Swirling Questions, lingering doubts.
The charachter of power - or opression - needs to shape how we respond to politics. Even the nature of the entity we direct ourselves against needs to be in question - do we concern ourselves with 'power,' or rather 'violence' or rather 'oppression'? Each implies a system of organization, each a strategy for change. Oppression contains within it a model of ideal life, a proper wholy lived life, a subject that has no objective basis. At the same time we posit this free person within the oppressed, we decry that naturalization of opressive tendancies that mask themselves as the 'only way' 'human nature' or 'inevitable.' A false consciousness neccesarily drives the purpetuation of social crimes, and a similarly arbitrary consciousness animates our thoughts on liberation.
No doubt we encounter wrongs, but the nature of those wrongs eludes us. At the same time, the struggle to define those wrongs itself is striated with power. The process of identifying wrongs and focusing change is the cornerstone of politics - how we know problems shapes how we change. The terribly academic process of deconstruction is neccesary to match the strategies of power that construct their own schema for thinking about change, but at the same time, it invests authority in those people who already have the time for abstract thought. It puts the burden of defining change in the hands of folks with relative privilege.
There's always a point at which our understanding of opression, and what needs to change, disappears into an individual. No subject of power remains so coherent as to unequivocobly demand a single response; our understanding of change neccesarily requires the addition of judgement that arrises out of ourselves. The void stares back. At this point, some notion of universal values, or the master-narrative of the political interjects and asserts a basis for change. "Ah, but it is capital, all along!"
When the master-narrative re-emerges, we then face the structures of power, and our means of confronting them. The development of scale in political systems occurs to take advantage of divisions of labor, so that the thinkers don't have to do their own violence, and so those committing violence don't have to think.
The charachter of power - or opression - needs to shape how we respond to politics. Even the nature of the entity we direct ourselves against needs to be in question - do we concern ourselves with 'power,' or rather 'violence' or rather 'oppression'? Each implies a system of organization, each a strategy for change. Oppression contains within it a model of ideal life, a proper wholy lived life, a subject that has no objective basis. At the same time we posit this free person within the oppressed, we decry that naturalization of opressive tendancies that mask themselves as the 'only way' 'human nature' or 'inevitable.' A false consciousness neccesarily drives the purpetuation of social crimes, and a similarly arbitrary consciousness animates our thoughts on liberation.
No doubt we encounter wrongs, but the nature of those wrongs eludes us. At the same time, the struggle to define those wrongs itself is striated with power. The process of identifying wrongs and focusing change is the cornerstone of politics - how we know problems shapes how we change. The terribly academic process of deconstruction is neccesary to match the strategies of power that construct their own schema for thinking about change, but at the same time, it invests authority in those people who already have the time for abstract thought. It puts the burden of defining change in the hands of folks with relative privilege.
There's always a point at which our understanding of opression, and what needs to change, disappears into an individual. No subject of power remains so coherent as to unequivocobly demand a single response; our understanding of change neccesarily requires the addition of judgement that arrises out of ourselves. The void stares back. At this point, some notion of universal values, or the master-narrative of the political interjects and asserts a basis for change. "Ah, but it is capital, all along!"
When the master-narrative re-emerges, we then face the structures of power, and our means of confronting them. The development of scale in political systems occurs to take advantage of divisions of labor, so that the thinkers don't have to do their own violence, and so those committing violence don't have to think.
posted by Duncan at 9:19 AM
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