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31 Jul 16
eric2558The Noam Chomsky Website.Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault
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The definition of disease and of the insane, and the classification of the insane has been made in such a way as to exclude from our society a certain number of people. If our society characterised itself as insane, it would exclude itself. It pretends to do so for reasons of internal reform. Nobody is more conservative than those people who tell you that the modern world is afflicted by nervous anxiety or schizophrenia. It is in fact a cunning way of excluding certain people or certain patterns of behaviour.
So I don't think that one can, except as a metaphor or a game, validly say that our society is schizophrenic or paranoid, unless one gives these words a non-psychiatric meaning. But if you were to push me to an extreme, I would say that our society has been afflicted by a disease, a very curious, a very paradoxical disease, for which we haven't yet found a name; and this mental disease has a very curious symptom, which is that the symptom itself brought the mental disease into being. There you have it. -
Yes, I think you are right, and that is one of the reasons why I kept hedging on that issue and saying I'm very sceptical about the whole idea, because I think the notion of a proletariat, if we want to use it, has to be given a new interpretation fitting to our present social conditions. Really, I'd even like to drop the word, since it's so loaded with specific historical connotations, and think instead of the people who do the productive work of the society, manual and intellectual work. I think those people should be in a position to organise the conditions of their work, and to determine the ends of their work and the uses to which it's put; and, because of my concept of human nature, I really think of that as partially including everyone. Because I think that any human being who is not physically or mentally deformed-and here I again must disagree with Monsieur Foucault and express my belief that the concept of mental illness probably does have an absolute character, to some extent at least-is not only capable of, but is insistent upon doing productive, creative work, if given the opportunity to do so.
I've never seen a child who didn't want to build something out of blocks, or learn something new, or try the next task. And the only reason why adults aren't like that is, I suppose, that they have been sent to school and other oppressive institutions, which have driven that out of them.
Now if that's the case, then the proletariat, or whatever you want to call it, can really be universal, that is, it can be all those human beings who are impelled by what I believe to be the fundamental human need to be yourself, which means to be creative, to be exploratory, to be inquisitive. . . -
It is not true in our given society that all people are doing useful, productive work, or self-satisfying work-obviously that's very far from true - or that, if they were to do the kind of work they're doing under conditions of freedom, it would thereby become productive and satisfying.
Rather there are a very large number of people who are involved in other kinds of work. For example, the people who are involved in the management of exploitation, or the people who are involved in the creation of artificial consumption, or the people who are involved in the creation of mechanisms of destruction and oppression, or the people who are simply not given any place in a stagnating industrial economy. Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labour. -
And I think that the revolution, if you like, should be in the name of all human beings; but it will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings, and those will be, I think, the human beings who really are involved in the productive work of society. Now what this is will differ, depending upon the society. In our society it includes, I think, intellectual workers; it includes a spectrum of people that runs from manual labourers to skilled workers, to engineers, to scientists, to a very large class of professionals, to many people in the so-called service occupations, which really do constitute the overwhelming mass of the population, at least in the United States, and I suppose probably here too, and will become the mass of the population in the future.
And so I think that the student-revolutionaries, if you like, have a point, a partial point : that is to say, it's a very important thing in a modern advanced industrial society how the trained intelligentsia identifies itself. It's very important to ask whether they are going to identify themselves as social managers, whether they are going to be technocrats, or servants of either the state or private power, or, alternatively, whether they are going to identify themselves as part of the work force, who happen to be doing intellectual labour.
If the latter, then they can and should play a decent role in a progressive social revolution. If the former, then they're part of the class of oppressors.
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21 Jul 12
Antonio Pandolfiit's a very important thing in a modern advanced industrial society how the trained intelligentsia identifies itself. It's very important to ask whether they are going to identify themselves as social managers, whether they are going to be technocrats, or
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20 Feb 12
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05 Nov 11
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I'll overcome the urge to answer the earlier very interesting question that you asked me and turn to this one.
