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Biopolitics, Surveillance and the Subject of ADHD

Ott Puumeister,

Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu

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. KEYWORDS: biopolitics, surveillance, subjectivity, ADHD, normalization

Introduction

The goal of the following paper is to investigate how an individual human being is inserted

into the larger social order and population through the techniques of biopolitics and

surveillance. Biopolitics is here understood as a governmental strategy that takes as its main

object organizing the life of human beings. We can now ask how this qualification

distinguishes biopolitics from “regular” politics, since all political practices concern the lives

of individuals. The major difference, as I see it, is the fact that the aim of biopolitics is to form

and render humans’ bodies and psyches effective in the context of populations. Bodily and

psychological self-formation practices are governed in relation to the effectiveness and health

of populations.

Surveillance techniques can in many instances be seen as the implementation and

realization of biopower; as concrete practices that are used to create the knowledge important

to the government of populations. I do not, then, understand surveillance as solely the

practices of continuous watching (CCTV) and tracking (GPS), but any kind of data gathering

used in compiling profiles and categories created to classify and manage groups of

individuals. Surveillance includes, for instance, the keeping of medical histories and the

conduct of surveys. Statistical analysis creates a new normalized, abstract psychologized

body; and the (idealized) individual is understood through this abstraction. In relation to these

large-scale surveillance techniques, individuals are prone to types of self-surveillance.

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This interplay between the abstract psychologized body created through surveillance

techniques and the individual brings into focus the self-formation of the human being in the

context of biopolitical governance. The individual is not a natural given or an absolutely fixed

entity but a processual one that is necessarily created in social, political and cultural contexts.

A human being creates her/himself in a continuous and dynamic practice of semiotic self-

formation. Therefore the abstract normalized body of biopolitics plays a huge part in the

individual’s semiotic formation – all the more so because it is created as a figure of nature

which the individual should strive to become. Biopolitical government techniques, then, have

a fundamental effect on the individuals’ relations to themselves. We will see how ‘life’ is

produced in the formation of one specific mental disorder, namely, Attention

Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

As far as I know, there have not been any studies of ADHD made from the semiotic

point of view, using semiotic terminology. However, there have been some studies on the

conceptual and social history of ADHD (Rafalovich 2001; Brock 2010). The theoretical side

of biopolitics and its possible semiotic interpretation are touched on for example by Daniele

Monticelli (2008; 2012). I will draw on these studies in what follows, but I hope I will also be

able to add something extra, especially through the conceptualization of surveillance and

ADHD.

Biopolitics and biopower

Before we continue, an important distinction needs to be made, a distinction between

‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ as I use them in the following text (there have been many

different manners of this differentiation).1 I borrow this definition from David Hook, who

writes:

At a basic level, one might understand bio-power as the generic category of which bio-politics is a variant. [...] Bio-politics can thus be understood as that type of bio-power that targets collectivities, constituting its subjects as ’a people’, ’a nation’, ’a race’. [...] whereas bio-power begins with the body and its potentials, and seizes life and ’living being’ as its objects, bio-politics is always necessarily a form of government, it involves a government-population-political economy relationship [...]. (Hook 2010: 227)

Biopolitics is a collectivizing set of governmental practices in which a human being is

relevant only in as much as he is connected to the overall population; his conduct is measured

against the working of larger collectivities. Biopower, however, is any kind of intervention in

a human being’s bodily practices, in his construction of self as a bodily-psychological being

(the most prevalent set of techniques are of course related to medicine and health, for

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example, dietary regimes preventing diseases). What we need to note here is that there is no

strong line between the two: the individualizing techniques of biopower may easily be

converted to the working of biopolitics; for example, an individual’s choice of a nutrition can

become a question of ‘public health’, in which case the regime is already regulated by the

government (by illegalizing some products, raising the taxes of others, advertising, etc.).

Another note I’d like to make is that – following Foucault (see, for example 1981),

Mouffe (2003), Althusser (1971), and others – a human being is made into a subject only in

social, cultural, political power relations. This means that not only through cultural sign

systems and their interplay, but through the practices of constituting and implementation of

those sign systems (at the risk of simplification, we could say that sign systems are basically

discourses in Foucault’s sense). We could then agree to what Nancy Much says about cultural

psychology:

[It] emphasises the non-discrete and interpenetrating relation between personal psychology […] and the symbol systems, institutions, practices and contexts shared by the group and communicated by other persons. […] there is no longer a sharp distinction between the person and culture. Psychological experience, and the resulting “structure” of psyche and its potentialities are organised by networks of meaning. (Much 1997: 67)

The important thing is to add to the symbol systems the “institutions, practices and contexts”.

