Despite differences in focus and methodology, all approaches strive to identify the biogenetic predicates of human conduct and, especially, deviant conduct. For critics, these approaches can operate as forms of biosovereignty, or disciplinarity, used against neurologically and/or genetically ‘deficient’ and/or dangerous others. Accordingly, although Castel (1991) viewed the developments of the late twentieth century as affecting a move away from concern with ‘dangerous’ individuals toward a decentralization of risk (projected on the population and operationalized in terms of risky behavior), I argue that to varying degrees pharmacology, behavioral genetics, and cognitive neuroscience have the potential to reinscribe aspects of the nineteenth-century degeneracy discourses while offering private and state authorities new means of exercising power and control over suspect populations. My position stands in contrast to more optimistic accounts offered by some governmentality scholarship.
Majia Holmer Nadesan Governmentality, Biopower, and Everday Life pg. 163