Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
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Ott Puumeister
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).
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
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
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- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
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- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
