The Politics of Indeterminacy and the Right to Health

Abstract

Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of ‘health’ as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. This article draws critically on literature about the implications of developments in medical biotechnologies, to argue that a positive acknowledgement of the indeterminate character of health should transform, rather than simply hinder, the quality of debate over what is to be understood and expected in connection with a right to health. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related demands that may not stem from the scarcity of material resources or technical means, but from the misplaced authority of particular voices in defining what possibilities are to be seriously envisaged. This proposition only becomes politically effective, it is argued, when ‘indeterminacy’ (and the capacity for normativity) is referred to life itself and not merely to social and moral judgements about life. Although more immediately pertinent to the concerns of relatively privileged populations, the focus on indeterminacy provides a key to generating a certain symmetry and complementarity of interest, across the privileged/underprivileged divide, in promoting health as a (human) right.

Green Subjection: The Politics of Neoliberal Urban Environmental Management

“…With the protection of the environment being universally held to be scientifically sound and morally good, the micro‐politics of environmental governmentality has gone largely unchallenged. Its operation is perhaps most evident in relation to the question of personal health, now inextricably linked to the environment and one of the most powerful rhetorical devices in contemporary society (Greco, 2004), to such a degree that ‘the imperative of health has become a signifier of a wider — civic, governmental — obligation of citizenship in a responsible community’ (Rose, 2000: 101). However, what is involved here is more than authoritative regulation; it depends on the creation of certain sensibilities and ‘commonsense’ attitudes, for which the environment has become an important collective reference for the self‐governing citizen.…”

Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices

“…Moreover, in the 1970s, when STS and feminist self-help were emerging, the stratified labor of biomedicine was gathered together as the ubiquitous term 'health care' (Greco, 2004). In the second half of the 20th century, care has become a normative biomedical deliverable, involving its own history of commodification and labor, of bedside manners and gendered emotional expression, of managed care and insurance, of the pharmaceutical management of affect, and, most crucially, of deeply unequal access.…”

Om livets kunst: en vitalistisk læsning af medicinsk humanisme

“…16: For nyere kommentarer til dette emne, se eksempelvis Zygmunt Bauman (1992a, 1992b, 1995) og Michael Fitzpatrick (2000. 17: Se Osborne (1997) for mere om hvorfor sundhedspolitik nødvendigvis må fejle -og se ydermere Greco (2004) for en diskussion heraf.…”