In Light Of…

‘Gilles Deleuze (1995) has suggested that contemporary societies are no longer disciplinary, in the sense identified by Foucault – they are societies of control. Where discipline sought to fabricate individuals whose capacities and forms of conduct were indelibly and permanently inscribed into the soul – in home, school or factory – today control is continuous and integral to all activities and practices of existence. In the field of health, the active and responsible citizen must engage in a constant monitoring of health, a constant work of modulation, adjustment, improvement in response to the changing requirements of the practices of his or her mode of everyday life. These new self-technologies do not seek to return a pathological or problematic individual to a fixed norm of civilised conduct through a once-off programme of normalisation. Rather, they oblige the individual to engage in constant risk management, and to act continually on him or herself to minimise risks by reshaping diet, lifestyle and now, by means of pharmaceuticals, the body itself. The new neurochemical self is flexible and can be reconfigured in a way that blurs the boundaries between cure, normalisation, and the enhancement of capacities. And these pharmaceuticals offer the promise of the calculated modification and augmentation of specific aspects of self-hood through acts of choice.’
(Rose, Nikolas – Becoming Neurochemical Selves, p. 28)