In art and education, theorists dispute the concept of visuality, or how meaning occurs from what we see. This study examines two opposed and acrimoniously entrenched theoretical perspectives adopted internationally: visual culture and aesthetics. In visual culture, visual experience, including perception is mediated by background cultural discourses. On this approach, subjectivity is explained as conventional, the role of the senses in making meaning is strongly diminished or rejected and from this, accounting for visuality precludes indeterminate and intuitive aspects. Differently, aesthetic perspectives approach visual meaning as obtaining through direct perceptual and felt aspects of aesthetic experience. Here, subjectivity remains discrete from language and the role of cultural discourse in making meaning diminishes or is excluded. Each description is important to the explanation of visuality in art and education, but problematic. To start, the study outlines the central explanatory commitments of both visual culture and aesthetics. The study identifies problems in each with their explanations of subjectivity or self. Both positions maintain from earlier explanations of cognition that separate theoretically and practically the senses, cognitive processes, and context. The study looks at approaches to mind and representation in accounts of visuality and provides some background from the cognitive sciences to understand the problem further. Contemporary explanation from science and philosophy is revising the separation. However, some approaches from science are reductive of mind and both aesthetics and visual culture theorists are understandably reluctant to adopt scientistic or behaviourist approaches for the explanation of visual arts practices. The aim of the study is to provide a non-reductive realist account of visuality in visual arts and education. To accomplish this aim, the study employs philosopher John R. Searle's explanation of consciousness because it explores subjectivity as qualitative, unified, and intrinsically social in experience. By doing this, the study addresses a gap in the theoretical understanding of the two dominant approaches to visuality. The key to relations between subjectivity and the world in reasoning is the capacity for mental representation. From this capacity and the rational agency of a self, practical reasoning is central to the creation, understanding, and appreciation of art and imagery. This account of consciousness, its aspects, and how it works includes description of the Background, as capacities enabling the uptake and structuring of sociocultural influence in mind. Crucially, the study shows how the capacity for reasoned action can be represented without dualism or reduction to the explanatory constraints of behavioural or physical sciences, an important commitment in the arts and education. In this explanation, the study identifies epistemic constraints on the representation of mental states, including unconscious states, in accounting for practices as reasoned activities. Centrally, the study looks at how, from the capacities of consciousness and the self's freedom of will, visuality is unified as qualitative, cognitive, and social. In exploring Searle's explanation of consciousness, some account of current work on cognition extends discussion of a reconciliation of visuality on these terms.

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This thesis is an investigation into ways of seeing 12 Step fellowships. The latter provide a popular but controversial means of recovery from various addictive behaviours. The conceptual basis of 12 Step fellowships is the idea that addictions are an illness or disease, and this idea has become the focus of the negative critiques of 12 Step fellowships. Concepts of illness and disease are closely related to concepts of personhood. What 12 Step discourses construct as 'illness' can also be understood as a condition characterised by failure of human capacities for agency, choice, and responsibility. How we understand 12 Step discourses of addiction, illness, and recovery will depend greatly upon the concepts of personhood, illness, and knowledge that inform our view. In order to investigate the concepts that make diverging views of 12 Step fellowships possible, this study develops post-Enlightenment concepts of personhood, illness and knowledge. I use these concepts as a lens with which to examine the negative critiques, and to provide a more positive reading of 12 Step fellowships and illness concepts. In doing so, this thesis aims to show, first, that a positive view that can articulate the value of 12 Step fellowships to 12 Step members is possible, and second, that 12 Step fellowship discourses are philosophically interesting and challenge modern western notions of the self and its capacities. The thesis has six chapters. Chapter One presents an overview of the study, and introduces the basic concepts and practices of 12 Step fellowships. Chapter Two presents an epistemology called perspectivism which provides my research methodology as well as a means of analysing the epistemological assumptions at work in the negative critiques of 12 Step discourses. In order to understand how the capacities of the self may fail, and how such failures might be remedied, Chapter Three presents a post-Enlightenment theorisation of personhood as constituted, embodied, and socially embedded subjectivity. This theorisation enables us to examine how embodied selves may be constituted with diminished capacities for agency, responsibility, and choice, and permits the construction of an account of addiction that explains why addictive disorders are a significant social problem in contemporary western societies. Finally, this theorisation enables us to investigate the concepts of personhood that inform the negative critiques. Chapter Four investigates how concepts of illness inform the negative critiques, and shows that it is possible to understand terms such as 'illness' and 'disease' in a non-medical sense. Arguably, such understandings are better able to illuminate the connection between the notion of illness and recovery practices in 12 Step discourses of addiction. Chapter Five uses the conceptual framework provided by Chapters Two, Three, and Four to present a positive view of 12 Step fellowships and discourses. The three key features of this view are, first, that 12 Step fellowship discourses describe addictions as an illness of the self; second, they provide a phenomenology of the sick self; and third, 12 Step recovery discourses and practices are consistent with the notion that the constituted self is limited, and can be reconstituted or changed through practice of the 12 Step recovery program. Together, these three key features show us that 12 Step fellowships provide a valuable social resource for people with limited capacities for self-regulation to help themselves and each other. Chapter Six considers the implications of this more positive view of 12 Step fellowships in terms of the primary and secondary aims of this thesis.