Without the latter, we would – in theorizing about and researching politics and society – be

left merely with the critique of ideology; but there is much more to the construction of the

subject in society than ideology.2 We need to see the complex relations between the discursive

and the extra-discursive that condition one another. And an almost perfect extra-discursive set

of practices and techniques of power to investigate in this respect would be surveillance.3

We can then say that surveillance practices work in concrete connection with the

human: they record, fragment, distribute, (re)organize and (re)assemble the (abstracted) body,

the psyche, and (a profile of) the human being. Surveillance practices and techniques are

forms of biopower and –politics that work to produce certain kinds of life, certain kinds of

subjectivities. But, let us first try to conceptualize the more general categories of biopower

and biopolitics before moving to surveillance and its influence on life.

The totalizing function of biopolitics

There is a certain paradox present when dealing with (bio-)politics, the notions of government

and the state. This is the tension between multiplicity and unification. In order to govern

human beings, they need to be classified, encoded in a system that enables the government to

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work on their lives. In short, humans need to be understood as a species with certain kinds of

basic and unchangeable properties that form the nucleus of what has to be maintained and

further developed. “One has to be classifiable to exist in species terms” (Dillon and Lobo-

Guerrero 2009: 5). There exists a very powerful tradition of thinkers (e.g. Giorgio Agamben,

Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière) who – in terms of this encoding – understand politics and the

constitution of a political order as a totalizing practice that sets up an encyclopedia of

knowledges in which the human being has to be thought of. The political order is a strictly

structured (total, in the sense of whole) system.

But at the same time, these very same thinkers all see a kind of remainder (of life,

subjectivity, signification) at the very heart of that system. This remainder constitutes the

impossibility of final totalization, of closing the system. And, of course, the possibilities of

resistance are being sought from this remainder. The stasis of the state is being counter-

positioned by the dynamics of life and its potentialities. What first come to mind are Giorgio

Agamben’s (2005) figure of ‘whatever singularity’, Derrida’s différance, and Esposito’s

(2008) conceptualization of the ‘flesh’ [chair] as opposed to the totalizing function of the

(political) body. In the words of Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2009: 5):

[T]hese authors clarify how the political imaginary of species being demarcates and differentiates itself specifically by excluding from its very imagining, the invaluable, the incalculable, the un-encodable, the irredeemably opaque, the defiant, and the simply non-circulating. Theirs is in many ways a preoccupation with the not knowable that contours every form of knowing.

Perhaps the most well known analysis of this kind of exclusion of the unknowable is

Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998 [1995]), of which the central

figure is ‘bare life’. This is the figure that is both excluded and included in the political order.

Agamben argues that the separation of zoe (bare life) and bios (political life) is constituted by

an ’inclusive exclusion’ of bare life in politics. Life is postulated as situating outside of

politics (as natural) only to found political practices for protecting this very same life. For

example, let’s take human rights, which are – in modern democracies – considered to be the

original properties of any human being: every individual is equal in his/her being. But human

rights are attributed to an individual only when s/he is a citizen of some state. “Rights are

attributed to man (or originate from him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately

vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen” (Agamben 1998: 76).

Politics is envisioned as the protection of life that is the outside of politics; and so, politics

appears to maintain and produce a natural order of things.

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This kind of separation performed only in order to bring together, conflate politics and

nature could be termed a kind ‘structural secret’ of biopolitics. It is not only the case that the

categories that are created as the natural properties of man are artificial (at least not natural),

but, on a deeper level: the very separation of zoe and bios is in essence a fiction. The

‘mystification of politics’ as Monticelli (2012) calls it, postulates that it is a necessity that

there exist these abstract “natural” categories over which to govern and that need protecting.

What actually is excluded by this underlying structure of biopolitics is the potential that life

could govern, develop, and act out its own potentialities.4 What is excluded is the possibility

that the remainder of biopolitics (bare life) would ever develop its own politics – within the

biopolitical structure.

What this also means, is that

[t]he true problem is not so much the fragile status of the excluded, but rather the fact that, at the most elementary level, we are all “excluded” in the sense that our most elementary, “zero” position is that of being an object of biopolitics, so much so that political and citizenship rights are granted us only as a secondary gesture, in accordance with strategic biopolitical considerations […]. (Žižek 2011: 124-125)

At the “zero” position humans’ lives are all potentially excluded, every life that is included in

the political order can potentially be sacrificed, or to put it more mildly, discriminated. It does

not matter which rights the individuals have; once they are within the biopolitical structure,

these rights can be taken away from them. For Agamben, then, the central issue becomes the

decision on life and death, the decision on the value of life, which is made possible by the

biopolitical totalization of the political order.

