The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (In-Formation)
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0691121915
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology.
Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be.
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Nonetheless, these developments were linked to a new way of visualizing the brain as a differentiated organ traversed by localized neural pathways with specific mental functions amenable to localized intervention. But could madness be seen in the living brain? Electron microscopes were invented in the 1930s: first transmission and then scanning. Brain tissue could now be imaged at resolutions 1,000 times greater than those possible with visual microscopy, but only postmortem. The properties of.
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Longer a pathological species inserting itself into the body wherever possible; it is the body itself that has become ill” (136). The clinical gaze, trained at the bedside, shaped by anatomical atlases and the experience of pathological anatomy, must read beneath the appearance, distribution, and progression of visible symptoms to the vital living interior of the patient, to identify the underlying pathology that gave rise to them and is the key to their intelligibility. Foucault does not claim.
Risk profiles through which individuals are allocated to risk groups, their generalizability to others given national and cultural variations, the effects of changes since the time when the scales were constructed, and so forth. There are the problems of false positives and false negatives that are built into the very project of applying probabilistic reasoning to determine the treatment of individuals—these have become infamous in decision-making practices concerning compulsory treatment or.
Used to define “pre-existing conditions”: an individual carrying a detectable mutation or mutations that predispose them to develop a particular disorder in particular circumstances might be considered to have a “pre-existing condition”—even if they are unaware of it. Studies have also suggested that the fear of genetic discrimination is widespread among those who have family histories of particular disorders, and that this is leading to reluctance to take genetic tests, concern about disclosure.