Biopolitical technologies of prevention
Rosalyn Diprose
School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, NSW
PP: 141 - 150
Abstract
This paper examines the way some public health campaigns in Australia have been caught within a paradigm shift in the management of 'risk society'. It details this paradigm shift in terms of an intensification of political technologies of 'pre-emption' in response to incalculable threats to physical security. The challenge this presents to public health programs, particularly those dealing with 'life style' health problems such as obesity, depression, and drugs (illegal and legal), is that, in pursuing admirable aims of the prevention of ill-health in the population, such campaigns need to avoid reproducing (and indeed should counter) the harmful effects of the pre-emptive approach to security.
Using the example of 'quit smoking' campaigns of 2006-7, key features of the pre-emption paradigm are outlined, particularly the conservative comportment toward the future that it fosters. With reference to Foucault's concept of ‘political technologies of bodies' and Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies, the paper also explores deleterious effects of this approach to risk and health on human agency, well-being, and social relations in general. The negative impact of the pre-emption approach is outlined in terms of the way it tends to dampen the openness (or ‘potentiality') of bodies toward the future, the world, and other people.
However, the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies also explains the operation of resistance by human agents to both the paradigm of pre-emption and the health prevention strategies that employ its way of thinking. This provides the basis for a gesture toward a more ‘democratic', respectful, and effective approach to the promotion of health and well-being.
Keywords
pre-emptive paradigm, embodied agency, temporality, intercorporeality, sociology
Article Text
There is increasing recognition among risk theorists that we are undergoing a paradigm shift in the way we understand and enact ‘society's obligations for [ensuring] the physical security of its members' (Ewald 2002: 273). Alongside the focus on managing calculable risk, which Ulrich Beck argued characterised the organisation of ‘Western' societies for much of the 20th Century (Beck 1992), there has been an intensification of what I will call political technologies of pre-emption in response to incalculable threats to physical security - threats that have a low probability of occurring but would have potentially catastrophic effect. This focus on preventing low probability but high consequence risks is most obvious in the arenas of biosecurity and anti-terrorism measures. However, there are also indications that features of the paradigm have infiltrated approaches to the management of public health more generally. The paradigm presents a special challenge for public health programs in Australia that involve 'life style' health problems such as obesity, depression, and drug addiction (illegal and legal). In pursuing admirable aims of preventing ill-health in the population, it is necessary that such programs avoid reproducing (and indeed would have some role to play in countering) any deleterious effects of this pre-emptive approach to health and physical security.
In this paper I will, first, outline the key features of the emerging paradigm, particularly the attitude about the future that it fosters. Second, I consider the impact of the paradigm on human agency, the health of human bodies, and social relations in general. Third, by pointing to the operation of resistance by human agents to both the paradigm of pre-emption and the health prevention strategies that employ its way of thinking, I will gesture toward a more ethical and effective approach. The analysis draws on aspects of the 2006-7 'quit-smoking' campaigns in Australia as an example of one public health measure that takes the pre-emption approach to risks to health and physical security.
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