Domination is perpetuated by thought’s own ossification, not by technology

Evidence

We do not try to trace their origins back to that which gives them their basic legitimacy. We have to try, on the contrary, to identify the technical instruments that guarantee that they function. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1486 (#complicates, via linked claim)

This rationality, of a specific type and structure, may not be disentangled from modern forms of life, the very forms that have led to the state of current crises. The crises have clearly been precipitated by a human agency (and no other), one that is self-professedly rational, but also one whose quest for knowledge is garnered, as Scheler put it aptly, for systematic control and domination. And it is this sovereign rationality that has dictated the way we construe ourselves as well as the Other in the world, including Islam and its history and cultures. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 464 (#expands, via linked claim)

Domination is transfigured into administration. The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine. Within the vast hierarchy of executive and managerial boards extending far beyond the individual establishment into the scientific laboratory and research institute, the national government and national purpose, the tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement. With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom—in the sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus—is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Enlightened thought itself contains the seed of its own reversal into domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21; Modernity’s disaster is not backwardness but the domination machinery itself.; Domination is analyzed via its functioning instruments, not its legitimation — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1486 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Domination is analyzed via its functioning instruments, not its legitimation #complicates (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1486
• A rationality geared to domination shapes how we construe the Other #expands (0.78) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 464
• Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity #expands (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186