At least, if that means anything any more. If everything’s political, nothing is.
Except that’s wrong. “Politics” is not a uniform field. It is a set of always uneven relations, unable to be reduced to a mere adjective. Something can not be “more” or “less” political, just as something can not be “more” or “less” real, just as something can not be “more” or “less” material. So instead what we have is not politics, but power. This much is clear.
So I’m not out to talk about how politics “works,” how power “produces” this or “articulates” that, or how technologies become “politicized.” It is not that we should talk about the “how of power” but that we should talk about the heterogeneous effects of power. We must ground grounded theory–specifically and cartographically and improvisationally (Clark 2003; Deleuze 1988).
So when we’ve got a tremendous diversity of heterogeneous and spatiotemporally fragmented subjectivities to explain, they must be examined both in their particular expression and in the relations of power which they articulate. In other words, we must be psychonauts, intimately grasping what it is to be a particular subject (grokking, to be reminded of a word that is both lost and wonderful). And we must at the same time be cartographers, tracing associations between these specific effects of power. These associations can be people, places, or things, so we must also be careful and stay light on our feet (Latour, 2005). Otherwise we could lose track of what we’re watching.
So these very personal technologies–drugs, molecular prosthetics–are effects as well as relations of power, just like the bodies they assist, augment, or destroy. Each is distinct, while they all share the capacity to faciliate the active incorporation of selves into much larger “political” (specific, relational, improvisational) spaces. The distinction between “legal” and “illicit” drugs (i.e., criminalization, legalization, decriminalization, correction, rehabilitation), the mediated images that beseech us to transform ourselves in the service of self-fulfillment (i.e., “Be Happy Again”), the incontrovertibly disproportionate degree of addiction and drug abuse among the “economically underprivileged” (i.e., the scum of the earth), and the ways in which cognitive prostheses can either cooperate or resist (i.e., opium use in the 1840s vs. 2000s) are all uneven relations of power that reveal the diversity of the effects of biopower.
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