ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault once declared, “where there is power, there is resistance” (History of Sexuality 95). Alternatively, we could say that where there is resistance, there is power. However, this does not mean that from the point of resistance, we can easily backtrack to a single source of power. According to Foucault, power is not centrally located, but dispersed into multifaceted power-effects that operate differentially within localized sites. Thus, to understand the relationship between individuals and power, he advocates the study of local practices to determine how individuals are systemically created as particular kinds of subjects. Specifically, he identifies four “technologies” by which individuals come to understand themselves and their place in society: 1) one's relationship to the means of production, 2) language use, 3) practices of power and discipline, and 4) practices of the self (“Technologies of the Self”). Because these technologies rarely, if ever, work in isolation, they need to be studied in conjunction with one another in order to fully understand the complexity of power relations. In other words, a close analysis of the relationship between local texts (practices of power and discipline that set limitations upon individuals and the practices of self-defining and/or resisting those predetermined roles) and global texts (one's relationship to the means of production as well as one's language use), reveals that what goes by the name of resistance is often merely the adjustment of local conditions to the needs of a global system.
