Manufacturing biocitizens: The quantification of bodies as a method for incorporating a new ethics

The quantification of bodies serves an ambivalent purpose. On the one hand, it includes individuals in a new biopolitical norm, making them co-producers of the new biomedicine’s arrangements; on the other, it urges them to explore the deepest natural norms, making them protagonists in the production of what Donna Haraway (2003) called naturecultures. By recording, monitoring, and supplying large amounts of biometric data, individuals willl gradually be included in the process of incorporating a new ethos, characterized by locating them in a new level of citizenship in which the techniques of the self are overlapped by the technologies of corporeality. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the paths of social and individual transformations that have in the quantification of bodies its fundamental extracting method of the raw materials used to build an imagined future in which individuals are fully enlightened and informed and systems are fully efficient.