The Art of Governing in an Age of Revelation: On the Biopolitics of Biovisuality

This paper examines the transforming value, resolution and vitalism of the social body as it is increasingly informationalized, visualized and anatomized by multivalent systems of exposure. Multiplex biopolitical interests influence and incite these practices: wills to discern and direct consumption habits; ambitions to inscribe structured meanings upon somatic territories; and desires to better identify, verify and assess corporal components. An emerging confluence of biovisual imperatives, practices and flows are placing unique demands on embodied subjects, specifically concerning (a) the control, ownership and arrangement of personal information deriving from bodily interference, and (b) the types of performative exertions and authentication protocols that are now routinely requested and indeed expected at various visualization contact points (McGrath 2004; Andrejevic 2012). In an age of somatic magnification and scrutiny (Monahan and Wall 2007), where fleshy topographies are considered as stable sites for truth adjudication and as volatile sites for correctional modulation, the sociological imagination can help excavate several resonances attendant on the proliferation of biocapturing mechanisms and on concomitant conditions of biovisuality. As I will argue, repetitive bioexposure, as both involuntary dictate and volitional act, generates de-contextualized knowledge streams, the channeling of which can assist experts in sharpening their diagnostic definitions and honing their prognostic interventions. But it also produces curious subjectivation effects at the phenomenological level. Subjects become accustomed to exteriorizing interior confidences and revealing subjective states in the form of informatic particles (Foucault 1988). In this process, personal intimacies become public property, a situation inducing social harms and igniting insurgent possibilities. A critical consideration of these issues, specifically their interconnectedness and biopolitical significance, occurs in the paper as it focuses analytical attention on the types of subjectivity being fashioned from bodily transmissions and transitions.