Bare life, in this case, can be described as something that exists within the political

order but is excluded from it in the sense that it is postulated as not being an inherent element

of this order. For example: of course we see that poverty and ‘the poor’ are inherent for

liberal-democratic states, probably so much that liberalism could not work without them, but

in the imaginary of liberalism, poverty is the factor to be rooted out, excluded from the

political totality. In short, the poor are described as a foreign element within the normalized

system and therefore can be acted upon in many different ways.

The (re)production of poverty is obvious for anyone in the case of the population of

the ghettos in many countries. They are increasingly being either incarcerated or left on their

own, thus erasing them from the accepted political sphere. Which also means that the welfare

institutions and health care centers and so on are increasingly autonomous organizations for

profit (following the logic of liberalism) – they reproduce themselves instead of

’incorporating’ social subjects:

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[I]t [the carceral apparatus of the United States] has regained a central place in the system of the instruments for the government of poverty, at the crossroads of the deskilled labor market, the collapsing urban ghetto, and social-welfare services „reformed“ with a view to buttressing the discipline of desocialized wage work. (Wacquant 2009: 79)

What I wanted to point out is that the carceral apparatus is not so much the system of

„justice“, punishment and reformation, but one of exclusion of un-political life forms, one that

helps to „wage war“ „on the poor“, rather than „poverty“ (see more Wacquant 2009). This

means that the object of state politics is not the social structure, but the life of its „citizens“ (in

inverted commas because, basically, they are deprived of rights, made into bare life). The

individual here becomes a political being only in as much as and how he or she interacts with

the norm of the political body.

From the above example we can see that the possibility of the decision on life depends

on the production of specific life-forms, in this case, the poor. And the main question

becomes how these life-forms are produced. Agamben however seems here to reduce the

whole (bio)political field to the decision that is inherent in any politics; by searching for the

structure of biopolitics, he 1) makes every political act into a biopolitical one, and thus 2)

reduces the immense variety of power relations and techniques to this one structure. „Political

space [...] is reduced to a specific mode of the exercise of power: the decision on the value of

life“ (Genel 2006: 57).

Normalization of life

We have therefore come to understand that we need to move beyond the totalizing function of

biopolitics and its structure of decision in order to 1) differentiate biopolitics from any other

politics, and to 2) analyze the specific ways that life is produced and governed – transformed

into the central object of politics.

We therefore need to include the more general concept of ‘biopower’, of which

‘biopolitics’ is one variant, one mode of governing. The notions that become central to the

following discourse are ‘norm’ and ‘normalization’. Biopower, starting with the individual

body, is connected to the biopolitical totalization of populations exactly by the norm.

Normalization creates the abstract body that connects the individual to the population. It is

worth stressing that norms do not come to be solely by the decision of the state or the

sovereign; rather, the sovereign needs to govern in terms of those norms established by much

broader practices, techniques and signifying systems situated outside the reach of sovereign

power. These mechanisms of power have been charted by Michel Foucault, who describes

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three basic and very broad mechanisms: 1) the sovereign right, the law; 2) the disciplinary

mechanism; and 3) the mechanism of security. It is useful here to reproduce a lengthy passage

in order to describe the interrelations within this complex:

A good discipline tells you what you must do at every moment. […] In the system of the law, what is undetermined is what is permitted; in the system of disciplinary regulation, what is determined is what one must do, and consequently everything else, being undetermined, is prohibited. […] The mechanism of security works on the basis of this reality, by trying to use it as a support and make it function, make its components function in relation to each other. In other words, the law prohibits and discipline prescribes, and the essential function of security, without prohibiting or prescribing, but possibly making use of some instruments of prescription and prohibition, is to respond to a reality in such a way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds – nullifies it, or limits, checks, or regulates it. (Foucault 2009: 46-47)

In contrast to Agamben, Foucault places the basic stress on the security mechanism, when

talking about biopolitics and -power. While the law prohibits, the security mechanism

regulates the reality, makes it work as it should work. In reality, then, there is a randomness

that cannot be tolerated, and reality has to be brought to accordance with its nature. This is

the basic goal of normalization: measuring, establishing, and controlling the specific and

stabilized constants that are natural to the social order. Any deviation from these norms are

seen as pathological, as falling outside of the order – in which case this deviation can be

banned from the social sphere (this is Agamben’s exclusion). Discipline works with the

individual body, it produces the body, divides it into parts and reassembles to make it work

better; discipline constructs ‘docile bodies’ to work in compliance with the law and be in

accordance to the norm (biopower). Normative security measures the average of collectivities

and defines the relation of the norm and deviance; discipline works with the body to match it

to the norm, produces a normalized body; sovereignty has the right to exclude all who do not

pass the measurement.

