Rearticulating Motives (Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences)

This book presents a theory of motives that has evolved over decades in dialogue with academics and with practitioners. The key proposal is that of collectively cultivating meta-motives – rather than the ubiquitous recipes for manipulating self-regulation. Cultivating meta-motives can proceed through rearticulating motives. Such rearticulation engages with theories and practices of motivation and motives. First, this is a discussion of the psychologies of motivation, and a reflection of post-psychology as a way forward. Second, this discussion takes us back to fundamental problems with subjectivity, and with psychology, even critical psychology, as a way of addressing it. Third, out of this theoretical work come concepts that are put to work in understanding practices of modelling and cultivating motives – clinical, social work, and educational practices. In the first instance, as a critique of contemporary pragmatic practices, and then by rearticulating aesthetic practices as ways to expand and overcome those. Fourth, this has implications for the cultivation of the competence in care for motives, and for the place of theory in this competence. The book provides both a theoretical argument and a resource for those professionals in education, social work, and health who seek a qualitative understanding of what they do. Series Editor’s Preface: Desire for Agency— The Aesthetic of Motivation 6 Some of the Author’s Debts and Gratitudes 10 Metalogue on Meta-motives (with Julie Kordovsky) 13 Contents 15 Chapter 1: Introduction 17 1.1 Motivation, Needs, and Meta-motives 19 1.2 Rearticulating Technologies and Their Motives 21 1.3 Human Nature 23 1.4 Rearticulating the Many Psychologies 25 1.5 Collaborative Research as Applied Science Studies 30 1.6 Counselling Traditions as Precursors to a Post-psychology 35 1.7 Aesthetic Dissensus and Cultivating Meta-motives 38 1.8 Reading (This Book) Is Sculpturing: Overview of the Book 41 Chapter 2: A Post-psychology of Motivation 46 2.1 This Is Not a State of the Art 48 2.2 Brackets and Boundary Objectivities 51 2.3 Energy and Activities: The Substance Versus the Forms of Subjectivity 56 2.4 Bypassing the Self—Behavior Design and “Nudging” 62 2.5 Pragmatic Utopianism and the Scientific Articulation of the Common-Sense Self 66 2.6 The Calculating/Calculated Subject 69 2.7 Needs or Brains? 77 2.8 Quantified Humanism: Self-Determination Theory 79 2.9 Understanding the Glue 83 2.10 Sciences of Subjectivity: Off-Mainstream Objectivity as Theory Relevant to Transforming Institutional Practices 88 2.11 Functionalism and the Objectivity of Activity Theory 92 2.12 A Space Free of Objectivity: Holzkamp’s Reinvention of Phenomenology Within Critical Psychology 101 2.13 Drives and Desires 108 2.14 Stieglerian Repression: The Pre-psychological Temptation 115 Chapter 3: Theoretical Reconceptalization: From Needs to Meta-motives 121 3.1 Methodological Reflections: The Role and the Objectivity of Theory in a Critical Post-psychology of Motives 123 3.2 The Desire for Agency in Osterkamp’s Motivationsforschung 132 3.3 Individualities of Subjects and of Persons 144 3.4 We and I: Care as Practice, Beyond the Oedipal, and the Rational 151 3.5 Framing, Meta-motives: Boundary Objectivity in and for Itself 157 3.6 The Pharmaka of Liminal Technologies 162 3.7 Affect and the Liminal Materiality of Meta-Motives 171 3.8 Aesthetic Cultivation Beyond Function 175 Chapter 4: Rearticulating Counselling 184 4.1 On Rearticulating Activities and Practices 186 4.2 Infested Autonomy: Choice or Competence? 191 4.3 The Pragmatics of Signs With/Without Reference 196 4.4 The Contents of the Empty Form 205 4.5 From Signs to Aesthetics 210 Chapter 5: Writing Poetic Selves 214 5.1 Aesthetic Documentation 216 5.2 Context: The Revolution of Self-Writing 221 5.3 A Golden Yarnball of Convoluted Words 231 5.4 Write! 236 Chapter 6: Re-/Presenting Care for Motives 245 6.1 Texts for Care – Texts on Care 247 6.2 The Wiki Manual 254 6.3 The Role of Theory in Prototyping Motives 266 References 273 Index 293