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Pill Pod 8 - What the Fouc is The State? · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:07
  Well, we're trying to figure out how to break down this episode, which
• 0:10
  I've tentatively called state and Power, and I think we've settled on something.
• 0:16
  It's going to be Hegel versus post Hegel. And really one of the things
• 0:21
  that I want to bring up in the discussion is that the most visceral reversion
• 0:27
  from Hegel is Nazism. That's where Adorner, Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School and
• 0:32
  all the French guys, they all say, now you can't trust the state
• 0:36
  because of Nazism, and they all try to find Hegelian roots in that kind
• 0:41
  of spiritedness. I don't know if anyone else is thinking in that direction.
• 0:47
  That's or just fast the general. I mean, Karl Popper famously located the
• 0:54
  root of all the twentieth centuries problems in Hegel right and going back for them
• 0:58
  that Plato, and I think most serious commentators now, I think that this
• 1:03
  kind of liberal analytic states prem seriously overstated the case and missed a lot of
• 1:07
  what was unique in liberal and Hegel's philosophy. But if you look on the
• 1:12
  political right especially, there's still a lot of popularity and traction in this narrative,
• 1:17
  particularly amongst like pop intellectuals, right, and even saying that there's a
• 1:21
  bunch of leftist interpretations of Hegel, like foremost is Jijak, but it's brought
• 1:27
  up often as No, they're spotanaity and Hegel. Don't worry about it.
• 1:33
  Yeah, it was even before the Nazis, though, I mean, I
• 1:36
  don't see that, but I'm too lazy to read Hegel again. Anyway,
• 1:40
  I did it once. I mean, the Frankfurt school really came into its
• 1:42
  own in the interwar period. So they're just thinking about fascism in general.
• 1:47
  Nazism hadn't quite emerged yet, right, although it would come in the thirties.
• 1:53
  But yeah, they'll take or Dorno's thing is he'll take anybody's philosophy and
• 1:57
  show you how it'll lead to fact. Yeah, all right, So everybody
• 2:02
  got their headphones in, everybody got their MIC's on. Yeah, it's recording
• 2:07
  now, all right, we are ready to go. Hello everyone, listeners,
• 2:12
  friends, you are listening to the Pill Pod today. I thought we're
• 2:15
  not going to go pro or anti anything as a podcast, because we've done
• 2:21
  a lot of those and there's more to come, but today we are just
• 2:24
  going to call ourselves the podcast. After Hegel. So today we have a
• 2:32
  lot to get through, or maybe not a lot to get through. We're
• 2:36
  only doing two words, and we're going to deal with two words for probably
• 2:39
  six weeks or so, and those two words are state and power. Today
• 2:46
  is going to be a relatively open discussion because I want to sort of plan
• 2:51
  based on how this discussion goes, what we're going to be talking about in
• 2:53
  the next few weeks. But when we're talking about state and power, it's
• 2:58
  really the transition from Hegel to everything after Hegel in terms of political philosophy,
• 3:05
  specifically so as philosophically minded people who have done Comm's exams. A few thoughts
• 3:13
  should immediately pop into your head when you hear these terms state and power.
• 3:17
  The first is Hegel, who is the foremost philosopher of the state. He
• 3:23
  thought that the state was the manifestation of that or the resolution of the contradiction
• 3:29
  between in universal in particular, and he thought that the state was a realization
• 3:36
  of freedom on earth, not a specific state, but the abstract notion of
• 3:38
  state. We can get into that, and then power is critiqued by everyone
• 3:43
  that we usually talk about on a Critical Theory podcast, which is Marx S
• 3:46
  Nietzsche, Fuco de Luz, Frankfurt School, et cetera. So, of
• 3:53
  course this is a broad topic. We're just going to see how it goes.