As much as biopolitics deals with collectivities, it works as a security mechanism in

the sense that it tries to regulate the workings of populations, make the populations effective

by producing normal procedures and protecting ‘the normal’ from ‘the pathological’, and

therefore bring the risk factors to a minimum. But it is important to note that “[b]iopolitical

security practices do not articulate a design in nature. They are contingent achievements

reflecting the partial realization of designs which seek to enact ‘natures’” (Dillon and Lobo-

Guerrero 2008: 267). Biopolitics organizes ‘natures’ in conjunction with some measurable

phenomena; mechanisms of security work within the complex of power/knowledge that

produces specific forms of life (by establishing profiles, patterns and probabilities). While the

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articulations of security practices are contingent and historically specific, they are brought to

bear on life as inherent properties of populations.

For example, every time we go to the doctor’s we leave behind traces of symptoms

and diseases that are added to the population databank to better govern its health status. These

personal and highly individual traces are put into relation with every other trace left by others.

The abstracted information is used to measure the stable situation of health, which is then

seen as necessary for one specific individual.

Actually, the same goes for discipline, although the referent is of a different level – the

individual body: “It is not the normal and the abnormal that is fundamental and primary in

disciplinary normalization, it is the norm” (Foucault 2009: 57). When we are dealing with

discipline and security mechanisms, we are most importantly dealing with the norm; and the

question becomes: how is this norm produced, using what techniques, what kind of a ‘normal

life’ is being produced, and how this norm is being maintained using the techniques of

biopower?

In the context of biopower, the normal and the abnormal are not strictly separated, it is

the measurement of the norm, the stability of forms of life that produces the abnormal. The

norm is here only established with reference to statistical numbers, which do not take account

of individual differences and normativity. Any deviation from this statistical norm is viewed

as an abnormality and opposed to the normal. And it is this procedure of separation that is

established by mechanisms of security and discipline as natural, scientific: “Disciplines […]

will necessarily refer to a theoretical horizon that is […] the field of the human sciences”

(Foucault 2004: 38). It is not the question, at the most basic level of what kind of life forms

are natural and optimal, but that there exists a necessity of the abnormal in order to establish a

norm and vice versa (we can say that this is the kind of structural “secret” that Agamben

wishes to reveal: we cannot think outside this structure, although it is artificial).

The creation of norms through surveillance systems

As mentioned earlier, one set of techniques to implement biopower is surveillance, which

does not simply mean watching people’s behavior for the purpose of punishment. Rather, it

signifies the constant gathering of information and assembling databases for the purpose of

profiling, prediction, marketing, housing, etc. Security cameras are just one type of

surveillance technology. For example, each day we leave behind traces of our credit card

using practices; we log in to websites and click on icons – these actions are used to profile our

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shopping habits, to construct suitable commercials for us. Surveillance is a means to produce

information and knowledge.

In addition to the classical, panoptical surveillance described by Jeremy Bentham

(1995) and taken over by Foucault to analyze the disciplinary mechanisms of modern

societies, we have all kinds of cataloguing, identification, profiling mechanisms that we are

not even conscious of. What is of course striking in today’s Western societies is the

proliferation of informational access and the huge amounts of collected information that

cannot possibly be worked through (be it the years of CCTV footage or health records). But,

all the information stored even need not be worked through; it may simply be categorized and

labelled in order to exclude irrelevant information.

Let’s make a short generalization here. Since, in the following, I am interested in the

(potential) effect of surveillance practices on the formation of ‘life’ and the individual, I’d like

to bring out three very broad ways of relating surveillance and its subject:

1) Surveillance that is perceived by the individual, s/he is conscious of it; for example in

some closed environment with a CCTV system where the cameras are visible. This is

the basis of disciplinary surveillance, where the important thing is the ‘visibility of

visibility’ (Yar 2003: 261) – the awareness of the subject of her/him being watched,

that results in the disciplining of self;

2) The case where surveillance is already widespread, it has reached out the closed

environments of institutions to the public space. In this case there is no need anymore

of the visibility of surveillance technology or the surveillant personnel. This is the

relation of the unconscious influence and affecting: the subject may act in accordance

with rules because he may be under surveillance – we may call this the economy of

disciplinary power relations: when surveillance starts to work without anybody even

watching;

3) Finally, the individual does come into direct contact with surveillance technologies

and practices, but the data collected is separated from her/him and therefore the

relation is cut. This is the case of forming ‘surveillant assemblages’ in which ‘data

doubles’ of the individual are produced by profiling and encoding. The individuals are

being formed into a political, social, and cultural subjects without their presence. (see

also Puumeister 2011)

Taken together, these relations an individual has to techniques of surveillance contribute to a

new relation to self. The subject is constituted through contact with surveillance systems and

the information that they produce. Concerning the third relation, the individual may not be

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aware of any ‘construction’ s/he is undergoing. What is important is the creation of ‘data

doubles’, these abstract normalized bodies that are used to categorize and encode human lives.

