Pharmaceutical interventions, prescribed or illicit, do much more than reorganize our somatic selves. Yes, they shuffle the sensorium and re-engineer the molecular body. But these effects are only part of the profound, and even violent, transformation of the somatic self made visible by the emergence of what Nikolas Rose has called the “neurochemical self.” Drugs of all kinds are potent technologies of the self, engineered in external spaces for incorporation into the most intimate aspects of experience, the senses, and the body.
Pharmaceutical interventions are technologies of the self. On one hand, they are precisely what Foucault meant when he coined the term in the sense that they
permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (Foucault, 1988: 18).
In other words, they enable individuals to deliberately produce certain modes of subjectification and in so doing actively incorporate themselves into biopolitical assemblages. Media images and narratives, medical consultations, together with the widespread availability and perceived efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions combine to create a wide range of personalized imperatives to make the self “better” in the service of historically, geographically, and culturally contingent normativities. The happy self, the autonomous self, the self capable of self-examination and self-control. The autopoietic, informational, cybernetic self. The liberal self.
But drugs, whether acquired with a credit card swipe or a paranoid glance over the shoulder, do much more than this. Just as Foucault suggested, they incorporate and translate bodies and minds into broad circuits of exchange and relations of power and subjectivity. And just as Foucault acknowledged, these technologies of the self are as essential to resistance as they are to repression. But they also reveal the contingency and heterogeneity of the effects of power itself.
As biomedical technologies at the smallest and most personal scale, drugs carry the productive apparatus of advanced industrialism into the body itself. But they are not, as Marx would argue, irrevocably or deterministically tied to advanced industrialism. Lysergic acid diethylamide is a synthetic assemblage, enabled and fabricated by the instruments of the (is it still anathema to call it this?) military-industrial-academic complex. To what extent are the doors of perception thrown open by the mechanisms of power, and to what extent are they recognized by fragmented, multiple, resistant, and contradictory subjectivities? It’s a little of both, I think.
Technologies of the self such as the pharmacological interventions that tell, make, and remind us who we are (and are not) are individualizing and collectivizing, and it will help to remind ourselves that technologies do not do anything. They only afford possibilities. They only afford action.
Most importantly, they only afford potential (future) selves.
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