Let me begin by referring to something that we have already discussed, that is, if it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effect of coercive institutions, then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realised. That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society, ours for example, as a historical residue. -
Now a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will.
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No, I don't have the least belief that one could consider our society democratic. [Laughs.]
If one understands by democracy the effective exercise of power by a population which is neither divided nor hierarchically ordered in classes, it is quite clear that we are very far from democracy. It is only too clear that we are living under a regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional; and to that degree, there isn't any question of democracy for us.
Well. When you asked me why I was interested in politics, I refused to answer because it seemed evident to me, but perhaps your question was: How am I interested in it?
And had you asked me that question, and in a certain sense I could say you have, I would say to you that I am much less advanced in my way; I go much less far than Mr. Chomsky. That is to say that I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society.
On the other hand, one of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it.
What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in European society, -
to consider that power is localised in the hands of the government and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state. One knows that all these institutions are made to elaborate and to transmit a certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or of the state, to have them applied and to punish those who don't obey. But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.
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14 Oct 11
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General or collective phenomena on the other hand, those which by definition can't be "attributed", are normally devalued: they are still traditionally described through words like "tradition', "mentality", "modes"; and one lets them play the negative role of a brake in relation to the "originality" of the inventor. In brief, this has to do with the principle of the sovereignty of the subject applied to the history of knowledge. The other claim is that which no longer allows us to save the subject, but the truth: so that it won't be compromised by history, it is necessary not that the truth constitutes itself in history, but only that it reveals itself in it; hidden to men's eyes, provisionally inaccessible, sitting in the shadows, it will wait to be unveiled. The history of truth would be essentially its delay, its fall or the disappearance of the obstacles which have impeded it until now from coming to light.
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The historical dimension of knowledge is always negative in relation to the truth
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knowledge had to surmount or to outlive in order to have access finally to the truth
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invoking a certain "romanticism" about the history of science: the solitude of the man of truth, the originality which reopened itself onto the original through history and despite it.
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it's a matter of superimposing the theory of knowledge and the subject of knowledge on the history of knowledge.
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Take for example medicine at the end of the eighteenth century: read twenty medical works, it doesn't matter which, of the years 1770 to 1780, then twenty others from the years 1820 to 1830, and I would say, quite at random, that in forty or fifty years everything had changed; what one talked about, the way one talked about it, not just the remedies, of course, not just the maladies and their classifications, but the outlook itself. Who was responsible for that? Who was the author of it? It is artificial, I think, to say Bichat, or even to expand a little and to say the first anatomical clinicians. It's a matter of a collective and complex transformation of medical understanding in its practice and its rules.
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in fact only possible creations, possible innovations. One can only, in terms of language or of knowledge, produce something new by putting into play a certain number of rules
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we placed more emphasis on individual creation, and we had kept aside and left in the shadows these communal, general rules, which obscurely manifest themselves through every scientific discovery, every scientific invention, and even every philosophical innovation.
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creative act of going from evidence to a scientific theory,
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look at the phenomena of the world theoretical physics comes forth, and we write it down and produce it; that's not the way our minds are constructed
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And the fact that science converges and progresses itself shows us that such initial limitations and structures exist.
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delimits and restricts the scope of our possible knowledge, while at the same time permitting the inductive leap to complicated systems of knowledge on the basis of a small amount of data.
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Each time this rewriting makes the knowledge completely different in its functions, in its economy, in its internal relations. You have there a principle of divergence, much more than one of growth.
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Only creativity is possible in putting into play of a system of rules; it is not a mixture of order and freedom.
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I would like to know whether one cannot discover the system of regularity, of constraint, which makes science possible, somewhere else, even outside the human mind, in social forms, in the relations of production, in the class struggles, etc.
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For example, the fact that at a certain time madness became an object for scientific study, and an object of knowledge in the West, seems to me to be linked to a particular economic and social situation.
