Over the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, human beings came to understand themselves as inhabited by a deep interior psychological space, and to evaluate themselves and act upon themselves in terms of this belief (Rose 1989). But over the past half century, that deep space has begun to flatten out, to be displaced by a direct mapping of personhood, and its ills, upon the body or brain, which then becomes the principle target for ethical work. In the twentieth century, we came to ground our ethical practices in an understanding of ourselves as creatures inhabited by an inner world, the font of all our desires and the place where we might discover the secret source of all our troubles. But these relations to ourselves are being transformed in the new games of truth that we are caught up in. New sciences of brain and behaviour forge direct links between what we do – how we conduct ourselves – and what we are.
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Pg 26
