The Discourse of Power & The Fabricated Self

(A short clip of a longer essay by Christina Issa)


Based on the ideas presented by Foucault in his book "Disciplinary Power," it can be argued that our identities are highly fabricated products of an invisible grid of power-relations, which constitutes the mechanism through which disciplinary power operates. In the greater sense, this is the basis for our inescapable arrest to which Kafka so subtly alludes in "The Trial." As our lives and identities are threaded through this lattice of power-relations, we perpetually reinforce ourselves as effects of power. We are systematically bound to a machine, which we ourselves fabricate and inadvertently attach ourselves to. We do this through, among many other things, awareness and ‘self-consciousness." Ergo, ‘The Self’ is a function of disciplinary power and we are just effects of this power. 


How do we break this? We cannot. It is impossible. For as long as the techniques of disciplinary power continue operating through our conscious and even unconscious awareness - through our struggle to assert and re-assert our identities, through our struggle to give meaning and definition to the world, through institutional operations and their assertion of power over the people pressed into the service and ‘improvement’ of the many - no one can avoid the grasp of power, and no one will ever be freed from the grasp of power. In this way ‘The Self’ will never cease being an endless subject of power perpetually being organized, examined, and observed. Moreover, as the individual reacts to these techniques of disciplinary power ‘The Self’ will never own itself and be its own justification; (To Nietzsche's disappointment...) it will only be owned, as a function of another operation. 


Among other things, this reality is why revolution is hopeless. This is why rebellion is just as absurd as the dictatorship in which it seeks to overthrow. As one attempts to reverse the dominant discourse they merely re-establishes another discourse under which he will be bound and existentially contingent. As one redefines, they merely re-subject. The most he can do is hope to have more power than others, so that he may enjoy the power of domination more and experience the effect of subjection less. 


Despite the transference of more power into the individual’s hands, we will always remain caught in the webbing of power-relations. Accordingly, our identity will always remain a figment of our imagination, evading us more and more, escaping us quicker as we tighten our grasp on it. Identity is hugely fabricated in this way, and exists as just an afterthought; in the present we remain to be effects of power.

truth-less reality

For his project in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier asked his head engineer “What is the truth really?” Then he drew two parallel lines, with a wavy line in between. “Truth is like a river,” he said, “it flows continuously, changing course, modifying itself, without ever touching either bank”.

Build, Break, Bloom: Some Very Unorganized Thoughts About Architecture

(Written weeks ago)

Contingency itself is the only condition of life and all things in existence pivot around a point of contingency. I am contingent. You are contingent. Life is contingent.

Time and space are the constants under which we manipulate our reality and define things. Our physical environment sits unassumingly as the culprit of Apollonian violence. Quite literally, architecture is the pinnacle of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle. The violence is unbearable sometimes. Existing within a vacancy of meaning while warped by a Dionysian chaos, this time-space experiment remains defined by mathematical boundaries, points and lines. Mastery of it is elusive in the sense that ‘truths’ are only as figured out as we determine them to be. It is only through formal manipulation that we build upon contingencies and thus assign definition and form.

Architecture, as a formal act of construction, is the wildest form of creative destruction, as well as the most tangible expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle. As you build you are systemically assaulting nature and assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless. In the process of building you are destroying all else. Physically you destroy and create while conceptually you are deconstructing the definition of what it means to be and to dwell at one point in time and space. By virtue of its process, the language of architecture is an attempt to control chaos and grant form to the formless.

Sadness

Can we be blessed with sadness?

Sadness, like all other things, is a state of mind. It's a place that we, ourselves, place who we are and who we think we should be, within. It's a place. It's a stage. I might be blessed with sadness only so far as it inspires me to create. Only so far as it moves me to progress as an individual who strives to master her own existence. I can manipulate that which I think is sadness, or those things that I believe to be sadness, but sadness has no inherent goodness or badness, it's just a state of mind that really, in the end, means absolutely nothing at all.

So, no. No Matthew. I am not blessed with sadness. I don't see it in that way, at least. In my own peculiar little world, sadness is the cessation of a struggle; the struggle is for a doomed-happiness, which I will never deny myself. The struggle to be real with myself and to be truthful to who I am. That is what you lose when you wallow and dwell in sadness. Like all other states of mind, sadness is just a human creation, a construct that which we bury our true selves under. Just as easily as I can create it, I can destroy it (realizing that it is slightly more difficult to destroy).

(Thanks to Matt Stangle, for inspiring me and succeeding, yet again, in distracting me from the "real" things I should be doing like studying for class and writing a paper on NAFTA...)

Language is war.

It is impossible to truly understand what another person is ever saying. Impossible to figure out another's concept or perspective born in their mind. It is impossible because no matter what we do and how we try, the only way for us as humans with cognitive activity, to learn, is through language. Through asking questions and attaching meaning to words (which will invariably be diverse and distinct in different minds), we taint the original meaning of words, of messages, of statements. The only thing that is guaranteed is that we humans will interpret things as we see fit, and in this process we will build and destroy. Language is war. Language is a problem. The question is now, how do we live with language?

Agreement in dialogue is technical. More than anything else it is technical. Agreement comes when my use of a set of terms and my chosen vocabulary reflects and triggers in your mind, the same associations by which you linked your original thought. That original thought you probably expressed using a different set of terms, different adjectives and subjects and verbs. Unique to you. Not until we have exhausted our ways of conversation, not until we find a point where I can say what I want and how I perceive what we are discussing to exist, and when that expression of my perception through careful use of language aligns with the idea in your mind, not until then, have we met agreement. Again, which can only occur when the words I have chosen to use to explain myself, happen to mean either the same or relatively the same things to you, in your mind, as you know and use them. And neither of us will ever know the true discord in existence, that lies between the shadows of our words, since we cannot feel it, since we strive for agreement, for peace. We will never really know how different our thoughts really are because we will always be striving to be in harmony. This duality is deadly but beautiful.

I recognize in this process that language and meaning is also always recycled. Social relation and communicative activity encourages the development of meaning by relying on other meaning. This is not important to me here.

It seems the only way for us humans to overcome this "problem" of language, to ever really see eye-to-eye, to ever truly see one thing from the exact same place in space and time, is to not speak. To not communicate. To not question. To not articulate. It is in translation that words will always lose their meaning, their associations, their histories. As we assign them meaning relative to ourselves, we destroy what they meant to another. As they pass from ones lips to another's ears, they morph into something new. That is why we as the carriers of the meanings of our words, are the ones to blame for the consequences.

True peace is silence. Pure peace is blackness and emptiness. Might as well be dead. If language is conflict, I don't ever want to be peaceful. Bring on the heartache.