These ‘data doubles’ are constructed by connecting various surveillance systems that

use different and diverse means of collecting, classifying, and coding the personal data

extracted from individuals. Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty call this combination of

systems ‘surveillant assemblage’, which

[...] operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series

of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized

and targeted for intervention. In the process, we are witnessing a rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of

surveillance, such that groups which were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now

increasingly being monitored. (Ericson & Haggerty 2000: 606)

For example, the individual’s consuming habits (that are acquired either through surveys,

clicks on the internet, etc), her/his travelling routes (GPS) can be connected to her/his medical

history. From these diverse systems a complex data double is created that acts as a basis for

prediction on the individual’s future health risks. In this way, her/his potentialities for future

action and conduct can be delimited. The individual is placed at risk and her/his relation to

self altered on the basis of abstracted and reassembled data.

According to Robert Castel (1991: 283) this kind of profiling of the future necessarily

entails unpredictability: “all insane persons, even those who appear calm, carry a threat, but

one whose realization still remains a matter of chance.” The introduction of unpredictability

creates a kind of permanent situation of risk that has to be regulated through the conduct of an

individual: s/he has to act in a certain way and, more importantly, has to be a certain kind of

subject. Nikolas Rose speaks here of ‘ethopolitics’, which means that the individual, in order

to become a whole and healthy subject, has to choose the “right” kind of techniques of self-

formation:

Thus these new practices for the identification of susceptibilities open a space of uncertainty. This is the

expanding realm of the asymptomatically or presymptomatically ill – those individuals carrying the

markers or polymorphisms of susceptibility who are neither phenomenologically or experientially ‘sick’

or ‘abnormal’. While the calculation of risk often seems to promise a technical way of resolving ethical

questions, these new kinds of susceptibility offer no clear-cut algorithm for the decisions of doctors or

their actual or potential patients. In this space, biopolitics becomes ethopolitics. (Rose 2001: 12)

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Ethopolitics, as I understand it, following Rose, could mean a “personalized biopower”: an

individual internalizes the abstract norms and standards and bases her/his decisions on how to

act, how to be healthy, how to enhance her/his body, etc. And through these decisions and

practices relating the individual to him/herself is a way of constructing an identity, a social,

political, cultural subject. The constant risk, the danger of probable abnormality renders the

norm into the object of individuals’ desire instead of being only externally imposed (Bruno &

Vaz 2003: 278).

Let us next turn to a specific disorder, namely ADHD, and see how the social,

medical, scientific, and cultural construction of this complex of symptoms into a

comprehensive diagnostic whole relates to the larger context of creating a kind of

“neurochemical” understanding of life. My hypothesis is that this process is not in the first

place an exclusion from the social and political order but a formation of another kind of

relationship of an individual to her/himself. ADHD is particularly interesting from the

perspective of risk and prevention, as it is mainly used to manage the lives of children and

adolescents.

Normality through medication: ADHD

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is considered to be one of the most

prevalent mental disorders among US children. It is estimated that about 5.4 million children

aged 7-14 have been diagnosed with ADHD and that about 2.7 million (66% of those

diagnosed) children receive drug treatment.5 These are of course only indicative numbers, as

“nationally representative data on the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders among

children are still not available“ due to the inability to include children under age 12 in the

sample” (Merikangas et al. 2009).

There are, however, other – and probably more important – issues about diagnosing

and estimating the prevalence of ADHD: the diagnosis consists of symptoms like inattention,

failure to follow instructions, inorganization of activities, forgetfulness, fidgeting with hands,

blurting out answers before questions are finished, etc.6 These behaviors are not uncommon

and are considered to be part of a quite normal child when taken separately. This raises more

questions about diagnoses that are performed based on just a few symptoms: can ADHD

really be called an illness, furthermore, an illness that requires pharmaceutical intervention?

Whatever the answer, social workers, doctors, drug developers have established ADHD as a

disorder in need of medication, although no clear biological or neurological basis has been

found (see for example Cohen and Leo 2003). In fact, medication with stimulants can be

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viewed as proof of the existence of the disorder: while in the case of a “normal” human being

stimulants cause hyperactivity, the human with ADHD is calmed by them (Napolitano et al.

