Abstract
Surveillance is a part of our everyday lives, and it does not include just the cameras watching over individuals safety and collecting images of them. Surveillance includes all kinds of techniques of data gathering, for instance, the keeping of medical histories and the conduct of surveys. Directly related to the medical sphere is the notion of biopolitics. The aim of biopolitics is to control and normalize individuals lives by subjecting them to treatments, proposing to them possibilities of a better life (or death), etc. This paper deals with biopolitics and its relations to surveillance (it can be said that surveillance is a set of techniques used to implement biopolitics). To mediate between these two concepts I have chosen a disorder called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, which is becoming ever more prevalent among children and lately also adults. I will investigate how this disorder – which is definitely not an irrefutable medical fact – is being constructed through surveys and biopolitical techniques and what kind of a subject ADHD treatment hopes to create.
About the author
Ott Puumeister (b. 1985) is a graduate student at the University of Tartu 〈ott.puumeister@gmail.com〉. His research interests include biopolitics, political semiotics, semiotics of culture, and non-identificational politics. His publications include “Review: Michel Foucault's care of the self in the context of power and knowledge” (in Estonian, 2011); “The construction of the subject in surveillance systems” (in Estonian, 2011); “The subject's self-creation in power relations: Agamben's, Badiou's and Foucault's theories of subjectivity from the semiotic point of view” (in Estonian, 2012); and “Biopolitics as a power over life and as life's own power” (in Estonian, 2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
