Archives
Biopolitical technologies of prevention
Rosalyn Diprose
School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, NSW
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.
References
Agamben G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Heller-Roazen D) Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA.
Arendt H (1998) The Human Condition, Canovan M (intro) University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL.
Beck U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (trans. and intro by Lash S and Wynne B), Sage: London, UK.
Beck U (1999) World Risk Society, Polity: Cambridge, UK.
Collier SJ and Lakoff A (2008) Distributed preparedness: The spatial logic of domestic security in the United States, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(1): 7-28.
Collier S and Lakoff A (2005) On regimes of living, in Ong A and Collier S (eds) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Blackwell: Malden MA and Oxford, UK.
Collier S, Lakoff A and Rabinow P (2004) Biosecurity: Proposal for an anthropology of the contemporary, Anthropology Today 20(5): 3-7.
Cooper M (2006) Pre-empting emergence: The biological-turn in the war on terror, Theory, Culture, and Society 23(4): 113-135.
Derrida J (2003) Autoimmunity: Real and symbolic suicides, in Borradori G Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jügen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press: Chicago IL, pp.85-136.
Diprose R, Stephenson N, Hawkins G, Mills C and Race K (2008) Governing the future: Political technologies of risk management, Security Dialogue 39(2): 267-288.
Ewald F (2002) The return of Descartes' malicious demon: An outline of a philosophy of precaution (trans. Utz S), in Baker T and Simon J (eds) Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, pp.221-228.
Foucault M (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison (trans. Sheridan A), Penguin: Harmondsworth, UK.
Foucault M (1980) The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (trans. Hurley R), Vintage Books: New York.
Foucault M (1994) ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history, in Faubion J (ed) Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Penguin: London, pp.326-349.
Foucault M (2001) Security and dependence: A diabolical pair (1983), in Faubion J (ed) Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 3: Power, Penguin: London, pp.365-381.
Foucault M (2003) Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collége de France 1975-76 (trans. Macey D) Bertani M and Fontana A (eds), Picador: New York.
Hardt M and Negri A (2005) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin: London.
Heidegger M (1977) The question concerning technology (trans. Lovitt W), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper and Row: New York.
Keane H (2006) Time and the female smoker, in McMahon E and Olubas B (eds) Women Making Time: Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis, University of Western Australia Press: Perth, pp.94-115.
Lazzarato M (2002) From biopower to biopolitics' (trans. Ramirez I), Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 13: 100-111.
Luhmann N (1993) Risk: A Sociological Theory, Aldine de Gruyter Press: New York.
Merleau-Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Smith C), Routledge and Kegan Paul: London.
Nowotny H (2006) The quest for innovation and cultures of technology, in Nowotny H (ed) Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation, Berghahn Books: New York and Oxford, pp.1-23.
Rabinow P (2003) Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Rabinow P and Rose N (2006) Biopower today, Biosocieties 1: 195-217.
Race K (2005) Recreational states: Drugs and the sovereignty of consumption, Culture Machine 7 available at http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm.
Rier D (2007) The impact of moral suasion on Internet HIV/AIDS support groups: Evidence from a discussion of seropositivity disclosure ethics, Health Sociology Review 16(3-4): 237-247.
Stengers, I and Gille O (1997) Drugs: Ethical choice or moral consensus (trans. Bains P), in Stengers, I (ed) Power and Invention: Situating Science, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapois MN and London, pp.215-232.
Van de Ven, P, Rawstorne P, Crawford J and Kippax S (2002) Increasing proportions of Australian gay and homosexually active men engage in unprotected anal intercourse with regular and casual partners, AIDS Care 14(3):335-341.
eContent Home