Systems of power necessarily generate the subversive discursive strategies that oppose them.

Evidence

It is, I think, pointless to engage in the question of whether ideas precipitate and bring forth material realities, or the other way around. It is more fruitful to view this question in terms of a dialectic: it is in the nature of systems of power to produce within them opposing strategies, what we may commonly call strategies of subversiveness (or “subversivity,” a term that resonates with discursivity). We might then say that while central domains are defined by the discursive formations they produce, these very formations in turn per force produce discursive subversivity. No one, I think, can reasonably think that a Marx, for all that a Marx can represent, could have been possible without an industrial revolution or without a laissez-faire system of capitalism. Nor could Foucault himself, no doubt now a founder of discursivity, have been conceivable, much less possible, without the emergence of particular systems of political, economic, and cultural power that are unprecedented in human history. We might be tempted therefore to add Foucault to Foucault’s chosen duo, Marx and Freud. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 93

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the coined term ‘subversivity’ as the counterpart of ‘discursivity’.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and the internal-dialectic critiques of power, plus Said’s own framing of the critic’s counter-discourse.