2010).

ADHD can actually be said to be defined with the help of drugs: in 1937 Charles

Bradley discovered the positive effects of stimulants (in his case, Benzedrine) on the behavior

and learning abilities of hyperactive children (Brock 2010: 21-23). In 1944, Ritalin

(methylphenidate) was synthesized and in 1955 it was licensed by the Food and Drug

Administration to treat various psychological disorders. And this was also the time when the

symptoms of ADHD were first described as ‘minimal brain dysfunction’ (Anastopoulos et al.

1994). The development and marketing of amphetamine-based drugs and the definition of

ADHD as a brain disorder go hand in hand.

The medication of children with an ADHD diagnosis shows an important tendency

from the viewpoint of biopower: deviant behavior is understood as having a cause internal to

a person’s body, more specifically, her/his brain. Edward Comstock (2011) traces the

interesting path of the development of treatment for ADHD. At first, in the first half of the

20th century, drugs, “alongside other therapeutic techniques were meant to eradicate (deviancy

in general). The focus was on behaviors, conformity, and institutional roles” (Comstock 2011:

52). It was not a disease that was being targeted but behaviors that needed eliminating.

Children with behavioral disorders were “other children”, the unknown – because not

thoroughly described within medical discourse (Rafalovich 2001: 106). In order to describe

these children as knowable objects of scientific study and medical intervention, researchers

turned (starting from 1960s) to the brain, “which “functions” in knowable ways according to a

transcendental human program” (Comstock 2011: 58). The behavioral disorders became

strictly connected to the individual and her/his body. They are no longer strictly connected to

social and moral deviancy. The stimulants – with their paradoxical effect – can now detect

abnormality within the body.

But perhaps most importantly, because psychotropic drugs replace institutional moral and juridical

norms as the test for this behaviour disorder, the new disorder could be found in anybody and in any

behaviours based no longer on these norms but on the reaction to the drug in relation to a synthetic ideal

of behaviour. (Comstock 2011: 61)

The basis for confirmation of the diagnosis and the reality of the illness is no longer social

deviancy but the processes within the individual – the processes altered by the stimulants (see

for example Napolitano et al. (2010) and Volkov et al. (2007) for neurological research on

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dopamine production effects in ADHD).7 The practices of medical surveillance play an

important role in this confirmation and formation of the illness. The practice of population

health statistics makes it necessary that any normal and abnormal condition be encoded; every

condition has to be classifiable in order to form a coherent image of the population’s bios, a

figure of the healthy “social body”. The prescription of drugs requires that one is diagnosed

with a specific disorder, and every diagnosis is registered and entered into the population data

bank. While the drugs themselves in the case of ADHD are one of the bases of the disorder’s

reality, we see here a complex structure which forms this disorder. The interplay between

biopower (intervention into the conduct of individuals), surveillance (the collection of data),

drug developers, psychiatry and broader cultural knowledge forms this reality that is ADHD.

This is not to say that the knowledge produced by medical practices and drug

developers are immediately ‘subjectifying’8 individuals in societies. Rather, by creating a

discourse with the help of surveillance techniques, human sciences, existing social

institutions, the formation of complex wholes such as ADHD produce a kind of ‘life’ that is

separated from actual individuals. This ‘normalized life’ is attributed to the healthy social

body, an abstract entity that represents the state of affairs for which the management of

individuals is supposed to govern the population. The production of such ‘life’ is important to

notice, because, as Ivan Illich (1994) noted, “’A life’ is amenable to management, to

improvement and to evaluation in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of ‘a person’.”

‘Life’ can be mapped down “scientifically”, its processes predicted, the latter can be

intervened and prevented.

What is important, then, is not the fact of surveillance, the collection of data itself, but

the social meaning making practices that are built upon this data. A concrete individual might

not even have any connection with the data that is used to create a norm and define the

deviance from it, considering that medical population statistics are usually compiled by

surveys and previous diagnoses – that cover a rather small part of the population. Through

statistics and the marketing of medications, an illness like ADHD is constructed as a social

fact and as a problem for the population as whole; that is, a concern for each individual.

