The Banana Peel Project

The commodification of personality; personhood; identity; self:::

How do we come to know ourselves through personal technologies? Objectification. Discourse is always material; what discourses do individuals participate in, internalize? Swirling, multifaceted, contradictory cultural meanings congeal into narratives that are not necessarily coherent; technologies fragment narratives and unify them. The self is the negotiation, the movement between. Generalized subjectivities are power structures, ubiquitous, incomplete, and material. The inside of neurosis, the outside of psychosis. When people speak, they speak the language of cultural stereotypes, assumptions, genres, tropes. “That’s me!”

Economies, markets: the circulation of materiality:::

Embeddedness, networks, action and structure. Markets are collective improvisations, and spaces. Alienation, commodification, objectification. Production, distribution and circulation, exchange, consumption of identity. Technology, the space where all the action takes place, the space where politics is played out, politics itself. Technology structures relations, technology is relations. Consistency and dynamism, structure and agency, script and improvisation, community and identity. Mediation, of course.

Technology disciplines, but inconsistently and formlessly:::

Inconsistent information, improvised networks. Rational movement through irrational space. Technology, order, and organized chaos. Scarcity, identity is an unlimited resource. Identity, a materialized orientation. Identity, an anti-ideal. Technology productive of identity, the commodity, alienated subjectivity. Actors, calculating agencies, agency, the producers and consumers, embodied subjectivity.

Agent negotiates purchase of identity.
Agent becomes a new orientation, narrative, situation.
Agent negotiates purchase of identity.

Colliding subjectivities?

(Image credit: Current.com)