Page Against The (Culture) Machine

https://louisecharente.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/from-critical-theory-to-postmodernism-foucault-horkheimer-and-adorno/

 "This is the totalitarian state, (not yet named as such) that they saw growing around them, especially in fascism. But not only in fascism. In the enlightenment even the liberal democracies saw coercion at the core of the political regimes. One of the things that Horkheimer and, and Adorno argue in the introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment is that, there is no alternative to enlightenment that people in modernity can imagine in respectable terms. All forms of knowledge are pulled into the enlightenment mould and are pressured to conform to the scientific or technological model of understanding. There is no alternative to it. The technological and scientific models of understanding will debunk religion, political pieties and, of course, magic. It wants to absorb everything within its paradigm. For Horkheimer and Adorno that’s what makes it a myth – that it wants to provide an explanation for every form of cognition. There’s nothing outside the enlightenment."

“Regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped; it is the new form of blindness which supersedes that of vanquished myth.”

With this quote they were trying to remind us that there are forms of art that we might open our ears and eyes to, but there were great forces in social praxis and social coercion and the homogenization of society that limit what we can hear and take pleasure from, limit what we can see and consider as art.

Michel Foucault

MICHEL FOUCAULT (PHOTO CREDIT: WIKIPEDIA)

Foucault  was an historian, a philosopher, a writer on art and literature, an activist and a bit of a trickster in some ways as well. He was a leader of French Postmodernism insofar as he was rigorously antifoundational. He, didn’t want to find the ‘really real’, nor a total dialectic. He wanted to tell the story of progress in such a way that we would see how what we thought of as progress was actually a form of greater social control and homogenization. He told that story not because he thought it had objective truth but because he thought that alternative accounts of how we came to be who we are might actually open up possibilities for us to change who we would be in the future.

He delighted in showing how the pursuit of anti-conformity  often lead to more conformity because you concretize or make too stable some alternatives, you make them into identity markers that then become their own forces of conformity. For example Foucault in his History of Sexuality wanted to show how the fluidity of sexuality gets increasingly controlled over time, especially in the modern period. Especially when people think they’re pursuing sexual freedom, they create new categories for how you should pursue sexual freedom, new forms of identity to which you should conform even if that identity is outside of the main stream. This is Foucault’s great subject. How we, in a way, police ourselves.

http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.power.en.html

The Subject and Power

Foucault, Michel. "The Subject and Power." In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, pp. 208-226. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Original Publication: Le sujet et le pouvoir (Gallimard, D&E Vol.4 1982)

"the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much "such or such" an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power. This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word "subject": subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. "

"This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead, I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution."

"What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of."

http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/

"Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63). Instead it is a kind of ‘metapower’ or ‘regime of truth’ that pervades society, and which is in constant flux and negotiation. Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’"

"Foucault is one of the few writers on power who recognise that power is not just a negative, coercive or repressive thing that forces us to do things against our wishes, but can also be a necessary, productive and positive force in society (Gaventa 2003: 2)"

"A key point about Foucault’s approach to power is that it transcends politics and sees power as an everyday, socialised and embodied phenomenon. This is why state-centric power struggles, including revolutions, do not always lead to change in the social order. For some, Foucault’s concept of power is so elusive and removed from agency or structure that there seems to be little scope for practical action. But he has been hugely influential in pointing to the ways that norms can be so embedded as to be beyond our perception – causing us to discipline ourselves without any wilful coercion from others."