the Female Body GOVERNING

Regulation through Postfeminist Pharmacy 119
Normalizing discourses that operate in the shadow of (social) death
can be characterized as “discourses of the interior.” In the context of the
emergence of notions of social and political deviance and abnormality,
Gordon (1991) describes the conduct of conduct as the “postulation of
an interior domain of mental norms [that] parallels and presupposes
[the] promotion of an alert public sensorium of civil vigilance” (p. 37). 3
The “conduct of conduct,” in other words, operates at the level of an
interior—a subject, a psyche, an unconscious. Furthermore, the decentralization
of state power through the interiorization of self-discipline by
means of an ensemble of agencies, practices, and discourses (inclusive
of vocabularies) is, in this sense, why Foucault characterized governmentality
as a type of rationality. 4 (Although Foucault [1991b] did prefer
“an analysis of . . . discourses in the dimension of their exteriority,” he
never argued that interiors—subjects, psyches, contents—did not exist;
indeed, they must exist or governmental rationality would have never
emerged [see Foucault, 1991b; and on the subject as a “fold,” Deleuze,
1988, pp. 94-123]). Furthermore, although government rationality,
and by extension any governing apparatus, is autonomous, it is an
autonomy that must nevertheless become “internalized,” or enfolded, to
use Deleuze’s metaphor, in order to regulate. Analogously, governmental
apparatuses articulate populations to discursively emergent problems
that are internalized in the process of self-discipline.
In this “folded-in” sense we turn to the discursive strategies of the
pharmaceutical industry, which at the most abstract level is part of a
diffuse transnational apparatus of medicalization that constructs and
identifi es diseases and provides for their remedy. The discursive strategy
of this apparatus, then, calls diseased populations into being and supplies
a means of self-surveillance and self-regulation principally by means of
pharmaceutical products. Although, to be sure, the health-care apparatus
works to sustain the life of a population (that is, works to prevent death),
one discourse of that interior seems to be increasingly prominent: psychological
health. Increasingly, discourses regarding mood have articulated
everything from allergy suffering to diabetic symptoms to a diseased
psychic existence; returning to the norm, averting (social) death, not only
requires physical but also psychical standardization.
Like all governmental apparatuses, the health industry exists to
administer and promote life and to maximize profi t while doing so;
however, in this age of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and
the rising cost of prescription drugs, undeniably the practical logic
animating its policies, practices, tactics, techniques, and rhetorics is
fundamentally economic. Indeed, precisely this strange articulation of
the promotion of the security and welfare of multiple populations and