The Banana Peel Project

Where there is power, there is resistance.  Is this a death sentence for resistance, an eternal guarantee for power, or something else entirely?

Attacks on the idea that power and resistance always go together seem to have come from all sides.  There are those who have attacked the histories that claim to show the ability of structures of power to subsume resistance, arguing that efforts to understand history genealogically and in the domain of discourse have failed to produce true origin stories and stuttered when it comes to discovering the facts of those stories.  There are also those who have found pessimism, nihilism, and a lack of strategic options in such narrative work.  Thankfully for those to whom resistance is constitutive of life, and disappointingly for those who insist on finding answers to oppression and ignorance in traditional political strategies, such accusations are entirely unfounded.  To see the constitutive relations between power and resistance as a death sentence for the latter is not just another way of understanding genealogical politics.  It is simply wrong.

There is a tension that needs to be identified.  This tension resounds through early 21st-century biomedical discourse and finds supports in powerful institutions, individual bodies, and everyday practices.  It is a tension that needs to be problematized, as it demands new solutions and new ways of living that will in turn produce new problems and new ways of thinking about and dealing with those problems.

This tension is the tension between the processes of individualization, personalization, and narcissism that have been growing and extending into every aspect of our lives for hundreds of years, and the technologies of self that are increasingly available to us in our everyday lives.  We are told to be ourselves, to take control of our futures, to resist power in all its guises.  At the same time, the technologies that can give us the most control over our own lives, senses, bodies, and thoughts are increasingly torn from our hands in the service of maintaining the very systems of power that we are taught to resist.

Drugs are technologies of self that have become ubiquitous in contemporary society.  They afford the ultimate in resistance, but they are at the same time products of that against which they are posed.  It is this tension that renders them problematic, and it is this tension that needs to be understood if we are to grasp the meaning of “personal technology.”