<p>This thesis is a small scale in depth exploration into the perceptions of power held by eight Muslim women residing in the Cape Town Metropole area. Using a Qualitative Feminist approach the study aimed to explore and shed light on the multiple ways in which Muslim women negotiate, construct and co-construct agency, power and authority in their everyday lives. This study also sought to explore whether Muslim women who appear independent or empowered actually feel in control of their own lives / and how their ability to make choices is mediated by intersecting identities such as race, class, age, etc. The research highlights a number of emergent themes in which discussion of the women‟s views around education, finance, reproductive responsibilities, patriarchy, etc. takes place and also explores the ways in which the women contest and resist traditional cultural norms in their everyday experiences. Furthermore this study also sought to create a space where the researcher focused and refocused her gaze on the theoretical and epistemological aspects of her chosen method of enquiry in order to interrogate its merits and limits. Upon reflection the researcher also acknowledges that, similar to the participants, she also holds contradictory views on some of the issues discussed.</p>

I argue that the bubonic tourist is a resistive and reflexive everyday character. I hypothesize that the bubonic tourist can generate spatial and temporal transgressions that sanction increased social agency and thereby transform our sense of subjectivity. By appropriating, cannibalizing, and carnivalizing social codes and modes of operation, I considered how communities are created through performance. I argue that by departing and arriving from the centre to the margins of a peer, social, and cultural genus—what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus—marginalized individuals can both destabilize and inform demarcated and delimited categories. By performing and feeding back to social codes and norms experiences of the margins, the bubonic tourist creates fissures that engender self-reflexivity and meaning. I argue that, the bubonic tourist as a critical and creative practitioner can emancipate and empower the self and others. I considered how the bubonic tourist as an ethical individual is a member of a community that is created through performance. Finally, I considered how creative interventions might engender someone to transmogrify into the bubonic tourist and how as a methodology the bubonic tourist could have practical application. This study, seeks to outline the grounds in which instability can generate agency and a sense of self.

The modern principle of freedom of subjectivity sets a moral standard which radically departs from Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean: modern moral agents, exemplified by the rising middle class, are granted the right to develop extreme dispositions towards goods like honour and wealth. Given that Aristotle considers such goods divisible in the sense that when one person gets more another gets less―the basic definition of distributive injustice―it isn’t surprising that modern philosophers like Kant have trouble reconciling this right with duty to others. Failing to resolve this dilemma satisfactorily in ethical terms, Kant and others turn to aesthetics, but Kant, at least, takes no account there of moral agents’ interest in the actual existence of goods. In this respect, the alternative to the Kantian aesthetic response I document in my dissertation is more Stoic than modern. This response, the modern mediocre-artist narrative, features a mediocre artist who fails to achieve the new standard of distributive justice and a genius who ostensibly succeeds. Though other critics discuss the ethical dimension of mediocre-artist narratives, they don’t consider the possibility that the mediocre artist’s failure might be due to the ethical dilemma just described. They therefore tend to uphold uncritically the narratives’ negative judgments of mediocrity, ascribing the latter’s failure to egotism. By contrast, I examine the genius’ artistic efforts for evidence of a similar failure. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the genius does indeed fail, albeit less spectacularly, arguing on this basis that egotistical characterizations of mediocrity are unjust. But the mediocre aren’t the only victims: in “concealing” genius’ failure, mediocre-artist narratives ignore unmet claims on its fruits. Finally, I invoke Derrida’s notion of the “lesser violence” to outline a new genre that recognizes the unattainability of the modern standard of justice. I call this genre morally progressive, rejecting Jürgen Habermas’ view that freedom of subjectivity has hit a dead end, and that we must backtrack to a philosophical turning indicated but not taken by Hegel, namely, the path of intersubjective freedom.

