Bio-civics

Biological civics suggests that education must include the understanding of biotechnologies of the self and of biopower, of the biological citizen in relation to the environment. The potentials of autonomy that biological citizenship supposedly offers, as its promoters claim, can only be realized if biological citizenship is complemented with biological civics. This is a relatively new aspect of the debate, which is gradually made explicit in part by the physical activity movement (John Ratey), the multiple intelligence movement (Howard Gardner) or mental health pluralism (S. Nassir Ghaemi). Bio civics is at the centre of future discourse on biological citizenship, biopower and governmentality.
Civics
Civics suggests that citizenship is attained by education and maturation and not bestowed by birth. With the rights of a citizen come responsibilities, which must be understood and accepted and which include conceptions of justice, government and ethics. Without civics, the concept of citizenship is passive to the point of emptiness.
The Bio-civics debate
The bio-civics debate is a discourse that spans various disciplines and subjects. According to sociologist Alexander Stingl, who coined the term biocivics in an essay titled "The ADHD-regime and neurochemical selves in a whole system perspective", it aims at the reconciliation of two levels of Lebensfuehrung (a term used prominently in the work of Max Weber to describe the way life can and should be lead) or active and voluntary control of one's life-course: bios and ethos, or the autonomous control over the development of one's biological organism and the autonomous decisions in regard to one's moral and social values. Following Michel Foucault, Stingl argues that this can be achieved by creating an attitude of critical participation in the moral and knowledge economies in modern societies, as discussed by Paul Rabinow, Nikolas Rose, Susan Pickering and others, and summarized under Focuault's concepts of governmentality, biopolitics, and biopower, and Focuault's understanding of enlightenment, critique and parrhesia. Stingl makes the case that the key to creating bio-civics as a positive aspect of our societies lies in reforming the system of education, from kindergarten to university. The future of higher education and the humanities and liberal arts in particular, he says, lies in producing active information brokers who have learned tools to facilitate a translation and mediation between expert discourses in science, legislators and the concerned public. In his perspective, the trend towards hyperspecialization has only produced experts but not mediators. The bio-civics debate, which is Stingl's name for the debate that arose implicitly between various disciplines and scholars, because of this apparent lack of mediation and translation on the one hand, and on the other hand the debate is a result of several unresolved conceptual issues, left over from several glosses and theory-political exclusions in the history of Western life sciences from 1800 to 1950. As a result, modern health discourses are stuck between a physical reductionist perspective, including the current school of "operational diagnostics", and a wild bunch of "alternative medicine"-visions. Neither satisfies the necessary complementary perspective that allows for an integration of diagnostic-therapeutic practices and individual life-course. The resolution of the bio-civics debate will eventually lead to the complementary re-integration of social/political, medical/scientific and environmental perspectives in the discourse of the general public. Enlightenment, Stingl argues with Kant, will not become a reality but in one form or the other a regulative ideal in modern society.
Bibliography
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