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Abstract:
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Initiatives in medical practice that are said
to re-insert the subject, thereby overcoming
the problems of objectifying practices in
earlier times, often operate with a notion of
bodies and selves as pre-established
entities. In this paper, I will try to show
some of the work it takes to produce or
perform self-monitoring subjects who
participate in keeping their asthmatic
bodies in control through the use of an
online control center. I argue that the bodies
in control and the competent selves related
to this technology depend on the
establishment of a chronically ill body and
on the decentering and incorporation of the
clinic in everyday life. Passages into the
body are to be kept open in real-time
through the involvement of materially
heterogeneous arrangements.
The distributed character of this work
creates and is dependent on an ambiguity in
relation to the question of agency. Who or
what acts, decides, looks, knows and so on,
is not necessarily defined or otherwise clear
in the day-to-day use of the technology.
Instead, agency becomes performed in
particular instances, where it might become
the property of one part of the network or
another. Creating the asthmatic as a free,
autonomous agent in this instance depends
on blurring other nodes in the network in
the day-to-day use of this technology, these
being, the physician, the technology, and
the scientific set-up. As such, I argue that
agency in the form of the self-monitoring
competent ill, is best understood as a
successful performance of invisible
passages and links that hook up bodies,
other selves, science and medical practices. |
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