Sequencing the self first undermines any connection between ethical care and larger democratic politics. Anti-racist praxis should start with public naming, not proper performance of the self.

(Ella, PoliSci&Gender Studies@Utah Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World )

Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self-artistry as an "essential preliminary to," and even the necessary "condition of," change at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics and political movements work "in tandem," each producing effects on the other/os he sometimes privileges "action by the self on itself" as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the self. For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that "today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment."106 Here and elsewhere in Connolly's writing the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and reinforcing.107 • It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical selfintervention, however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level, going to get off the ground, so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal, for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct attention to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and changeable? How and why would an individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned, at least partially, to problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by the macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens.lOs For reflexive self-care to be democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to larger political mobilizations. Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self's relation with itself is also treated as a privileged site, the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the self's reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucault's and, to a lesser degree, Connolly's work. This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, "ontologically prior." An ethics centered on the self's engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for democracy. (44-5)