The Annihilation of
Subjective
Experience.
Dr. Alastair Morgan
Dr. Tim Calton
University of Nottingham, UK.
Whither Subjective
Experience ? Trends in
International schizophrenia
Research.
 Aim: to evaluate trends in research
presented at two international
schizophrenia research fora between
1988 and 2004, including an
assessment of patient-centredness.
 Conclusion: of the 9284 abstracts at both
conferences ( International congress on
Schizophrenia Research and the Biennial
Winter workshop on Schizophrenia), only
2% had any focus on subjective
experience.
Calton, T, Cheetham, A, D’Silva, K, and
Glazebrook, C. “International schizophrenia
research and the concept of patientcentredness – an analysis over two
decades”, in Alanen et al (2006).
“. . . anti-psychiatry was based on an a priori
philosophical position that elevated to
maximum importance the category of
subjectivity . . . It entails a reduction of
politics to a philosophical first principle
according to which power is evidenced by
the suppression of subjectivity”.
Peter Miller, “Critiques of Psychiatry and
Critical Sociologies of Madness”, in Miller
and Rose (eds). The Power of Psychiatry,
(1986).
Critique of “antipsychiatry”.
 The anti-psychiatry critique is outmoded – based
around the triptych of institutions, madness and
medicalisation.
 Madness/subjectivity is wrongly emphasised as the
privileged site for understanding in the critique of
psychiatric practice.
 The account of power as domination leads to a
negative and undifferentiated understanding of the
effects of power.
 A Copernican turn from madness to the practices
and discourses of psychiatry and associated
disciplines.
Concept of Biopower
 Inspired by Foucault’s development of
the concept of power as biopower, in
the Collège de France lectures of
mid-seventies and first volume of
History of Sexuality (1981).
 Replacement of sovereign power with
biopower
 “. . . the ancient right to take life or let
live was replaced by a power to
foster life or disallow it to the point of
death”. Foucault (1981).
 “To make live and let die”.
Two Poles of Biopower.
 One centred on the individual body – an
“anatomo-politics of the human body”. . .
“centred on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimisation of its
capabilities, the extortion of its forces . . .”
 The other focuses on the population – a
“biopolitics of the population”. . .
“propagation, births and mortality, the level
of health, life expectancy and longevity”.
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol.1.
 Those movements that attempt to
resist these forms of biopower do so
on the very same terrain - that of the
concept of life.
 Human rights are increasingly
conceived as rights to life, health, and
control over the making and shaping
of bodies
Hannah Arendt’s analysis
of biopower.
 In The Human Condition, Arendt
articulates a paradoxical combination
in the politics of life.
 On the one hand the belief that
“everything is possible”.
 On the other, the belief that human
beings are merely animals governed
by the laws of nature.
“The social realm where the life
process has established its own public
domain, has let loose an unnatural
growth, so to speak, of the natural”.
Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition
(1958).
Critical Psychiatry and
Biopower.
Three Elements.
 Knowledge of vital life processes –
conducted largely in the name of
neuroscience but blurred in the
transformation of vital life processes in
the very formation of knowledge itself.
 Strategies for intervention upon
collective existence in the name of
mental health, even happiness.
 Modes of subjectification- in which the
individual is enjoined to work on him
or herself in the name of an
understanding of mental health.
Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow, “Biopower Today”, in
Biosocieties, (2006), 1:195-217.
Two forms of
subjectification.
 The move in a risk politics of life from group risk
to a “biological susceptibility”, which is inherently
probabilistic and indeterminate.
 The move towards the assumption of a
responsibility to producing one’s own mental
health, in terms of an understanding of one’s
individuality as defined by belonging to a biological
classification – Rose terms this “somatic
individuality”.
Nikolas Rose “The Politics of Life Itself”, in Theory,
Culture and Society, (2001), vol.18 (6): 1-30.
 A new form of biological citizenship,
creating new forms of human rights.
 This takes place in a moral economy of
hope, focussed on life.
 Biological citizenship is a matter of
biosociality as well as somatic individuality.
Rose and Novas, “Biological Citizenship”, in
Ong and Collier (eds.). Global Anthropology,
(Blackwell, 2003).
A new form of critique?
“The melancholy refrain of those who
condemn the arrogance of biomedicine for
meddling in such areas, who convict all
references to the biological of reductionism,
individualism and determinism . . .are of little
help to us in understanding the issues at
stake here…We have entered the age of
vital politics, of biological ethics and genetic
responsibility”.
Nikolas Rose “The Politics of Life Itself”.
“Critical evaluation would have to take other
forms than denunciation of reductionism,
individualism and rejection of the social. . . If
in fact we are in an emergent moment of
vital politics, celebration or denunciation are
insufficient as analytical approaches”.
Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. “Thoughts
on the Concept of Biopower Today”.
The Concept of Life
“For anyone undertaking a genealogical study of the
concept of “life” in our culture, one of the first and
most instructive observations is that the concept
never gets defined as such. And yet, this thing that
remains indeterminate gets articulated and divided
time and again through a series of caesurae and
oppositions that invest it with a decisive strategic
function in domains as apparently distant as
philosophy, theology, politics, and – only later –
medicine and biology”.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (2002).
Giorgio Agamben and
Bare Life
 The distinction between zoe and bios.
 Sovereign power is already based on the inclusive
exclusion of life, it is already biopower.
 Sovereign power incorporates life through the limitfigure, who can be included only on the basis of
his or her exclusion.
 The state of exception in which sovereign power
confronts bare life in the form of an inclusive
exclusion is increasingly becoming diffused though
different practices and spaces of political life.
Giorgio Agamben:Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, (1999).
 What is produced at the centre of a
biopolitics of the individual is a dead
space, a form of “life that does not
live”.
 A politics of life reverts to a death-inlife.
Early Intervention in
Psychosis
 Susceptibility to develop psychosis is
based on a probabilistic notion which
has no biological basis.
 The duration of untreated psychosis
hypothesis leads to the potential for
earlier and earlier intervention in the
name of something only minimally
apparent.
 Psychosis itself is an uncertain and
indeterminate label, which may or may
not develop, but into what ?
 How can the individual situate him or
herself in relation to such a form of
biopower ?
Fate and Biology
 “Biology is no longer blind destiny, or
even foreseen but implacable fate. It
is knowable, mutable, improvable,
eminently manipulable”, Rose and
Novas,(2003).
 “Fate as the definite ineluctability that
springs from an essential
indefinability”, Alexander García
Düttmann, The Memory of Thought, (2002).
The process of selfformation
 What is not allowed into discourse
and recognition by biopower.
 What is the process of self-reflection
through which subjectification takes
place.
 There is an experience of loss and
domination at the heart of a
subjective experience that is identified
through a reduction to its biological
life and supposed potential.
Critique
 Any critique of the biopower of psychiatry
needs a concept of individual suffering, of
what is lost through the formation of a
somatic individuality.
 The subjective experience of madness is
not exhausted by an analysis of the
discourses and practices of psychiatry.
 We need an understanding of power as
domination and exploitation as well as of
the productivity of power.