Comments on: Resistance, strategy, and personal technologies http://bananapeelproject.org/2009/01/14/resistance-strategy-and-personal-technologies/ Tue, 28 Sep 2010 23:54:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Marisa http://bananapeelproject.org/2009/01/14/resistance-strategy-and-personal-technologies/#comment-243 Marisa Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:25:54 +0000 http://bananapeelproject.org/2009/01/14/resistance-strategy-and-personal-technologies/#comment-243 I wonder: doesn't power ever act as a positive force in the lives of those it acts upon? Is there not benevolent power, the opposition to which is foolish? As something of a socialist, it's easy for me to imagine at least political powers that would make life better. I don't see an inherent reason why the power exercised by biomedical discourses needs to be resisted. A problem is that in the post-modern condition (whatever that is) even our own capacity to reason does not give us answers about how best to live our lives. But it can be very disquieting to live this way. Throwing out ideology and religion, we assume that any power-exercising discourses inherently require resistance. I suspect that when the discourses of power reflect our own (invisible) ideologies, we don't see them as power, but rather tools, or even freedoms. Okay, that's all I got for now. I wonder: doesn’t power ever act as a positive force in the lives of those it acts upon? Is there not benevolent power, the opposition to which is foolish? As something of a socialist, it’s easy for me to imagine at least political powers that would make life better. I don’t see an inherent reason why the power exercised by biomedical discourses needs to be resisted.

A problem is that in the post-modern condition (whatever that is) even our own capacity to reason does not give us answers about how best to live our lives. But it can be very disquieting to live this way. Throwing out ideology and religion, we assume that any power-exercising discourses inherently require resistance. I suspect that when the discourses of power reflect our own (invisible) ideologies, we don’t see them as power, but rather tools, or even freedoms.

Okay, that’s all I got for now.

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