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Got self?

01.07.03 | Comment?

If we are simultaneously natural and manufactured (and also self-naturalizing and self-manufacturing)–as the cyborg writers allege–then it is helpful to begin speaking on something we might call “selfcraft.”

“Selfcraft” has a number of advantages.

  1. It includes within it the traditional spiritual disciplines, allowing us to speak of such common spiritual practices as prayer, confession, lectio divina, etc.
  2. It includes within it those power-relations which also form the self–without or without its explicit, considered consent–such as those outlined in Foucault’s genealogies: the Clinic, the Prison, the Confessional, etc.
  3. A “craft” lies somewhere between popular understandings of technology as either magically alienating or magically empowering and popular understandings of arts as either sentimentally fulfilling or incomprehensivly irrelevant.
  4. A craft must be learned. A craft can be taught. A craft can be mastered. A craft can be changed. A craft is never finished. New crafts may be created.
  5. No craft is innately better than another, although they are more or less useful depending on the crafter’s proficiency and project.
  6. Because selfcrafts form the power-related self, the practice and study of selfcraft is a site for ethical critique.

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