Etnografia afektywnych poruszeń: coaching i neoliberalna psyche

The article seeks to defamiliarize coaching practices based on the premises of positive psy- chology that were the focus of the author’s inquiry during ethnographic research among the Polish community of professional coaches and their clients: managers, entrepreneurs and university teachers. The author argues that coaching practices equip individuals with tools to cope with the social and personal risks associated with living conditions of late-capitalism. These practices are also a space within which we fase the circulation of affects and the power of desires that support capitalist regimes of productivity and, consequently, produce a neoliberal psyche (neoliberal type of subjectivity). In this paper, the author aims to answer the following questions: how do people participating in a coaching process govern themselves (construct, negotiate or contest their own self) by means of affective movements? What is the persuasive dimension of the affective work on self undertaken by coachees that results in subjectification and/or objectification along the lines of neoliberal rationality? And finally: how is the affective-rhetorical process of embodying the neoliberal type of governance manifested in coaching? The answers to these questions have been developed based on the findings of affect theory and rhetoric culture theory.