Jorge Castillo Seminary part I. Cancer, biopolitics and subjectivation

This week we attended to the Jorge Castillo-Sepúlveda seminary about Govermentality, Biosociality and Biopolitics. Here you can read the first part of our report:

Evidence. Differences between the representational framework vs etymological meaning ( "what is evident, making something in one or more contexts).

Evidence about life:

-Origin of the shown work: Technoscientific scenarios for diseases in Catalonia . Importance of protocols and guidelines. Implications for patients  and experience configuration in the biomedical network.Cancer (object, not just the patient), also takes actions that influence patient decisions (whether they are treated or not, emotions, etc.). Result: The evidence-based medicine sets its own standards of objectivity. Ensambka disease in a new socio-technical grammar.

Medicine based on evidence (MBE) is a medicine based on knowledge and tested diagnostics (the knowledge is valid if it is test internationally in different trials). They are specified in protocols and guidelines. Cambrosio: the objective is included in a guideline or protocol, because it has been well established arbitrarily. The real is that which depends on certain regulations. The MBE changes medicine: it realigns biology and medicine, creating what we know as biomedicine. Health-pathology debate is reconfigured according to the provisions of a number of propositions enrolled in clinical guidelines.

The context is very different between Chile and Catalonia: the neoliberal framework ban medical protocols to be applied because this "cuts" the free exercise of their profession. In addition, it is impossible without the intervention of private companies. Disease in Chile, is what protocols and guidelines grounded in MBE say. Health is to access to minimum benefits and guarantees. The citizen becomes a consumer and he is not a patient anymore. It does not guarantee health, but technology, quality, performance (if it is not proved by evidence it is not collected as health).

Guarantee vs warranty. The first is the formal assurance that certain conditions are met. The second is the written guarantee that promises to replace or repair an item (the person is a body that must be replaced or repaired certain elements). Redefinition of the relationship between public and private. The State does not monitor the health market, but creates his own one, as well that it is powered by State in relation to the allocation of certain rights to citizens.

"GES diseases" (diseases gathered in a protocol by the Chilean State, that are state-funded) are different from "non-ges diseases". Differing modes of access to health systems. The subject of law becomes consumer: the concept of citizenship is redefined. 

Subjectivity (Latour interface, something which registers certain experiences. Connections that an entity of human character learns to register. Agency distributed between humans and non-human (Artur Leal)). Regulations redefine the notion of pathology. Protocols relocate the body and distribute it among many different actors and organizations that register their properties and then invest this knowledge about it. In this moment arise vitality regimes: truths that govern how we manage our own lives and how we meant by ourselves.

Embodiment: incarnate expression of disease. Having a body is the ability to affect and be affected. Corporealization of pathology is the process by which a biomedical proposal establishes certain conditions affecting the person.

Biopolitics to biogubernamentality. Biosociality (forms / social practices arising from a  biological feature, knowledge or concern).

"Ges" as a governmental expression of life through its protocols and the promoting of biosociality. Biogubernamentality, then, rules at the basis on the biomedical strategies, creating biomedical subjects and biomedical forms to understand ourselves. Moreover, beyond the proper sphere of biomedicine and go beyond.

Photo Credit: Eric Gjerde