Therefore, in addition to concrete medical and medication practices, the construction of

ADHD – or any other similar mental disorder – faces concrete individuals with a new kind

life, which has to be internalized as part of the cultural signifying system. Adding to the

“scientific” basis of this ‘life’ is its basis in biological-neurological treatment with

medications, thus creating an understanding of the individual as a “neurochemical self” (Rose

2003).9

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The development of drugs and the refinement of psychiatric and psychological

language that helped to integrate different behaviors into a heterogeneous whole, have then

profound effects on the individual’s formation of her/his identity; it alters the relation the

individual has with her/himself. And this shifting of relation is highly problematic because the

biological cause of the disorder is not definite – the diagnoses do not so much discover as

construct it. The creation of the normalized social body and the encoding of even the minor

disorders in terms of neurological activity put the individuals in a constant risk of deviancy

and in a position of self-surveillance with regard to their conduct and action, their self-

production. “An ethics is engineered into the molecular make up of those drugs, and the drugs

themselves embody and incite particular forms of life in which the “real me” is both “natural”

and to be produced” (Rose 2003: 59).

One of the major effects of the types of medications as the stimulants used for ADHD

on the semiotic level of self-formation is definitely the conflation of “natural” and “cultural”;

the view of one’s body as producible through one’s conduct. The body is viewed as being in

constant risk when the individual is “behaving badly”. But this “bad” is no longer so much in

relation to societal norms as in reference to one’s own body, which is decaying and getting

out of shape if the individual does not treat it right. For example, a whole field of literature on

self-help has emerged that teaches the individual to live a good and healthy life. The

individual has to work on her/himself to become “natural”, that is, healthy.

But this working with the self means increasingly that one needs to be a good patient.

Good conduct in this context does not simply mean that one needs to behave according to

social and moral rules. Rather, it means doing and taking what the doctor(s) have prescribed

to the patient – it means to let oneself be governed. That is, one needs to follow medical, not

simply behavioral rules; one has to let the prescribed substances work on his/her biology in

order to become an acceptable citizen. Here we come to the question of treatment adherence,

that is, “the extent to which a person’s behaviour – taking medication, following a diet, and/or

executing lifestyle changes, corresponds with agreed recommendations from a health care

provider“ (WHO 2003: 3). In the case of ADHD adherence usually refers simply to taking the

prescribed stimulants (Chacko et al. 2010: 2417), that is, altering one’s brain activity and

through this, altering one’s behavior. Chacko et al. (2010: 2420) propose, in order to improve

adherence, various interventions are necessary; for example, parent-training, students’

education, „tailoring medication to the profile of the youth and family“ – that „target

environmental constraints to adherence, [...] adress habitual and automatic processes that may

influence adherence behavior, and improve patient self-efficacy in taking medication.“

15

What the above texts show is that patients’ behavior is being considered mainly in

relation to the taking of medications and following the regulations prescribed by the doctors.

Failure to adhere to treatment could be read as a sign of ADHD-related behavior: it is a failure

of willingness to alter one’s biological functions in accordance with social norms. The view

that the maximization of adherence to medication is the best way to treat ADHD confirms the

hypothesis that ADHD is seen as a bodily/biological disorder, which causes socially aberrant

behavior. As a neurochemical disorder, it enables the institutions (e.g. schools, clinics, but

also the family) to code individuals as biological organisms who need governing; and this

government is implemented as much through medical and governance practices (drugs,

surveillance of adherence) as through discursive normalization. The individual is subjectified

as a “natural” and biological entity that needs to act according to social norms in order to

attain his/her “nature”.

We see then that in the case of ADHD that the individual is a proper object of

biopower and that this biological normalization is as much linked to social norms as before.

Moreover, the fact that an individual’s behavior can be termed a disorder simply on the basis

of the influence of medications renders the relations of social and bodily norms even more

complex. The infinite sets of rules that are written and talked about on how to live draw out a

very refined field on which to act. Having a certain kind of a disorder can be – and usually is

– related to the moral code, the code of conduct. If the body is a site of conscious production,

it is immoral to “let yourself go”, be inattentive, disturb others, not take drugs, etc.

The creation of a common cultural knowledge and governmental, medical, social

practices applying that knowledge of the ‘life’ that is manageable through medication is vital

in order for the individuals to subjectivize themselves according to this figure of life. As it

seems, this production of life has for the present moment gained the status of truth in today’s

societies, forming the individuals’ (in case of ADHD especially the children) self-image in

relation to deviancy within the body itself that can be ‘normalized’ using medication. As said

earlier, an estimated 2.7 million children in the US are growing up being normalized by the

alteration of their brain activity.

Conclusion

I would not like to close on such a grim note, however it must be said that ADHD is a work of

fiction used to control children and, increasingly, adults; to marginalize them from the social

sphere as if the individuals themselves had no self control. Self-creation always takes place in

a cultural and social field of norms and regulated conduct but that does not mean that

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individuals have no freedom to creatively use those norms, to conduct themselves in other

ways than prescribed by social normativity. Self-creation works through semiosis and thus

always entails the specific subjective relation to societal norms. Here I can also see that

further studies using exactly semiotic methods and understanding to analyze the self-creation,

subjectification of individuals and groups would be absolutely fruitful and necessary. For

example, the semiotic concept of autocommunication would enable us to study the formation

of the social, medical subject from the viewpoint of the individuals themselves.

