By Sinead Murphy at Brownstone dot org.

It has been reported that 'healthy life expectancy' in the UK has fallen during the past decade.

Disparity between the 'healthy life expectancy' of those in different regions of the UK has been described. A 20-year gap between the 'healthy life expectancy' of those in Richmond and the 'healthy life expectancy' of those in Blackpool has been alleged.

The concept of 'healthy life expectancy' has been bandied about as if we have used it always. Its precursor, 'healthy lifestyle,' is already ubiquitous. Its successor, surely to be 'healthy lifespan.'

But the concept of 'healthy life-anything' should be unusable. It should say nothing. Like 'unmarried bachelor.' Or 'free gift.' Or 'organic food.'

What is health but life? The uninterrupted progression of life. Immersion in the projects of life. Involvement with life. Obliviousness to anything but life.

There is no 'healthy life.' There is only life.

We say that we fall ill. But if illness is a fall it is only because health is getting-on-with-life, folded into our purposeful expenditures of energy and attention, taken for granted.

Only illness is salient. Only illness is a thing.

Now that health is a thing – the biggest thing of all – it is like illness.

We submit samples to 'Our NHS' or download lists of 'Keto' foods or exchange cigarettes for 'vapes' or sign up to a marathon training programme – the details do not matter at all. What matters is that the obliviousness to health that is essential to health is gone.

There is now no real difference between health and illness. There is only the spectacle of difference between them and the veneer of sentiment with which it plays out.

The 'healthy' hordes at Park Run are all but indistinguishable from the 'ill' pileup in nearby cancer wards: misshapen bodies strapped to measurement devices of one kind or another, ailing from one punishing regime or another, according to one strand of expertise or another. Those 'battling illness' jostle alongside those in 'full health,' raising awareness or raising funds. Even the meds are shared; Park Run is sponsored by a pain-relief gel.

Health and illness comprise now the same interactions, the same losses, the same wins, the same monitorings by the same devices and the same institutions.

Through these same routines are refracted the mechanisms of our control: the rations and rewards, the data collections, the consumer opportunities, the recalibrations of diet, exercise, sleep. Ever-refreshed solutions to problems manufactured by discourse and by drugs.

Health and illness are no longer alternatives. They are not even two ends of a spectrum. They are only flavours of the same submission: to unmitigated surveillance, to inhuman engineering, to corporate concepts and products, to displaced experiences that we record and replay so as to have them and that pass for us as life.

Foucault detailed the execution in 1757 of Damiens the regicide. Public, bloody in the sublime, it exemplifies a brand of rule over people that was essentially spectacular, inscribed with excess on the few so as to produce subjection in the many.

Death was the currency of this brand of rule – imposed with artistry and eclat, or suspended theatrically at the final hour. As for life, it could go on as it would beneath the shock and awe.

Now there is a different arrangement of spectacle and power.

The might of the king inhered in the great show of his might; to rule, he must appear more than human, with infinite reach and absolute will. Our subjection relies on a great show of everything but might.

Nothing that is shown to us is what is done to us. Nothing that is done to us is what is shown to us. Display is, for us, without gesture. Gesture, for us, without display.

The spectacle of our times – the tremendous spectacle of 'health' – does not amplify the power that operates on us but distracts us from it. It does not make us see more force than is humanly possible but blocks us from seeing an...