• 3:57
  I have high hopes, but we'll see. We might get stuck in
• 4:00
  the weeds on something. But with us today we have a full deck of
• 4:04
  cards. Cards. Anyway, we got a politics guy, Victor, how
• 4:14
  you doing Victory? Pretty good semiotics guy who in this case doubles as an
• 4:18
  expert in the Frankfurt School. No, no, not an expert of the
• 4:26
  Frankfurt School. Man, you're one of the smartest people I hear to talk
• 4:30
  about it. Then then Matt McManus, who who doesn't have a guy name,
• 4:38
  but you know everyone knows him. Thanks man. If you've been on
• 4:44
  the internet lately and with us, with us, I know we're a broie
• 4:48
  podcast and it's only going to get more broie today because we have girl bro
• 4:54
  with us, Marian girl bro Hell, and Mirian has been brought on here
• 5:01
  for her expertise in FUC. Thank you. Like I spent a substantial amound
• 5:09
  of time reading about like four years of I don't know. Yeah, So
• 5:15
  in terms of the text that you're dealing with or the region of FUCO that
• 5:18
  you're dealing with, because obviously he published a lot. What would you say
• 5:21
  is your foremost area when reading? Honestly, I prefer the biopolitics stuff and
• 5:30
  that's what I like. That like interest me about. I mean, if
• 5:39
  I have to say, like I hated them most having to go through like
• 5:43
  the earlier text, right, like those are so heavy and I remember being
• 5:48
  so lost, which the system of things? Yeah, like yeah, like
• 5:57
  the more when he demails this inceptions about the right and the whole whole history
• 6:03
  of like well his concept t realization of like ideas and yeah, I think
• 6:08
  the system of objects is bowderyard. You're thinking of the order of things?
• 6:12
  Yeah, excuse me, sorry, right, fucking plastic pills and plastic pills
• 6:16
  with his Bojard bias. Yeah. No. I read a book recently by
• 6:23
  Rogers Scrutin. It was called Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Thinkers of the
• 6:26
  New Left, and it's everything you'd expect from a Roger Scrutin book, just
• 6:30
  nasty, nasty, nasty. But I was actually surprised because when it came
• 6:33
  to the section of Poco, he did actually claim that he was a good
• 6:38
  writer and I think you always have to qualify that by saying he became a
• 6:41
  good writer, you know, after he gained a little bit of confidence and
• 6:44
  he realized that he didn't have to write like a post structuralist anymore, and
• 6:46
  you get into like discipline and Punished and the history of sexuality. There's a
• 6:49
  really vivid and kind of interesting aesthetic value to his work, right, especially
• 6:56
  like those chapters about Porcher and sex and all that kind of stuff. Well,
• 7:00
  I remember a quotation by Fuco. I have not checked up on it.
• 7:04
  I don't know if he actually said it, but he said something like,
• 7:08
  oh, don't worry about the first ten pages of anything you write.
• 7:11
  You can fill it with any bullshit, and the more bullshit the better,
• 7:14
  because that makes you sound more interesting. Yeah, there you go. It
• 7:18
  sounds like it sounds like early foot quote to me. So anyway, we
• 7:23
  have a full cast of characters here, and we are going to deal with
• 7:28
  again two words state and power. So I thought, because I probably know
• 7:33
  less than anybody in the room on either of those things, but I do
• 7:36
  know Hegel's version of state. When when you're historicizing Hegel and I remember Listener
• 7:44
  not knowing a fucking thing about Hegel, and everybody talks about Hagel blah blah
• 7:47
  blah endlessly until they're blue in the phase. Then doing comps, I finally
• 7:51
  got a little glimpse of it. And really the thing that you have to
• 7:57
  understand is necessity and freedom as contradiction that has resolved. So necessity comes from
• 8:03
  nature, that's what you have to do. That means you don't have free
• 8:05
  will. Free will means you can act independently of nature. You have your
• 8:09
  own agency. This is what you do when you're being rational. You escape
• 8:13
  from nature in a sense. And this is one of the contradictions that's resolved
• 8:18
  in Hegel. And for him, this occurs in the state. So before
• 8:26
  you have I guess in Hegel's context, it's an early modern context, and
• 8:31
  he's looking at France from Germany, which is a fractured smattering of duchies and
• 8:35
  so on, and he says, in the state, the nation state,
• 8:39
  as we would understand it, you have finally your human freedom and meshed with
• 8:46
  your political freedom. So it's kind of the highest state of human development because
• 8:52
  you're not just an animal, but you have political free will, and the
• 9:00
  political free will is guaranteed by this abstraction or the universal, which is the
• 9:05
  state. That's all the introduction to Hegel I'm going to give. We could
• 9:09
  go on and on, and that's probably crudely oversimplified. But then we move
• 9:15
  over to the twentieth century and everybody thinks Hegel is fucking balls. Everybody that
• 9:22
  I read these days, you know, fuc le, feb le, fib.
