A particular technology is always a map, a representation, a model of the power relationships of which it is a part.
Technologies are simultaneously material and ideal, practical and discursive, structural and phenomenological. Technologies are at once the tools with which people do things and the context in which things are done.
Technology does not merely occupy a central space in cultural narratives; it is the space in which all the action takes place—that is, it is the space where politics is played out. Yet it also remains a tool, a prosthesis that enables some actions while preventing others. It is a map, a space that always already contains within it the tools necessary for navigating it.
Medical, psychiatric, and networking technologies are making the dividing line between bodies and communities harder and harder to discern. For now, there is no easy way to move back and forth between structure and praxis, between communities and selves. But if certain cultural narratives are any indication, it seems that there are ways to tell stories about technology that do not rely on binaries. In these stories, as objectivity gives way to diverse and shifting subjectivities, abstraction gives way to concrete corporeality.
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