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We can agree, perhaps, that behaviour in some broad sense constitutes the data for the science of man. But to define a science by its data would be to define physics as the theory of meter-readings.
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disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
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What model did it use to conceive, project, and eventually realise that human nature? It was in fact the bourgeois mode
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Isn't there a risk that we will be led into error?
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Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it's partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist.
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Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve,
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Are you committing this act in virtue of an ideal justice, or because the class struggle makes it useful and necessary ? Do you refer to ideal justice, that's my problem.
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Yeah, I don't agree.
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When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can't see what objection one could make to this.
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bureaucracy or petit bourgeois elements had taken power.
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ith that theory of revolution for a lot of reasons, historical and others
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But it is in terms of justice; it's because the end that will be achieved is claimed as a just one.
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e I think the notion of a proletariat, if we want to use it, has to be given a new interpretation fitting to our present social conditions.
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I've never seen a child who didn't want to build something out of blocks, or learn something new, or try the next task. And the only reason why adults aren't like that is, I suppose, that they have been sent to school and other oppressive institutions, which have driven that out of them.
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But I don't see any class-conscious proletarians. And that's the great dilemma.
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And so I think that the student-revolutionaries, if you like, have a point, a partial point : that is to say, it's a very important thing in a modern advanced industrial society how the trained intelligentsia identifies itself. It's very important to ask whether they are going to identify themselves as social managers, whether they are going to be technocrats, or servants of either the state or private power, or, alternatively, whether they are going to identify themselves as part of the work force, who happen to be doing intellectual labour.
If the latter, then they can and should play a decent role in a progressive social revolution. If the former, then they're part of the class of oppressors.
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29 Jun 11
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Anne Marie Cunninghampart of Chomsky - Foucault debate on YouTube http://bit.ly/gAKQ86 ... and the transcript http://bit.ly/9KU5pc
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11 Dec 10
Darcy MooreHuman Nature: Justice versus Power Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault 1971
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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of life was hardly used in studying nature: one classified natural beings, whether living or non-living, in a vast hierarchical tableau which went from minerals to man; the break between the minerals and the plants or animals was relatively undecided; epistemologically it was only important to fix their positions once and for all in an indisputable way.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the description -
the notion of life was hardly used in studying nature
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analysis of these natural beings showed, through the use of more highly perfected instruments and the latest techniques, an entire domain of objects, an entire field of relations and processes which have enabled us to define the specificity of biology in the knowledge of nature.
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into life has finally constituted itself in biological science? Has the concept of life been responsible for the organisation of biological knowledge?
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into life has finally constituted itself in biological science? Has the concept of life been responsible for the organisation of biological knowledge?
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transformations of biological knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century, were demonstrated on one hand by a whole series of new concepts for use in scientific discourse
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gave rise to a notion like that of life which has enabled us to designate, to delimit and to situate a certain type of scientific discourse,
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the notion of life is not a scientific concept;
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been an epistemological indicator of which the classifying, delimiting and other functions had an effect on scientific discussions, and not on what they were talking about:
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not by studying human nature that linguists discovered the laws of consonant mutation, or Freud the principles of the analysis of dreams, or cultural anthropologists the structure of myths
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notion of human nature is of the same type
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history of knowledge, the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of an epistemological indicator to designate certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history
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concept of life as an organising concept in the biological sciences.
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Can we explain in biological terms, ultimately in physical terms, these properties of both acquiring knowledge in the first place and making use of it in the second?
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look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
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one might ask the question whether physical science as known today, including biology, incorporates within itself the principles and the concepts that will enable it to give an account of innate human intellectual capacities and, even more profoundly, of the ability to make use of those capacities under conditions of freedom in the way which humans do. I see no particular reason to believe that biology or physics now contain those concepts
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science or scientists function in a certain period,
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when you speak of creativity as conceived by Descartes, I wonder if you don't transpose to Descartes an idea which is to be found among his successors or even certain of his contemporaries. According to Descartes, the mind was not so very creative. It saw, it perceived, it was illuminated by the evidence.
