February 4, 2011

"Doing Revolution" in a Disciplinary Society


Hank and Adam strike up a great conversation to be had. How do we "Do Revolution". The discussion I want to branch off from this idea is how do we Do Revolution in a society where there are detailed procedures, and apparatuses designed specifically to shut down such a thing. We can see this in our everyday lives. When someone openly disagrees with a dominant idea they are immediately discredited, and seemingly shunned from the sphere of relevance. When protesters take to the streets(although more rare in the US) there are police to make sure that they don't "go to far". These systems in place essentially put us in a police state where we can disagree insofar as we don't remove the existing hegemonic thought. People's livelihood can literally be affected by "doing revolution" because they are vulnerable to being arrested, ostracized, or in some cases killed because of their beliefs. A childish but very accurate example would be school when a teacher or authority figure is doing something wrong or maybe producing knowledge that is biased, and sometimes just straight up false. If you were to speak out like the UC students did you would then be subject to the "proper" procedures. You will be detained sent to the proper authorities and dealt a punishment, that can sometimes lead to more punishment(parents lol).This isn't our judicial system but our education modeling the same mode of thought manifested in the disciplinary system. Michael Hardt explains this notion of Foucault's thought very explicitly in "The Withering Away Of Civil Society" "Foucault's work makes clear that the institutions and enfermements or enclosures of civil society- the church, the school, the prison, the union, the party, et cetera- constitute the paradigmatic terrain for the disciplinary deployments of power in modern society, producing normalized subjects and thus exerting hegemony through consent in a way that is perhaps more subtle but no less authoritarian..." This is a crude explanation that I hope to expand on how our society which is so centered around the disciplinary model, maintains itself through the exertion of Power over difference


“An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.”
-Simon Bolivar




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