This thesis offers an analysis of how white women experience racial privilege in the international development arena. Based on post-structuralist ideas of identity construction and subjectivity formation, I examine the narratives of six white middle class female development workers in order to gain a deeper understanding of white privilege. Using grounded theory to examine the data, I find that the development arena offers an occasion for white women to fulfill their socially mandated subject position and therefore reproduce hierarchical relations across race. Furthermore, the data indicates that white female development workers resist engaging in critical self-reflection that would compromise the “helping” and “good” narrative of self as a development worker, which portrays the self in heroic terms. The lack of critical self-reflection suggests that the performance of whiteness and denial of white privilege exists within the everyday lived experience of white female development workers. I argue that this performance of white subjectivity is problematic because it maintains inequality in the development arena by sustaining white dominance and non-white subordination. This pattern must be broken in order to re-establish relationships in the development arena that reflect equality and justice.

The question of the human biological body and technology has been of major concern within posthumanist theories emphasising the co-constituting relationship between materiality and social discourse for the productions of subjectivity. Online space cannot be thought of as liberating the mind from the materiality of the body, but instead seen as effected by the body and affecting the body in return. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has been used to argue that the body is implicated in online practices for the productions of subjectivity within posthumanist discourses. In this theoretical master thesis, the aim is to investigate the productions and transformations of the subjectivity of self harm between the biological body of the subject and practices of written text in an online message board forum for self harm support. Methodologically, a functional hermeneutics is constructed from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage in order to engage empirical material generated from observations of the message board. The empirical material is interwoven with a theoretical exposition of Deleuze’s philosophy. By the concepts of force and affect, it is concluded that texts on the forum are constituted as bodies. However, the practices leading up to such constitution of bodies would not be considered corporeal. This is further theorised in the concept of the assemblage with particular emphasis on a proposed distinction in Deleuze’s philosophy between bodies and language. These bodies of texts function to create new forms of expressions and enunciations on the forum, and may theoretically be said to transform the biological body of the subject. The concept of expression functions to form the ethical backdrop to transformations of the body in the online space of enunciation. By the relations between bodies in the assemblage of self harm support, expression envelops these bodies in a supportive world. It is through the relations with other bodies in the assemblage that words form the expressive world that envelops all bodies in that world, thereby transforming them. This is further deepened by considering Deleuze’s ontology of the actual and the virtual, where it is proposed that online space is actual in that enunciations are materialised in bodies of texts which in turn create virtual ideas and new possibilities for expression and enunciation. It is argued both with and against posthumanist readings of Deleuze in regards to information technology that bodies and materiality are constituting factors of subjectivity along with language, insofar as the body is theorised as transformed incorporeally.

<p>Gilles Deleuze's definition of the other as the expression of a possible world has introduced a novel ontological organization into philosophy. It makes possible the conception of a singular being which may be expressed by a potentially infinite number of possible worlds. This, in turn, has lead Deleuze to propound the idea of "a life," immanent and impersonal but singularly determinate, as different from the universe of subjects, objects, and the transcendence that appears as their concomitant. This study resituates Wallace Stevens in the ontological universe of "a life" as opposed to the common practice of associating him with the questions of subject, object, and transcendence. It observes that Stevens's poetry primarily invests the field of the other, which functions as the structure of the perceptible. The result is a poetry predominated by a yearning for the immanence of "a life," an outside, that escapes the limits of the subject and is "disappointed" with the function of transcendence, rather than being explained by them. The study argues that Stevens's poetry can be read as a dramatization, itself regulated by an affective charge, of the passion for an outside, which goes beyond the framework of subjectivity and "feels" the inhuman stirring beneath the human.</p> / Dissertation

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