reformulating experience through affective–discursive practice in mindfulness-based stress reduction

Steven Stanley

Charlotte Longden

pp. 305-322

in: Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, Adam Burke (eds), Handbook of mindfulness, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

This chapter presents a critical psychological approach to the study of mindfulness as a situated social, cultural and historical practice. We combine discourse and conversation analysis of language use within mindfulness courses with attention to how subjectivity is collaboratively reconstructed moment-by-moment. Applying the concept of affective–discursive practice to the analysis allows attention to be paid to embodied meaning-making in terms of power, pattern and context. In particular, we aim to illustrate practices of "inquiry" through which mindfulness teachers initiate specific inter-subjective procedures, especially reformulations of participant accounts of what they "noticed" during meditation, which function to practically produce mindful subjects who can monitor, govern and take care of themselves. Mindful subjectivity is produced through the application of liberal power and negotiation of ideological dilemma within inquiry sequences, functioning as technologies of the self.