• 9:26
  I don't even know how to pronounce that francophone, but deluz. Everybody
• 9:31
  is just taking a giant dump on Hegel all day long. Except for the
• 9:37
  one exception uh Lacan as well. I guess he wouldn't count. But in
• 9:43
  terms of political philosophy, everyone thinks Hegel is the worst. They think he's
• 9:46
  totalizing, they think he allows for no spontaneity, no creativity. Right,
• 9:52
  and then, so what we're trying to deal with is how to deal with
• 9:56
  the state, not necessarily Hagel, but the state that we're thing under,
• 10:01
  which doesn't appear to be all that good for critical theorists. I would like
• 10:05
  to make a note a little irony from Richard Biiner's recent book Diandrew's Minds,
• 10:11
  which is that a lot of these French philosophers did like a bid in Hegel
• 10:16
  and Hegelianism. But the philosopher, the German philosopher that they turned to,
• 10:20
  was Nietzsche, who, if anything, how far more reactionary views than Hegel.
• 10:24
  Every did right. Hegel at the end of his career was kind of
• 10:26
  a conservative is liberal, you know, whereas Nietzsche was very happy to say
• 10:33
  things like, you know, burn them all and the God decided the rest,
• 10:37
  except God doesn't exist. So they're just going to suffer. Did you
• 10:41
  say? We also have to We also, just before we get to you,
• 10:43
  we have to recognize the other trajectory that goes from Germany to France,
• 10:48
  which is Marx Marx influenced obviously the Frankfurt School and all the neo Marxists Alta,
• 10:54
  Zera, Roncier, et cetera. So we're dealing with these dual trajectories.
• 11:00
  Everybody is dumping on Hagel, but they aren't totally. They're kind of
• 11:03
  incorporating Hegelian concepts and it may seem more antimonious than it actually is there there,
• 11:13
  they're reaction reacting to create something new. So with that, I'm gonna
• 11:18
  has to be a reconciliation with Halt. So with that, I am going
• 11:22
  to kick it to the floor. We have a contradiction to resolve if you
• 11:30
  will state and power, and I'm going to throw it to the floor.
• 11:33
  Well may I just would like to so two things quickly. Just miss something
• 11:37
  that Matt said earlier. I was wondering were you you were? Was that
• 11:39
  the book, the Ronald Beaner book. Then he's at UT so you probably
• 11:48
  I took his class. I took his class that he was based on that
• 11:50
  book. Well send him my accommendations because I really like that. We could
• 11:54
  actually probably interview him one time on this podcast if we wanted to. Oh
• 11:58
  thought that'd be but anyway, sorry pod casting now that would be just as
• 12:03
  an aside. But I did want to come back to something that Pills was
• 12:05
  saying, like, so that definition of the state. You know, it's
• 12:09
  funny. I think when I was doing the political Theory core course, I
• 12:13
  feel like the week on Hegel was like the week or the two weeks on
• 12:16
  Hegel was the week when I was busy, when we were in the philosophy
• 12:18
  of right, and I felt like I didn't really pay that much attention during
• 12:22
  those two weeks. But it's interesting, like the way, the abstract way
• 12:26
  that you described it, and that did ring a bell for me, And
• 12:28
  like, I don't know, just thinking back to like the history of political
• 12:31
  philosophy before that, Like I wonder, how different do you think that definition
• 12:35
  of the state is to like what, for example, Hobbes was talking about,
• 12:39
  because in some ways, like, isn't Hobbes justifying like the state power
• 12:43
  if you think of Leviathan a state as needing to protect human beings from necessity
• 12:48
  of nature? Right, Like the whole point is you need a state to
• 12:52
  protect people citizens from dying a horrible death as a result of I guess you
• 12:58
  could call it necessity, right, because for him, nature is this war
• 13:01
  of all against all. Right, So I don't know you had any thoughts
• 13:05
  about that or how you think that's different than like what Hegel was talking about.
• 13:09
  There are I don't know, do you want me to respond to that?
• 13:11
  Maybe I don't know, Okay, So the distinction, there's two distinctions.
• 13:16
  I only mentioned one. But the first is freedom and necessity, which
• 13:20
  is nature versus like free will. But the second is abstract versus or abstract
• 13:26
  versus concrete. Right, So Hobbes's state is very abstract in the sense that
• 13:33
  it never existed and still hasn't existed. Right, it's a model. But
• 13:39
  within the Leviathan state, you don't actually have freedom to be self conscious.
