Juridical systems of power discursively produce the subjects they claim to represent

Evidence

Power, according to Foucault, can.. not be understood solely on the model of domination as something possessed and deployed by individuals or sovereign agents over others, with a singular intentionality, structure, or location that presides over its rationality and exe.. cution. Rather, power is to be understood as a strategic relation of force that permeates life and is productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses ( Foucault 1978, 1980 ). Secondly, the subject, argues Foucault, does not precede power relations, in the form of an individuated consciousness, but is produced through these relations, which form the necessary conditions of its possibility. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 131 (#expands, via linked claim)

Codes must also be “systematic and clear,” arranged rationally and logically, and rendered easily accessible to lawyers and judges, the presumption always being that “traditional law” does not possess these rational and logical qualities. Codes are not only declaratory and enunciative of their own authority but also universal in the statement of rules, hence their concision. They pay direct attention neither to the particular case nor to the human individual as individual. They are always abstract, “to the point,” and deliberately preclusive of the concrete. It was considered a virtue that the “French and German Civil Codes could be held within the boards of a volume while the common law required a full library” to house it. Considerations of instrumentalized economy, as always, are paramount. But the primary attribute of the code is its capacity to create uniformity, an attribute in keeping with the homogenizing and universalizing ethic of modernity. The sway of the code’s authority therefore extends beyond its own legal, administrative, and regulatory power: the code possesses a performative power that, through the law, constitutes and reconstitutes subjects. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 264 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Some time ago, looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important theoretical and intellectual work which it had made possible in Cultural Studies from a mere repetition, a sort of mimicry or deconstructive ventriloquism which sometimes passes as a serious intellectual exercise. My fear at that moment was that if Cultural Studies gained an equivalent institutionalization in the American context, it would, in rather the same way, formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics. Paradoxically, what I mean by theoretical fluency is exactly the reverse. There is no moment now, in American Cultural Studies, where we are not able, extensively and without end, to theorize power—politics, race, class, and gender, subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in Cultural Studies which isn’t so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this overwhelming textualization of Cultural Studies’ own discourses somehow constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 258 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Legal structures both express and reinforce the distribution of power — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3798; Analyzing power requires abandoning the juridical-representation model entirely — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 17; Knowledge produced by discourse subjects those who are known to power (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Power produces subjects and desires rather than merely repressing them #expands (0.95) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 131
• Legal codes constitute subjects through their performative, homogenizing power #exemplifies (0.92) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 264
• Over-theorizing power as textuality can empty it of real political meaning #complicates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 258