The power of the highest order doesn’t recur to violence.
Once you have to use violence, it means that somebody has found the strength or the presence of mind to oppose you. Real power means you don’t have to break the body because the mind already belongs to you.
Real power is when everybody willingly turns the self into a panopticon and when the disciplinary apparatus moves inside you.
The weird thing to me about this mind-level conception of power has always been how muddy it makes everything else. If people’s minds can be taken over, why would I trust anything anyone would ever say, including their assertions to the contrary?
This view also gets real weird if you consider that whoever holds it may not be immune to the effects they are describing. How do I know that you are telling me about psychopolitics as part of a genuine intellectual effort, and that you are not merely a mind puppet to some unseen ideological forces?
To hold this view, you need to have a strong idea of who’s in and who’s out in terms of being a reasonable human, but the in-group identity (in our case, the really smart people who know what’s really going on) is also unstable and can be challenged at a whim.
The blame rasexism stuff literally runs off the same conceptual juice, no? Everyone is suffused by forces beyond their ken, including the people who are aware of this, so you have a near constant ideological knifefight over who gets to be trusted even though by definition no one ever can.
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Hey, I work every day to enrich the owners of WordPress, so I’m part of this just like everybody else.
Nobody can stand fully outside ideology. Nobody. We can try to gain a bit of a critical distance from it but that’s the best it can get. And it’s up to everybody to decide what constitutes that distance b
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[…] parts are here: one, two, three, four, five, six, and eight. (Seven seems to be a […]
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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