Psychology and the Art of Living

Abstract

A weakness of contemporary social constructionist work is its overarching concern with discourse at the expense of a thoroughgoing analysis of non-discursive phenomena. Alternative analytics such as materiality, embodiment or power engender their own problems. Using the example of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) discussed by Kroll-Smith and Floyd (1997), this paper works through a number of approaches that may redress this lack of concern for the non-discursive. Drawing variously on Foucault, Heidegger and Deleuze, these approaches call for a renewed engagement with the aesthetic as a means of understanding the concrete work of ordering and stylizing the world in which persons engage. That is, an `art of living'. Issues of composition, truth, performance and expression are entailed. This results in an account of the intertwining of the discursive and the non-discursive, and an exploration of the possibilities such a conception offers for social constructionist psychology.