the Female Body GOVERNING

Productive Bodies 151
is often extended beyond objective conditions to include the inability
to manipulate or control fully the amorphous condition in which the
worker is required to survive. The depressed takes on as his or her own
fault the mutable, unstable status of his or her own subjectivity. This
subjectivity, as has been argued, is mirrored in the model of capitalist
organization of postindustrial labor. Both the environment of work,
and the essential condition of the subject within it, lack stability and are
defined by their fluidity, mutability, and essential lack of ground. While
this condition of subjectivity and work is dominant today, the depressed
blames the self for his or her lack of ground or stability in all areas of
life. Therefore, the example in the DSM-IV is already dated because
it suggests a concrete objective relation as the site for self-blame. This
would assume that if one did get the sales or attain the goal than one
would not be depressed. Today, the pervasive form of depression can
be understood as literally objectless. The only stability the depressed
person has is the internalization of the unstable relations in which he
or she lives. 13 This condition allows for a particularly intense form of
self-governance; whereas the depressed is diagnosed as “sick” he is,
nevertheless, because of the self-blame for his own instability, arguably,
the most willing and able worker in this economy.
Conclusion
Antidepressants in the age of a feminized labor force produce a feminine
subjectivity that is productive for capital. The depressed subject is
still directed toward the self—today by mass-mediated institutions—but
the remedy that the self is directed toward is that offered by psychotropic
pharmaceuticals. The blame for depression still lies within the
individual. There is no external object to blame and because this
blame is directed toward the self, it becomes a form of self-resentment,
requiring the individual to seek his own treatment and to “overcome”
himself; literally, to become someone else at the level of one’s affective
being. The shift to biopower produces a different form of governance
that works through the body to alter its biological functions to produce
the affects that correspond to the qualifications necessary for work.
Antidepressants assist in the production and performance of affective
qualities that are necessary for today’s model worker, suggesting that
depression can be productive, and perhaps necessary, within contemporary
models of work.
The relation between depression and work continues to intensify. In
a disciplinary society, the depressed were encouraged to seek refuge