Governmentality, Temporality and Practice From the individualization of risk to the 'contradictory movements of the soul'

Recent scholarship on the governmentality of risk has revealed ways in which rationalities of government are directed at the transformation of mundane time consciousness in daily conduct. Reflexive temporalities are inscribed through what Ulrich Beck has termed the 'individualization of risk'. Such an account, however, has been criticized for its overemphasis on the reflexive, cognitive dimensions of temporal practice, by theorists drawing on a Bourdieusian notion of the habitus, as a pre-reflexive basis for action. This article attempts to mediate these two positions by emphasizing the practical work by which individual temporalities are made reflexive. Drawing on the theory of ethical practice developed in Michel Foucault's later work, the governmentality of temporality is read as a multi-dimensional practice of ethical self-transformation. More precisely, drawing on Bourdieu, this article considers the pre-reflexive, unthought and embodied future orientations incorporated in the bodily habitus as the ethical substance of a reflexive project of temporal self-government.