Somatechnics, Styles of Reasoning, and the Making of the Subject of Suicidology

Abstract

Suicidology calls itself and is recognised as the science of suicide and suicide prevention. Findings from suicidological research are widely acknowledged as truth and inform some of our most profound ways of knowing and experiencing suicide today in the west: suicide is the result of mental illness, it is located in the interiority of the individual, and it is a problem that must be prevented. Suicidologists make these claims by using quantitative research methods, which they propose allow them to study suicide objectively and to find its truth. This paper investigates the somatechnics of research at play in suicidology that allow the field to maintain its position of authority in both academic and public discussions of suicide. It thus analyses how suicide has come to be known in suicidology, and how these knowledges are sustained as the truth of suicide. In bringing Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to bear on suicidology, the paper identifies the ways in which suicidology puts in place narrow parameters for what can be known about suicide and how it can be known. In doing so, the paper argues that what has come to constitute neutral, evidence-based knowledge about suicide both in this field of research and in public understandings of suicide is the result of an elaborate somatechnic machinery aimed at the regulation of knowledge and at the preservation of an image of scientificity and the position of authority of the field, rather than being the truth of suicide. In doing so, the paper argues that the suicidological style of reasoning is a somatechnic that is implicated in in/trans/forming both the body of the suicidal person and that of the expert suicide researcher as particular kinds of subjects in mutually generative ways.