the Female Body GOVERNING

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lori reed
a way as to remain inapprehensible. Yet, in an increasingly mobile
and networked social space, the mobilization of the psy-disciplines
toward individual self-regulation and self-modulation functions as a
traveling mode of discipline that exceeds confinement—what Deleuze
(1992) terms as a move from discipline as confinement to the control
society wherein regulation is transformed to matters of self-modulation,
and to what Grossberg (1992) in another context describes as “mobile
discipinarity.”
Yet, and relatedly, Stone (1996) posits that the imperative exists that
a given body carries “within” it one socially articulated and intelligible
(and regulatable) self that is the true site of agency. Significantly,
this articulation of body and self—and not simply the body on its
own—privileges the body as the site of “political authentication and
political action” (p. 91). Toward this end, the “fiduciary subject is fixed
and stabilized within a grid of coordinates that implicates virtual location
technologies—making the boundaries between the jurisdictions
of the physical and those of the symbolic extremely permeable—by
techniques such as psychological testing” (p. 91). Stone’s notion of a
warranting technology is useful here: The practice of warranting refers
to the implied link between the virtual body and the convergence of
discourses that constitute the body in physical space—ensuring that a
physical human body is involved in an interaction (p. 87).
By means of warranting, this discursive entity is tied to an association
with a particular physical body, and the two together, the physical and
the discursive, constitute the socially apprehensible citizen. Within
a political framework, the discursive entity—including the meaning
associated with the physical body—is produced by means of texts, such
as legal, medical, and psychological description. (p. 90)
If a warranting technology functions as an apparatus toward the
(dis)articulation of virtual and physical bodies, the mobilization of
Internet addiction through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) functions also as a “location technology” (p. 90). The
DSM functions as an apparatus of location in that:
in the process of defi ning a psychological disorder it simultaneously
produces, organizes, and legitimizes a discursive space. . . . The
inhabitant proper to this space is the virtual entity of psychological
testing, census taking, legal documentation, telephone numbers,
street addresses—in brief, a collection of virtual elements that, taken
together, for a materialized discursivity of their own . . . the fi duciary