Diagnosing transnationality: Therapy discourse and psy practices in the ethicalisation of transnational living

The chapter investigates the genealogy of a transnational ethics. That is, in Foucauldian terms, how transnational living is constructed as an ethical substance, the modes through which the actors become invited to problematize their transnational conduct and the telos to which they are impelled to aspire. Using multimodal discourse analysis, the chapter uncovers the discursive technologies through which therapeutic practice (as well as the genres and institutions implicated in it) is employed in using the individual’s relationship to oneself to exercise and rationalise a transnational ethics. The analysis demonstrates how discursive practices, dispersed across multiple modalities, participate in the formation of alliances between diverse regimes of transnational living, such as computer-mediated transnational spaces, diaspora communities, national and para-national institutions and professional associations. In doing so, the analysis makes visible how new agents and authorities become recruited for administering transnational conduct. The chapter argues that these assemblages and the transnational ethics made visible through the analysis prime the mechanisms of transnational governmentality and prepare the basis for a restrictive morality through which transnational conduct can be regulated.
Keywords: Transnational governmentality, Multi-modal discourse analysis, Subjectivation, Psy practices