TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lindner, Peter
T1  - Molecular politics, wearables, and the aretaic shift in biopolitical governance
T2  - Theory, culture & society
N2  - Since the publication of Nikolas Rose’s ‘The Politics of Life Itself’ (2001) there has been vivid discussion about how biopolitical governance has changed over the last decades. This article uses what Rose terms ‘molecular politics’, a new socio-technical grip on the human body, as a contrasting background to ask anew his question ‘What, then, of biopolitics today?’ – albeit focusing not on advances in genetics, microbiology, and pharmaceutics, as he does, but on the rapid proliferation of wearables and other sensor-software gadgets. In both cases, new technologies providing information about the individual body are the common ground for governance and optimization, yet for the latter, the target is habits of moving, eating and drinking, sleeping, working and relaxing. The resulting profound differences are carved out along four lines: ‘somatic identities’ and a modified understanding of the body; the role of ‘expert knowledge’ compared to that of networks of peers and self-experimentation; the ‘types of intervention’ by which new technologies become effective in our everyday life; and the ‘post-discipline character’ of molecular biopolitics. It is argued that, taken together, these differences indicate a remarkable shift which could be termed aretaic: its focus is not ‘life itself’ but ‘life as it is lived’, and its modality are new everyday socio-technical entanglements and their more-than-human rationalities of (self-)governance.
KW  - biopolitics
KW  - governmentality
KW  - mobile health
KW  - molecular politics
KW  - self-tracking
KW  - wearables
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53474
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-534740
SN  - 0263-2764
SN  - 1460-3616
VL  - 37
IS  - 3
SP  - 71
EP  - 96
PB  - SAGE Publications
CY  - London [u. a.]
ER  -