Task of Thought

10 April 2008

07:02

The task of thought is to perceive the forces that produce the political and cultural terrain, and not just to accept and eloquently recite the already given of the terrain.

Morality

03 May 2008

15:39

Morality can only provide a solid basis to legitimate violence, authority, and domination when it refuses to admit different perspectives and judgements. Once one accepts the validity of different values, then such a structure immediately collapses.

Legal Structures

03 May 2008

15:41

Legal structures have traditionally provided a more stable framework for legitimation than morality, and many scholars insist today that national and international law remain the only valid bases for legitimate violence.

State philosophy is such that it subjects us to rationality  of the irrational oppressor. This way it leaves the state intact by subjecting every revolutionary activity to rational injunctions that then channel the revolution into state forms

Fighting a dictatorship

10 April 2008

While we fight dictatorship and oppressors let us not overwork the broad category of politics by imagining that every sort of reaction to dictatorship is democracy.  The resistance to Mugabe, for example, may not coalesce into an obvious democratic aspiration, it is important to stop treating democracy as an omnibus category, that means everyone who speaks the anti-dictatorship language because change is an intertwined processes

The Illusion

10 April 2008

07:03

We need to believe in the old wisdom of the past, our forefather never lost the belief that things needed to be changed. Yet today we still cannot rise above the illusion that representative democracy and free markets are free and fair.

We need to fight to get back our world from the hegemonic powers that are not just busy destroying our actions for a better world but are also trying to murder the very faith we have in building an alternative.

The Rhizome

25 April 2008

14:09

Allowing thought to shake off its model, make its purpose, make its grow - even

Non-hierarchical

10 April 2008

05:52

If we indeed desire to generate such a non-hierarchical society, we must start from our present day societies and modify them in a manner that does not negate the desired end, even if we do not know which form it will adopt in terms of its changing institutions, for a non-hierarchical society cannot be obtained by processes that increase hierarchical relations.

 A system can only be destroyed by denying the relations that constitute it, and, conversely, a system can be generated only by implementing the relations that do constitute it. There is no other possibility. Therefore, for man to generate a new society he must generate new interpersonal relations, and to do so he must change his cognitive domain. Accordingly, only if men want to live in non-hierarchical society in which everybody has real-time access to an interesting and satisfactory life will they create it, otherwise they will not.

 However, it is not the historical circumstance in which we now live, nor the laws of nature (for economic laws are an arbitrary human creation), nor lack of sociological imagination that limits us in the effort of creating a non-hierarchical utopia, it is our reluctance to abandon our culturally learned and deeply cherished joy of forcing other human beings to accept our pretended superiority.

This is why unending discussions about the means to obtain a given end betray the lack of commitment to obtain that end. An end always species means to obtain it that do not negate it, but no agreement about ends is possible between members of different social systems if they do not change their ethic so as to coincide in a meta-level of identity. Social change can only arise from ethical change, therefore, a social revolution is first of all a cultural revolution.

Filters of Knowledge

24 April 2008

The critique of the category of experience, like anti-essentialism as a whole, conflates two issues. On the one hand it is true that our perceptions of and feelings about the word, and our experience in it, are filtered through assumptions and values that are socially acquired. It would be impossible to make sense of experience without categories for ordering it, and culture plays a role in the construction of those categories. But the reason we have mental categories for sorting reality is that there is a real world out there that we need to understand if we are to function effectively in it. We will never have a comprehension of reality that is absolutely true in the sense of being unmediated by categories of perception, but that does not mean that perception is entirely shaped by these categories and has nothing to do with the reality that is being perceived. On the whole, one's ability to negotiate the world is improved by having a more accurate rather than a less accurate understanding of it. If there are no facts, only theory, then theory cannot be judged by its ability to explain the world; it must be judged on other grounds. The first alternative criterion that feminist/radical poststructuralism turns to is sophistication, defined as an interior quality of theory rather than in terms of its relation to an external reality.

Universal Truth

08 May 2008

14:37

The core of poststructuralist philosophy is the doubt that any method, theory or tradition that makes claims to be the 'right' or the privileged form of knowledge is suspect. Post-structuralism suspects all truth claims of masking and serving particular interests - Richardson 1993: 517

Domination and Thinking

09 May 2008

05:41

Disciplinary technologies effect the internalization of norms--a removal from view of the mechanisms that create us as subjects, making our identities self-evident. Resistance brings those norms back into an arena of contestation. By its very existence resistance ensures resistibility, which is the very thing internalized norms are designed to suppress. In other words, resistance is not undertaken as a protest against the subjugation of a reified ideal subject, but rather resistance, as the action of thoroughly constructed subjects, reveals the contingency of both subjectivity and subjection. While Chaloupka suggests that the role of the protestor is "tellingly different" from that of the citizen, I disagree. Often only the act of resistance provides any meaningful sense of "citizenship" in this privatized contemporary world