Culture, Politics and Governing The Contemporary Ascetics of Knowledge Production

Culture, Politics, and Governing: The Contemporary Ascetics of Knowledge Production investigates how the practices that govern the production of knowledge and culture have material consequences for how we experience everyday life. In a critical and interdisciplinary approach to governing, Patricia Mooney Nickel looks to artists and intellectuals including Gustav Klimt, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tino Sehgal, and Kenneth Goldsmith, to explore the themes of institutionalization, ontology, and valorization, as they relate to ascetics. These portraits demonstrate not only how contemporary rituals of knowledge production potentially inhibit the emergence of critical subjectivities, but also how such rituals have been resisted.

Patricia Mooney Nickel is Assistant Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs and Core Faculty in the ASPECT Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, US. She is the author of Public Sociology and Civil Society (2012) and editor of North American Critical Theory after Postmodernism (Palgrave, 2012).

1. Introduction: The Politics of Ascetics and Governing
2. Academies of Exhibition and the New Disciplinary Secession
3. The Man from Somewhere: Author, Affiliation, and Letterhead
4. The Institutionalization of Author Production and the Performance Imperative as an Ontological Fiction
5. Celebration and Governing: The Production of the Author as Ascetic Practice
6. Matterphobia and Matterphelia: Artistic Discourse and Ascetic Production
7. The Conclusion as the Contemporary Ascetic of Knowledge Production