trapped by my own politics?

I had a good meeting with temporary and departing supervisor. Her leaving-ness made it easier to be really frank today, and well, we got down to the core of things. She suggested that I 'out' my politics within this project. She talked about how other people at the centre are committed to engaging with public health, and are motivated, politically, to improve health. She suggested that maybe for me it's less about this (correct) and that my politics lie elsewhere (correct again).

I guess I've held my cards to my chest on this one. It's not really appropriate, here, at my centre, to say that health is a fallacy, that health promotion is redundant, that people are going to engage in 'risk' practices no matter what. I find myself trapped in an impasse, wedged between post-structural and health promotion discourses. Straddling the two, but perhaps committed to neither on account of their incompatibility.

Health promotion believes in fairness, justice, equality, and correcting situations where these ideals do not occur, doing so through intrusion into people's lives, values, and bodily practices. I do not. But I don't begrudge others who believe in these things, particularly if these beliefs achieve some sense of social justice, or more so, a greater desire for social justice. In my view, such a thing is impossible, but worth striving for. Yet, convinced of its impossibility, I can't be the one striving for it. I want to, but cannot.

What I feel more impassioned about is the (unproductive?) destruction that seems to be formed by health surveillance, education, promotion and monitoring. I worry what this does to our experiences of bodies, generating an implicit understanding that bodies are some sort of productive systems through which the nation, the state, the community is served, regenerated, fixed. Bodies as mechanisms in a force that serves (and regenerates) the function of a capitalist regime. Oh my. I typically shy away from the c word - what's happening to me? It's strange, but I guess I have to go there (for now, perhaps I'll recoil tomorrow) to say it, simmer it, see where it takes me in my desire to articulate my political position.

But I realise that this outburst (the c word!) puts me at another impasse. Am I suggesting a need to return to a place where bodies were more... 'real'? I don't think so. Bodies aren't real, in the sense that nothing is. Bodies are always fragmentary, slipping in and out of consciousness. To argue for bodies as materially purposeful seems flawed, in this respect. I guess that bodies as fragmentary is the one thing I can say and believe. Bodies as fragmentary, incoherent, sensual, and affective. So maybe this is my starting point?

I guess it comes back to the experiment that I've always envisioned my project to be. I'm saying "I'm not so sure about this and this. What happens if we consider it in these terms?" An experimental gesture that hopefully engages with an ever-rolling discourse around health and bodies. But I fear it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy (isn't it always?) in which my political beliefs win out in the end. Well, the final chapter was probably drafted before I started, otherwise I may not have started. Because such a project (I believe) is unsustainable without some element of knowing what you want to say, how you want to say it, and how it feels (ie. self-validating) to say it.

Because isn't all writing, work, and adventure about self-production - inscribing ourselves into this world? And if I think this is what I'm doing (I pretty much do) then why here, now, in the form of a PhD? What the fuck was I thinking?