Rearticulating Motives

ISBN-13: 9783031434938 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Morten Nissen

Opis

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.

Spis treści

MORTEN NISSEN: Rearticulating motives. 1

Table of contents. 2

Series Editor’s Preface: Desire for Agency - The Aesthetic of Motivation. 4

Some of the Author’s Debts and Gratitudes. 8

Metalogue on Meta-Motives (with Julie Kordovsky) 10

1.     Introduction. 13

1.          Motivation, needs and meta-motives. 13

2.          Rearticulating technologies and their motives. 14

3.          Human nature. 16

4.          Rearticulating the many psychologies. 18

5.          Collaborative Research as Applied Science Studies. 22

6.          Counselling traditions as precursors to a post-psychology. 26

7.          Aesthetic dissensus and cultivating meta-motives. 28

8.          Reading (this book) is Sculpturing: Overview of the book. 31

2.     A Post-Psychology of Motivation. 35

9.          This is not a state of the art 35

10.       Brackets and boundary objectivities. 37

11.       Energy and Activities: The Substance versus the Forms of Subjectivity. 41

12.       Bypassing the Self – Behavior Design and ‘Nudging’ 46

13.       Pragmatic utopianism and the scientific articulation of the common sense self. 50

14.       The Calculating / Calculated Subject 52

15.       Needs or brains?. 60

16.       Quantified Humanism – Self-Determination Theory. 61

17.       Understanding the Glue. 65

18.       Sciences of subjectivity: Off-mainstream objectivity as theory relevant to transforming institutional practices. 68

19.       Functionalism and the Objectivity of Activity Theory. 72

20.       A space free of objectivity: Holzkamp’s reinvention of phenomenology within critical psychology  79

21.       Drives and Desires. 85

22.       Stieglerian Repression: The Pre-Psychological Temptation. 91

3.     Theoretical Reconceptalization: From Needs to Meta-Motives. 96

23.       Methodological reflections: The role and the objectivity of theory in a critical post-psychology of motives. 96

24.       The Desire for Agency in Osterkamp’s Motivationsforschung. 103

25.       Individualities of Subjects and of Persons. 113

26.       We and I: Care as Practice, Beyond the Oedipal and the Rational 119

27.       Framing, Meta-Motives: Boundary objectivity in and for itself. 124

28.       The Pharmaka of Liminal Technologies. 128

29.       Affect and the Liminal Materiality of Meta-Motives. 135

30.       Aesthetic Cultivation Beyond Function. 138

4.     Rearticulating Counselling. 146

31.       On Rearticulating Activities and Practices. 146

32.       Infested Autonomy: Choice or competence?. 150

33.       The Pragmatics of Signs with/out Reference. 154

34.       The Contents of the Empty Form.. 161

35.       From Signs to Aesthetics. 166

5. Writing Poetic Selves. 169

36.       Aesthetic Documentation. 169

37.       Context: The Revolution of Self-Writing. 173

38.       A Golden Yarnball of Convoluted Words. 181

39.       Write! 186

6. Re-/Presenting Care for Motives. 195

40.       Texts for care – texts on care. 195

41.       The Wiki Manual 201

42.         The Role of Theory in Prototyping Motives  212

O autorze

Morten Nissen, Dr.Psych, PhD, is professor at the Graduate School of Education, Aarhus University, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studies theories and practices involving subjectivity, collectivity, knowledges, standards, aesthetics, and motives, mostly as relevant to youth work, counselling, education and social work. Coming from critical psychology and science studies, he calls his approach a ‘post-psychology of care’, a contributory research aiming for sustainable ways to understand and re-/present ourselves. Among many other texts in English and Scandinavian, he published The Subjectivity of Participation at Palgrave in 2012. 

Blurb

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.

“Motivation is the central issue of human psychology. Yet it is gloriously understudied within the kind of psychologies that have flourished over the past century. This book – Rearticulating Motives – makes a difference.

Not only are issues of motivation brought back into the theoretical center of psychological science through this book, but the whole issue of motivation is appropriately situated within the field of our societal discourses about addictions, therapies, standards, and ordinary human strivings to be some-body in the middle of many-bodies.” – Jaan Valsiner, Berlin.