constant escape
winter withered, warm
Really liked Capitalist Realism, having spent some time teaching it hit home. I'm reading Discipline and Punish right now and I think Capitalist Realism can be called a blend of the feudal model of spectacular, arbitrary power and the norm defining disciplinary model. You see that clearly in schools:
Great points. But I'm unclear on a couple things. How does the feudal arrangement correlate to the sovereign society? Can we think of the sovereign society as the society where institutions have not yet been territorialized/distinguished, while the disciplinary society is marked by such territorialization, while the control society is marked by their deterritorialization? I haven't read anything of Foucault's other than a couple essays, so I'm working on second-hand information regarding disciplinary and sovereign societies. And I could very well be forcing the territorialization trend onto a development that follows different trends.
You refer to the "feudal model of spectacular, arbitrary power" - is this opposed to the more organized power of the disciplinary society? I suppose that's part of what I mean by territorialized: organized. Again, I could be using that work ineffectively, but it makes sense as far as I can tell.
Also, from a system's perspective, in as far as we can ascribe an emergent agency to a system, an agency that is not reducible to the agencies of its subjects/agents/units - from a system's perspective, what role has the institution of the school come to adopt? It seems like, from this perspective, schools are more useful as bureaucratizing machines than as edifying/enlightening machines. I could be mixing in my personal opinions about school, or I could be stating the obvious - it just seems severely unrealistic to expect the school to effectively open minds rather than define them, position them as optimally manipulable by the system.
To be sure, I do not think the system, in this sense, is steered by humans. I think it exercises an agency (if that word is even applicable) that isn't reducible to our own agencies.
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