SUBJECTIVITIES OF MEDICALIZED SOCIETY

Abstract

The article analyzes the modern health-obsessed society, understood as an operational result of the politics of health and the next phase of expansion of medicalization, basically defined within the framework of the half-century-old concept of biopolitics, and which has become relevant again due to the use of typically «Foucauldian» and high-tech supported medical-political actions as a response to the recent pandemic. Today, despite the diversity of theories and conceptualizations of "health-and-well-being", the medically-conscious subject in a medicalized society is idealized in every way; through his activity, awareness and initiative he modeled as capable of being prosperous and socially fit. This is exactly the kind of self-imagination by medical aspects that defines and marks the field of genesis, communication, and «collaboration» of medicalized subjectivities and forming the manners of their construction. Along the line of biopolitics’ explication – ​​from «discipline» to «control», then to «self-controls» and further – «patient», «consumer» and «hacker» come one after another as supplementary to each other. They are personifications of certain attitudes to health, and of the dominant practices and techniques associated with these attitudes, and of typical resulting effects of these attitudes, that is subjectivities. They differ in the levels of activity on the market of medical services, in the degrees of controllability by the authorities, in the advancement in scientific knowledge, in the attitudes to institutionalized medicine and to health care systems. But they are homogeneous, conceptualizing and imagining the «self» as a computed biological body; this body emits data that can be tracked as evidence of health status and used to improve own performance and fitness.