• 13:46
  Your only your freedom is to follow the law that has been placed over you
• 13:52
  in that context. Right, So Hegel's state is more like, you have
• 13:58
  the free will to be an absolutely free political subject and self reflective and it's
• 14:05
  not about following the rules. In that case, you can think freely because
• 14:09
  you have all of history behind you, and you can reflect on history as
• 14:13
  being the thing that brought your consciousness into being and allows your freedom to express
• 14:18
  itself. Good. That's a good distinction to make. Yeah, I would
• 14:22
  say also that I think that you're onto something. And I think Hegel,
• 14:26
  like every figure that he deals with, doesn't just dismiss Hobbes. Right,
• 14:30
  And I think there is something to this idea that the body politic, by
• 14:33
  establishing the sovereign, commits a free act and establishes the bio within and achieves
• 14:39
  a certain level of freedom through the law. Right. What I think Hegel
• 14:43
  tries to add to Hobbes, primarily if you're a critic of Kant, is
• 14:48
  taking these very Aristotelian themes of recognition, the desire for sociality, the desire
• 14:54
  for meaningful symbols that people share collectively, and he incorporates that all into the
• 15:00
  tapestry by saying, well, in order to make your freedom substantive than to
• 15:03
  last, it's not enough just to be allowed to do whatever you want even
• 15:07
  as a country. You also need to achieve recognition from the other and you
• 15:11
  do that by establishing these kinds of institutions. For instance, the monarchy right
• 15:18
  where he says, you know, sovereign isn't necessarily going to be like the
• 15:22
  sovereign leviathan. What it's going to do is a singular manifestation of the unity
• 15:28
  as a kind of symbol, right, And it might not necessarily even have
• 15:31
  any significant power allocated in the monarch, but nonetheless there's a tremendous amount of
• 15:37
  affective significance and a very important function that it serves to have a monarchting place.
• 15:43
  Right. No, that makes sense. When Hegel talks about the state,
• 15:46
  it seems like an enlightened despotism. I mean, yes, this is
• 15:52
  with hindsight, of course, And I'm just gonna say this is a cave
• 15:56
  yat because Born is going to come here and probably wreck our shit. On
• 16:00
  Hegel, But all of my interpretation of Hegel comes from French people who hate
• 16:06
  him, and then and then my comp exams where I actually had to read
• 16:10
  him. So I might be biased in the wrong way towards him, and
• 16:12
  I'm going to just straight on admit that. But that's yeah, that's my
• 16:17
  reading is that freedom and necessity the contradiction is resolved, and abstraction and concrete
• 16:22
  the contradiction is resolved. So the state is like the full manifestation of reason
• 16:27
  in history. Right. Well, I think that's a good I mean,
• 16:30
  I think that's the that's a good reading of what Hegel like wanted his account
• 16:33
  to be. And I guess maybe what Matt was bringing up well is like
• 16:37
  or implying at least, is you know, like like to what extent is
• 16:41
  it really manifesting this freedom in a in a substantive way, And to what
• 16:47
  extent is it just like maybe an enlightened despotism where like the freedom is I
• 16:52
  don't know, like maybe it's because I think that's a lot of the critique
• 16:55
  from the left of Hegel, right is that it's it's not really uh,
• 16:57
  it's not really freedom in him in a meaningful sense. It's kind of this
• 17:00
  abstruct Why don't why don't we just start off from coming down from the clouds,
• 17:07
  because I don't think that anyone is going to find this particularly interesting.