This is also why I tried to step outside of the biopolitical structure of inclusive

exclusion described by Agamben: to theorize individuals as capable of self-normativity. The

construction of ADHD as a large-scale problem has achieved the definition of very

heterogeneous behaviors into one homogenizing totality and transformed the self-relation of

millions of individuals who probably would not need to be treated by medication. But this

does not mean that ADHD and the medication of children is an inevitable part of society and

culture. On the contrary, this seeming inevitability stems from the work of continuous

promotion of drugs, definition of deviant behaviors, and shifting the focus from social norms

to the bodily norms. It is said about mental disorders: the first step to recovery is recognizing

that you have a problem. Maybe we could ask the people searching for disorders where

maybe there are none to recognize that there is a problem in the way that ADHD is sometimes

clearly over-diagnosed and children too easily over-medicated. Maybe one aspect of the

problem is not inherent within the bodies of citizens but the way that society describes them?

Notes

1. For example, Roberto Esposito in his Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008)

understands bio-power as „a life subjected to the command of politics“ and bio-

politics as „a politics in the name of life“. For him, then, this is a distinction between

the negative and the positive use of ’life politics’.

2. It is of course important not to think of society as a unitary, homogeneous whole,

rather, following Latour (2005: 108), we could say that “there is no society, no social

realm, and social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate

traceable associations.” There is no “society” that generates individual subjects, but

“society” is constructed through the interactions of individual subjects, social

institutions, signs systems, technologies, etc.

3. However, there might be some confusion about what exactly is this “extra-discursive”,

if, like most contemporary political theorists argue, the political space (even the

17

world) is structured according to discursive formations. Here I would like to call upon

Manuel DeLanda’s view on the matter: “while pairing a certain category of crime, like

stealing, with a certain category of punishment, like cutting off a thief’s hand, is

clearly a discursive practice, the actual act of mutilation is equally clearly a non-

discursive one“ (DeLanda 2008: 162).

Similarly, we could say that surveillance in itself is non-discursive: the acts of

watching, recording data, etc. The practices of surveillance acquire meaning (become

discursive) when they are inserted within a discourse; that is, for example, when

gathered data is connected with individuals’ conduct and this (already abstracted)

conduct becomes one of the signifiers of an illness or a disorder. Again, treatment with

medication is non-discursive, but it is discursively formed knowledge that leads to this

treatment. It is the discursive practices of surveillance that work on the discursive

object known as ‘a human being’. But, of course, non-discursive materialities are

formed and reformed by discursive practices; non-discursive elements are deeply

interconnected with discourse – the two actually could not exist without one another,

which is also why it is so difficult to think there being something “outside” discourse

(like an actual human being standing behind all the deconstructive work of his/her

body).

4. I like a quote by Žižek (2008: 384) that illustrates the situation rather precisely:

„Today, for example, the true antagonism is not between liberal multiculturalism and

fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded Third

(radical emancipatory politics).“ – the focal point is not exactly life, but the structure

is represented very accurately.

5. Data are from 2007; taken from the CDC web page:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html

6. http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html

7. It should be emphasized however that none of these researches can pin down the exact

neurological caus(es) of ADHD, which makes the treatment through drugging more

problematic. ADHD is composed of very heterogeneous symptoms and using

stimulants to alter brain activity should be viewed as an over-simplification.

8. Derek Hook (2010: 31) makes a distinction between 1) ’subjectification’: „the

promotion and elaboration of a thoroughly individualizing set of knowledges about the

singular subject who is effectively normalized and psychologized as a result“; and 2)

’subjectivization’: „the feeding back of such knowledges to a subject who comes to

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apply such notions, to understand and experience themselves in the terms of

subjectification“.

9. The dream of immortality in this world and the exile of death to the sterilized walls of

hospitals – the erasure of death from everyday life – may in part be explained by the

vision of ‘life’ as wholly manageable, controllable: “[A]long with the increasing

corporeality of the concept of self-preservation, there may also have been a

corresponding transformation of the concept of immortality itself, a shift which is just

beginning to become noticeable. While the claims of medicine are still couched in the

usual terms of self-preservation […] out on the edge there has appeared a worldly,

corporeal vision of immortality, complete with a liquid-nitrogen limbo” (Tierney

1999: 252).

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