The oeuvre of the sociologist Nikolas Rose and the so-called governmentality school is worth mentioning here. Since the 1980s, Rose’s prolific work has grappled with “these little engineers of the human soul, and their mundane knowledges” (Miller and Rose, 2013: 5), which Rose calls the “psy-disciplines”, namely psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychotherapy (Rose, 1999). The psy-disciplines pivot around “heterogeneous knowledges, forms of authority, and practical techniques that constitute psychological expertise” and are generative, in the sense that they make it possible for human beings to “conceive of themselves, speak about themselves, judge themselves, and conduct themselves in new ways” (Rose, 1991: vii). These disciplines are a key technology for regulating the self and shaping “governable subjects” in advanced liberal societies (Rose, 1999: 40). The term technology, then, refers to applications of power that are less based on overt violence and more on the “subtle manipulation of human behavior”, in which “bodies are prodded in certain directions, molded according to particular norms, and forced to act in coordination with one another” (Behrent, 2013: 84). Neoliberal media culture, in particular, suggests a psychologized ontology with the individual or the business as its fundamental units, organizing an entrepreneurial regime of truth (Foucault, 1977), that is to say, a systematic viewpoint that proposes a taken-for-granted market rationality across every aspect of social reality (Wilson, 2017: 52). In this culture, there are prominent ideological injections shaping governable subjects, such as to be autonomous and creative, as we already with McRobbie’s idea of the “creativity dispositif” (2018: 11), or to be empowered and assertive, as with Rosalind Gill’s and Shani Orgad’s idea of a “confidence cult” (2022: 4), which we discuss later in this chapter.
Life coaching is a present-day instantiation of the psy-disciplines, an up-todate “little engineer of the human soul”, with its expertise being distributed and assigned in a rather disorganized and voluntaristic manner. An institutional certification, for example, a university degree, is one of the possible modalities of legitimization for becoming a life coach, and probably not the main one. Instead, coaching legitimacy mostly relies on the coach’s own “charismatic authority”, as Hendriks (2017: 59) puts it (more on this concept in the next section). This deregulated and seemingly anti-institutional
Curating Mindsets, Micro-Celebrities, and Intimacies
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