The Annihilation of Subjective Experience.

1
The Annihilation of Subjective Experience.

• Dr. Alastair Morgan
• Dr. Tim Calton
• University of Nottingham, UK.

2
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.

3

• 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, DSilva, K, and
  Glazebrook, C. International schizophrenia
  research and the concept of
  patient-centredness an analysis over two
  decades, in Alanen et al (2006).

4

• . . . 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).

5
Critique of anti-psychiatry.

• 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.

6
Concept of Biopower

• Inspired by Foucaults 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).

7

• 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.

8
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.

9

• 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

10
Hannah Arendts 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.

11

• 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).

12
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.

13

• 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), 1195-217.

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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 ones own mental
  health, in terms of an understanding of
  ones 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.

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• 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).

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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 hereWe have entered
  the age of vital politics, of biological
  ethics and genetic responsibility.
• Nikolas Rose The Politics of Life Itself.

17

• 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.

18
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).

19
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 limit-figure, 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 AgambenHomo Sacer Sovereign Power and
  Bare Life, (1999).

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• 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-in-life.

21
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.

22

• 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 ?

23
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).

24
The process of self-formation

• What is not allowed into discourse and
  recognition by biopower.
• What is the process of self-reflection
  through which subjectification takes place.

25

• 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.

26
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.