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that of understanding how one could pass from one of these clear and distinct ideas, one of these intuitions, to another, and what status should be given to the evidence of the passage between them
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given very little room to what you might call the creativity of individuals, to their capacity for creation, to their aptitude for inventing by themselves, for originating concepts, theories or scientific truths by themselves.
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history of knowledge has tried for a long time to obey two claims. One is the claim of attribution: each discovery should not only be situated and dated, but should also be attributed to someone; it should have an inventor and someone responsible for it.
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General or collective phenomena on the other hand, those which by definition can't be "attributed", are normally devalued: they are still traditionally described through words like "tradition', "mentality", "modes"; and one lets them play the negative role of a brake in relation to the "originality" of the inventor. In brief, this has to do with the principle of the sovereignty of the subject applied to the history of knowledge.
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The history of truth would be essentially its delay
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its fall or the disappearance of the obstacles which have impeded it until now from coming to light. The historical dimension of knowledge is always negative in relation to the truth.
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how these two claims were adjusted, one to the other: the phenomena of collective order, the "common thought", the "prejudices" of the "myths" of a period, constituted the obstacles which the subject of knowledge had to surmount or to outlive in order to have access finally to the truth; he had to be in an "eccentric" position in order to "discover".
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the solitude of the man of truth, the originality which reopened itself onto the original through history and despite it. I think that, more fundamentally, it's a matter of superimposing the theory of knowledge and the subject of knowledge on the history of knowledge.
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superimposing the theory of knowledge and the subject of knowledge on the history of knowledge.
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What if understanding were a complex, multiple, non-individual formation, not "subjected to the subject", which produced effects of truth? One should then put forward positively this entire dimension which the history of science has negativised; analyse the productive capacity of knowledge as a collective practice; and consequently replace individuals and their "knowledge" in the development of a knowledge which at a given moment functions according to certain rules which one can register and describe.
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substituting transformations of the understanding for the history of the discoveries of knowledge.
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history of knowledge, one sees that there are two broad directions of analysis: according to one, one has to show how, under what conditions and for what reasons, the understanding modifies itself in its formative rules, without passing through an original "inventor" discovering the "truth"; and according to the other, one has to show how the working of the rules of an understanding can produce in an individual new and unpublished knowledge.
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I am nevertheless conscious of the fact that in my statement there are rules at work, not only linguistic rules, but also epistemological rules, and those rules characterise contemporary knowledge.
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knowledge, followed a certain line of "progress", obeying the principle of "growth", and the principle of the convergence of all these kinds of knowledge. And yet when one sees how the European understanding, which turned out to be a world-wide and universal understanding in a historical and geographical sense, developed, can one say that there has been growth? I, myself, would say that it has been much more a matter of transformation.
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animal and plant classifications. How often have they not been rewritten since the Middle Ages according to completely different rules: by symbolism, by natural history, by comparative anatomy, by the theory of evolution.
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rewriting makes the knowledge completely different in its functions, in its economy, in its internal relations.
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many different ways of making possible simultaneously a few types of knowledge.
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If one understands by democracy the effective exercise of power by a population which is neither divided nor hierarchically ordered in classes, it is quite clear that we are very far from democracy. It is only too clear that we are living under a regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional; and to that degree, there isn't any question of democracy for us.
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it is the custom, at least in European society, to consider that power is localised in the hands of the government and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state. One knows that all these institutions are made to elaborate and to transmit a certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or of the state, to have them applied and to punish those who don't obey. But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
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institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
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all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
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real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
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firstly, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it. Probably it's insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognise these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.
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Nathan ReinRandomly stumbled across this. Looks fascinating.
!toread criticism del.icio.us_import interview language philosophy
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