• 17:10
  But yeah, how do we negotiate Let's just say, you know, capitalist
• 17:17
  democracy, neoliberal democracy, how does that reason with the state? And then
• 17:22
  how do we critique that? Even leaving Hagel behind, I actually I had
• 17:26
  something to say on this because actually this is the main point I want to
• 17:30
  make in relation to it. But basically, I think it's important to look
• 17:33
  at the Hegelian account of the state now more than ever before, because if
• 17:38
  you look at like the ascendency of right wing populism around the globe, are
• 17:42
  you look at the way that people have tried to manage the COVID crisis,
• 17:45
  the institutions that they're turning to are the state and the sense of collective identity
• 17:52
  and shared values and shared care that it's meant to manifest, right and a
• 17:57
  lot of the people who are attracted to populist rhetorics say precisely that we don't
• 18:03
  want global institutions. They're affiliated with global capital, which is disinterested, which
• 18:08
  doesn't appreciate our freedom and its particularity, and so we want a resuscitation of
• 18:12
  the nation state as the primary locus political legitimacy and attention. That's a great
• 18:18
  point, and I know a lot of us don't like that, and I
• 18:21
  don't either, because you know, I hate right with populism in a lot
• 18:23
  of ways. But I do think it's worth questioning why this is appealing now,
• 18:27
  because that would be a rejection of the Hegelian development towards like perfect particularity
• 18:36
  in a universal state. Right, Let's see, you caught me at unawares
• 18:41
  with all this Hegel talk, all right, so whenhy don't we just like
• 18:45
  put Hagel on the shelf then, because this is kind of an alienating discussion
• 18:49
  for anybody. Well, I think I could maybe pick up on something that
• 18:56
  I think that Matt was talking about, like the appeal of like the way
• 19:02
  in which capitalism seems to be taking power away from the state. And I
• 19:06
  thought maybe we should actually make because I think you defined what the state was
• 19:11
  for Hegel, but up hills, but like, you know, how would
• 19:14
  we like, what's the difference between power and the state, Like maybe we
• 19:18
  should just talk about broadly like those two since those are the two words.
• 19:22
  Maybe we should just talk about power broadly now and then like think about how
• 19:26
  those two things link. I was thinking about it and the way I mean,
• 19:30
  what first pops into my head when I hear the state is the early
• 19:33
  modern state? First of all, the development of the early modern state.
• 19:37
  Yeah, so by the time we get past the whole divine right of King's
• 19:41
  things, we get into Hobbes and Locke, and they're so radical because they're
• 19:47
  articulating like a secular state. And it's the social contract, right, So
• 19:52
  the idea that we give up our own personal power so that it can be
• 19:56
  exercised on our behalf by a higher authority, which then keeps society in order
• 20:02
  and staves off the state of nature. So power is almost legitimated by the
• 20:08
  social contract, and it's wielded by the state itself. Right, the state,
• 20:14
  The state is wielding the sword, and power is the sword itself kind
• 20:19
  of thing. If you need a metaphor for it out of curiosity, maybe
• 20:25
  Mary can answer this question, but it's something that always perplexiby. Can anyone
• 20:30
  give like a working definition of what power is like? Because again, I
• 20:33
  sometimes think Kanye West probably has a better consumption of it than like social scientists,
• 20:37
  we like to invoke it. It's like powers here, power is there,
• 20:41
  says powers everywhere. But I remember even Pacolians if you ask them,
• 20:45
  like, well, what is we called mean by power, They're just like,
• 20:48
  well, it's all right, one thing you say about it, I'll
• 20:52
  beyond that. So does anybody know how to define? We have the experts
• 20:57
  exactly exactly, No, no, Like I was just gonna say that there
• 21:03
  are many definitions of power I used to teach like political science, and there
• 21:07
  is really a huge, right array of definitions. Or I think that the
• 21:12
  one that's usually a common place is the ability the capacity a whatever actor.
• 21:21
  Right, might be an institution an individual to just exercise like be able to
• 21:26
  change someone like someone else's behavior, right, And I think that could go
• 21:30
  like understands power that way. Although he differentiates three different types of power in
• 21:37
  exercise in society, do you want to name them? Yeah? Yeah,
• 21:41
  Like what you have like the what he calls a legal one that comes from
• 21:45
  the state, right, all of what you were saying, hey, go,
• 21:48
  right, like the authority that comes from the state through the law,
• 21:52
  and also of course to for example, other institutions associated to the state,
• 21:59
  and then there is, of course what made his name, what made him
• 22:02
  very famous, which was disciplinary power, right, like all the disciplinary institutions
• 22:07
  right that govern our bodies, right, and that like basically yeah, like
• 22:15
  governor our bodies just like keep it perfectly there. And then there's his latest
• 22:19
  account of power, which is biopower. Right. It's more about governing populations
• 22:26
  and just going back to what appeals said before or asked before, like I
• 22:32
  think at some point like twentieth century political theories or philosophers kind of not only
• 22:42
  because of what happened of course in terms of historical events, right, the
• 22:45
  two words et cetera, would like a Nazism, fascism. There was some
• 22:51
  sort of recognition that associating power with state power was just a very limited account
• 22:59
  of what power is. Right. There are other sources of power that are
• 23:04
  as important and that are as relevant maybe two shape, right, the individual
• 23:12
  and society. And I think that's why someone like Covid Game is so famous
• 23:17
  for right and other thinkers not only for correct when you associate that that,
• 23:22
  like I guess you're gonna say, qua part of power with ideology? Is
• 23:29
  that a fair connection to make? Oh yeah, definitely, Like like what
• 23:34
  would you say as to see it, like you mean established like more specific
• 23:38
  I just think ideology is a way of for exercising power, right, like
• 23:41
  just some millions of like yeah, like there are also again there like that's
• 23:48
  a problem in the social sciences, right, and the humanities. You have
• 23:51
  like many competing definitions contested definitions for things. But I think one of the
• 23:55
  definitions of ideology and why ideology sometimes is perceived right this kind of public enemy
• 24:02
  is because it has to do power, right, like specifically sometimes do the
• 24:06
  power exercise from this state? Do you think disciplinary power is like ideology?
