On social plasticity: the transformative power of pharmaceuticals on health, nature and identity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes a theoretical framework on the role of pharmaceuticals in transforming perspectives and shaping contemporary subjectivities. It outlines the significant role drugs play in three fundamental processes of social transformation in Western societies: medicalisation, molecularisation and biosocialisation. Indeed, drugs can be envisaged as major devices of a pharmaceutical regime, which is more akin to the notion of dispositif, as used by Foucault, than to the sole result of high-level scheming by powerful economic interests, a notion which informs a significant share of the literature. Medications serve as a key vector of the transformation of perspective (or gaze) that characterises medicalisation, molecularisation and biosocialisation, by shifting our view on health, nature and identity from a categorical to a dimensional framework. Hence, central to this thesis is that the same underlying mechanism is at work. Indeed, in all three processes there is an evolving polarity between two antinomic categories, the positions of which are constantly being redefined by the various uses of drugs. Due to their concreteness, the fluidity of their use and the plasticity of the identities they authorise, drugs colonise all areas of contemporary social experiences, far beyond the medical sphere. A video abstract of this article can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djIBY7DHKW4&feature=youtu.be.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it