Movement an regimes of vitality. New organization of life in medicine

Abstract

This paper puts forward that the massive use of protocols in biomedicine has created a new kind of materiality for pathology. This is very well depicted by the notion of ‘potential object’ coined by A.N.Whitehead. Potential objects are a complete and heterogeneous ordering of life. We will call to these orderings, resulting from the shaping of such potential objects, regimes of vitality. They establish different scales of life, actors and the relation between them in biomedical activity. Moreover, they define the temporality in the medical processes, the correct articulation between normality and abnormality and, finally, they produce a set of motility conditions for individuals. Based on a research about protocols on cancer, telecare and epidemics we will pose that movement is inseparable from the “truth” that always appears in the regimes of vitality. In this sense, we will also pose that biomedicine has remove our concern about movement from the political and individual sphere and has put it in the sphere of health and normativity of science. In a nutshell, biomedicine has transformed mobility into correct-and-healthy-movement.