The New Social Theory Reader by Steven Seidman Jeffrey C. Alexander

Author:Steven Seidman, Jeffrey C. Alexander [Steven Seidman, Jeffrey C. Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415437707
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2008-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Biopolitics as Ethopolitics

The original biopolitical thesis implied a separation between those who calculated and exercised power and those who were its subjects, whose biological existence was to be shaped for the benefit of each and all. This does seem to characterize policies seeking to modify the breeding patterns of individuals in the name of the population; the bloody techniques of negative eugenics; medical experimentation on prisoners and psychiatric inmates; euthanasia of those whose lives are not worth living; even such benign strategies as medical inspection of schoolchildren. [. . .]

But the huge extension of the political apparatus of health in liberal democratic polities in the 19th and 20th centuries would have been inconceivable if the newly shaped values of hygiene and health had not become entangled with the aspirations of 'the people' themselves – especially the poor, the disadvantaged, the working classes (cf. Baker, 1994). In this period, that is to say, biopolitics was democratized, and relays were formed between political and personal aspirations for health. In the neo-hygienist strategies of the first half of the 20th century, the duty to be well was to be built into the practices of education and routines of domesticity, and hence, it was hoped, into the obligations of mothers and children. In the second half of the 20th century, a new alliance formed between political aspirations for a healthy population and personal aspirations to be well: health was to be ensured by instrumentalizing anxiety and shaping the hopes and fears of individuals and families for their own biological destiny. The very idea of health was re-figured –the will to health would not merely seek the avoidance of sickness or premature death, but would encode an optimization of one's corporeality to embrace a kind of overall 'well-being' – beauty, success, happiness, sexuality and much more. It was this enlarged will to health that was amplified and instrumentalized by new strategies of advertising and marketing in the rapidly developing consumer market for health – non-prescription medicines, health insurance, private health care, healthy food, vitamins and dietary supplements and the whole range of complementary, alternative and 'self-health' practices. By the start of the 21st century, hopes, fears, decisions and life-routines shaped in terms of the risks and possibilities in corporeal and biological existence had come to supplant almost all others as organizing principles of a life of prudence, responsibility and choice.

Selfhood has become intrinsically somatic – ethical practices increasingly take the body as a key site for work on the self. From official discourses of health promotion through narratives of the experience of disease and suffering in the mass media, to popular discourses on dieting and exercise, we see an increasing stress on personal reconstruction through acting on the body in the name of a fitness that is simultaneously corporeal and psychological. Exercise, diet, vitamins, tattoos, body piercing, drugs, cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment, organ transplantation – for 'experimental individuals' (Lury, 1998) the corporeal existence and vitality of the self have become the privileged site of experiments with subjectivity.

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