Systems of power necessarily generate their own subversive discursive counter-strategies

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 (#corroborates, 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: Countervailing powers unite to block qualitative change — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 234; The same society that roots bureaucratic stasis also generates countervailing change tendencies. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1365; Systems of power necessarily generate the subversive discursive strategies that oppose them. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 93 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Systems of power necessarily generate the subversive discursive strategies that oppose them. #corroborates (1.00) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 93
• Reform-minded dissent within a system strengthens rather than threatens it #complicates (0.76)
• Over-theorizing power as textuality can empty it of real political meaning #complicates (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 258