This article is a revised version of a talk given in lieu of the Ph.D. dissertation: "Huntington´s Disease in Everyday Life. Knowledge, Ignorance and Genetic Risk". The dissertation evolves around the analysis of modern living with risk for a late onset genetic disorder. Here, three aspects of everyday lives faced with Huntington´s Disease (HD) are discussed. First, HD is one aspect of everyday living along with a variety of other aspects. The importance of risk is analysed as personal and changing (...) in changing circumstances. Second, genetic knowledge and technology are not solid universals, but situated and changing, and of varying importance in lives at risk. Last, the ethical rationalities of everyday living, research and clinical practice concerned with a hereditary condition are discussed as complex and contradictory in and across structures of social practice. (shrink)

The paper encircles the subjectivity of drug taking as one form of contemporary practice in which fundamental theoretical issues are dealt with. In particular, following Mariana Valverde's genealogy of alcohol regulation (Valverde, 1998), the question of the free will, and the paradox of the simultaneous being and non-being of the autonomous subject, are viewed as present in various approaches to drugs. The current neo-pragmatist wave substitutes low-key practical notions of habits for a dichotomy of free will or determinism. The concept (...) of objectification promises to overcome that dichotomy by externalizing it; in terms of this concept, we can distinguish the abstract-imagined 'fix' from a genuinely transforming realization, and suggest that ours is the age of the fix, of instrumental commodities that change us in ways we do not intend. But, it is claimed, an inescapable issue of the self-dissolution of the subject remains; perhaps in the definitive shape of a suicide, or in the minor shapes of fixes such as a tactics of feigned surrender, New Age Higher Powers, or imagined communities. Determined to realize the idea of a benevolent surrender of the subject, the paper ends in an attempt to contribute to the coming to an understanding of herself and with herself of a person who finds herself at the troublesome intersection of Narcotics Anonymous and a social work development network of Copenhagen City called Wild Learning. (shrink)

The article identifies a problem in socio-cultural-historical activity theory (SCHAT) with ignoring how hope and power constitute the theory itself, and suggests that this is why the tradition faces a bad choice between functionalist or utopianist reductions of its own social relevance. Currently, remedies for this kind of (perhaps shammed) innocence can be found in Foucauldian and Latourian approaches to knowledge. However, since these appear to presuppose the (often feigned) cynicism of a purely negative standpoint that fits all too smoothly (...) into the neoliberal management it describes, this presents us with an impossible choice or oscillation at another level. To get beyond it, we need the frankly self-reflected standpoint of ideology critique and the articulation of ‘concrete utopia’, i.e. real possibilities for social transformation. The approach is then realized and exemplified as part of an emergent practice research in the field of drug treatment. The field is broadly described as moving toward certain kinds of recognition of users’ standards, but also as filled with paradoxes that allow us to intervene with theory. One of these (sets of) paradoxes concerns the relations between state and civil (bourgeois) society that are played out in drug treatment. Contrary to the doxa of New Public Management, the (welfare) state’s normative power has not dissolved, only hides from itself. An immanent critique of practices and ideas in the field leads to the suggestion that its forms of recognition imply both submission of users, and the creation of positive standards and collectives. To intervene in this set of issues, we must expand the SCHAT reading of its own Hegelian-Marxist legacy, against the dominant liberal and scientistic trend, to engage with theories of recognition. A contemporary, participatory concept of recognition is sketched, which seeks to sublate (include and supersede) submission into the building of the generalizing ethics of a collective. (shrink)