Abstract

In Culture, Politics, and Governing, the study of contemporary ascetics provided me with a way to approach the practice of knowledge production and its intersection with cultural production that was able to take into account the institutionalization of authors and artists and the ways in which their practices were both governed and governing, often through valorization. Recently, I have worked to extend this framework to settings that are less obvious as sites for the production of governing knowledge: what Max Weber and Foucault discussed as ascetics, generated through what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called the culture industry. The contemporary culture industry produces an art of living genre that encourages pecuniary subjects who treat the self as a site for the production of value from which to practice valorized ascetics.