Recasting Suffering

-->

Bio-power, as introduced in Foucault’s (1978) book chapter, has emerged in a society where “political power has assigned itself the task of administering life”(p 139), and involves what he calls 1) regulation—the biopolitics of a population and 2) the anatomo-politics of the human body. 

In a very superficial way, the term “hierarchy of suffering” that Petryna (2002) uses to discuss the Chernobyl victims’ classification for the rights to compensation reminds me of our own system of disability compensation here in the US. 

Dmytro’s story in chapter two stood out.  His effort to bargain for a higher level of compensation is described as involving a self-advocacy including knowing the amount of chromosomal abberations and “calculat[ing] his lost work capacity and amassed diagnoses” (p35).  Dmytro’s way of casting his own suffering in these terms reflects what Rose and Novas (2003) discuss regarding biological citizenship, where increasingly populations describe their own state of being in biomedical terms.  In Foucault’s anatomo-politics of the human body, the body is cast as machine-like, in terms of what it can do for the society or for the economy.  The fact of Dmytro’s calculation of working capacity as related to his entitlement for compensation reflects this dynamic.

Likewise, applying for disability in the US involves a process of self-advocacy in which the sufferer has to make the case that they are sick or hurt enough to warrant governmental support.  I have helped a handful of people trying to work through the disability system.  Likewise, they learned to cast their own suffering into specific symptoms, and to be sure to exhibit or provide documentation for these symptoms, increasingly identifying with their affliction in the process.  This, not to fake their pain and suffering, but to receive recognition and support for legitimate issues in very narrowly defined parameters and in competition against others in equally bad predicaments.

Yet I imagine, it might also be possible to draw some remote bureaucratic parallels as well. I wonder if, under such conditions as Foucault mentions, where the structures of power serve in the administration of life, it happens that the classification and regulation of health may produce this phenomenon—the struggle to have ones’ suffering legitimized?