Assembling Mindfulness: Technologies of the Self, Neurons and Neoliberal Subjectivities

Abstract

Over the past three decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, phenomenologists and educators have displayed a growing interest in mindfulness, a contemplative practice which aims at enhancing the experience of the present moment. Mindfulness has been implemented in the prevention of stress and heart diseases and in the management of pain. Encounters between scientists and practitioners of mindfulness have filled the public imagination of mindfulness with images of brain scans, visual testimonies of the effectiveness of this practice. Despite the technical apparatus involved in mindfulness research and thousands of articles written on the topic, early researchers, such as Francisco Varela, recognized that the methodological intricacies of studying contemplative technologies, usually practiced in silence, required the need to intertwine first and third person approaches to the study of consciousness. The passionate and often personal relationship with mindfulness tends to complicate the boundaries between research and self–care, pointing towards new ontological politics which are embodied, somaesthetic and often escape academic orthodoxies. This paper analyses the assemblage of mindfulness, showing how it entangles topics such as silence, the brain and biopolitics. Through the support of STS literature, the article explores the relationship between the anatomo–politics of mindfulness and contemporary formations of subjectivity.