Syndromic observation. Life’s management in the 21st century

Abstract

The present work is an extract-summary of the doctoral thesis I defended last September entitled Security and Surveillance. Management of Life in the 21st Century, framed in a theoretical framework that mixes the Social Studies of Science and Technology, the Theory of the Actor-Network and other concepts from philosophy, anthropology and sociology. From a qualitative methodology, using a case study focused on the semiotic-material analysis of biosecurity and biomonitoring in the European Union, I offer a review of the concept of biopolitics indicating its obsolescence and its insufficiency to take account for the events that have occurred since the first years of the 21st century. For this reason, in this article I compile the central concept of the thesis: syndromic observation, exposing both the field where it originates and the reasons which led me to coin it as a better answer than biopolitics as a tool to analyze how life is managed contemporarily.