The genealogy of the AD /HD subject: The culture of self -control

Critical scholarship on AD/HD has largely ignored the recent and massive increase in AD/HD diagnosis and treatment, preferring instead to focus on its control effects at the level of the individual child. Where this subject is addressed in critical literature, it is usually cast in the terms of "over-prescription," or otherwise reduced to the power elite's supposed interest in drugging more and more children as a control technique. In contrast to these critical theories, this work means to explore a complicated relationship between subjectivication and the positivities upon which knowledge of subjects is founded, in order to explain the recent proliferation of the AD/HD-type as emerging from radically new positivities of the subject and new techniques of (self) control. Power, in the case of AD/HD, does not come from the "top-down," but works through complicated relations of care, knowledge, medicine, and identity. Specifically, this work locates the AD/HD phenomenon as rooted in emergent positivities of the developmental child---positivities that reflect the discourse on homo economicus as opposed to homo criminalis and the discourse on "deviancy"---along side techniques and possibilities of self identification. The adoption of the AD/HD identity is a ritualized process by which one becomes the kind of person that positively constructs the self in alignment with the truths and norms implied by homo economicus . One adopts the AD/HD identity not just to accrue institutional benefits, but to become the kind of person that does things to accrue benefits.