Ubiquitous Digital Devices and Health: Reflections on Foucault’s Notion of the ‘Clinic’

Abstract

This paper examines the role of digital technologies in health surveillance practices by revisiting the arguments made by the French philosopher Michel Foucault regarding the social role of ‘the clinic’ and its counterpart, the ‘medical gaze’. Many references to Foucault in digital health studies focus on the surveillance theory first described in Discipline and Punish. This paper argues, however, that it is also important to consider Foucault’s older, pre-panoptic work on the relationship between forms of knowledge and the spatial reorganization of the hospital field. Rather than asking traditional questions regarding how new technologies increase surveillance practices and extend the medical gaze, it reverses the perspective and questions how changing structures for gazing (surveillance) also change our perspective of what and where the clinic is, as well as what purpose it serves. This, in turn, leads to questions regarding how ‘the patient’ is becoming redefined and how social relationships between the public and the medical field are changing, including shifts in how non-medically trained individuals locate health/medical expertise within the information landscape, assess this expertise and transform it into health knowledge of their own. The paper approaches these not as practical questions to be answered empirically, but as theoretical puzzles that should be considered in current scholarship on the relationship between digital technologies and health.