• 24:12
  I guess if I'm thinking about like the more else the Zourian definition of ideology,
• 24:17
  which I think like JA picks up on a lot, is that because
• 24:22
  I guess when I think about the disciplinary power that fuco or like it's almost
• 24:26
  like the everyday level that sort of monitors people's like the way people respond to
• 24:30
  norms and they're sociding and the way they the sort of affect of feeling they
• 24:33
  get to like not fitting into norms. I don't know if that Let me
• 24:37
  just jump in here, because we just mentioned a whole bunch of terms and
• 24:41
  I'm not going to expect that everybody knows what these terms means. Yeah.
• 24:44
  First is legal power. This is the law's power to punish you, right,
• 24:51
  So that's very direct, like you know, if you usually more to
• 24:56
  compel you with the threat of punishment, not you know, you know in
• 25:00
  your own mind if you break the law, a CoP's going to arrest you.
• 25:03
  Basically, then you have disciplinary power. And disciplinary power is not the
• 25:07
  threat of being arrested, but it's enclosure. Right. So schools hospitals are
• 25:14
  his main example, asylums you are, but it's not physical. It's also
• 25:19
  power knowledge, right, So also knowledge is equated with power, but certain
• 25:26
  ok okay, okay, I'm just trying to get three easy definitions out of
• 25:30
  the way so we can keep talking about it, right, soavo law power,
• 25:34
  second one school power, and then three is biopower. I don't think
• 25:40
  we need to go into that yet. But you you internalize each of these
• 25:44
  states of power into your own mind, that restrict that forces you to restrict
• 25:48
  your own activity. I think is a fair way to say it, because
• 25:51
  that's kind of what Marian said in terms of you can compel someone else to
• 25:56
  do what you want. And ideology is a version of this disciplinary power that
• 26:00
  makes people not act out because they are afraid in their own mind of being
• 26:06
  punished in advance of ever doing anything wrong. Right sure. I mean I
• 26:11
  heard this anecdote about a person in Saskatchewan. He was a very prototypical Canadian
• 26:15
  where it was like twelve o'clock at night. They went to stop light.
• 26:21
  It was a red and it was midnight, and there was no one probably
• 26:23
  for a one hundred kilometers, and this guy stayed and waited the light out
• 26:27
  rather than go through it because that was the kind of more that he did
• 26:33
  internalized. And then I was like, in some ways, this guy is
• 26:36
  like the ideal fu Koian subject. Right, Yeah, see, I guess
• 26:41
  I guess what power really is is it's deeply it's deeply entangled with just our
• 26:47
  theory of causalities, basically how things get done, how things happen. I
• 26:52
  mean, there's the scientific definition of power, obviously, but we in the
• 26:57
  humanities and the social sciences tend to look at it as a more dispersed,
• 27:03
  impersonal kind of phenomenon, not like not just my power to lift things and
• 27:07
  do physical activities, but also to compel people or to have foreknowledge about an
• 27:14
  event right, Like one could say that at the beginning of this COVID crisis
• 27:18
  when stocks were sold before everybody knew, that was an exercise of power.
• 27:23
  Right. It's power isn't just power. Also works a lot like class.
• 27:29
  Right. You can't just freeze it and look at it. It always has
• 27:32
  to be manifested, embodied in some act. Right. So it's a widely
• 27:37
  dispersed phenomenon that has many different sources, and it's associated with a theory of
• 27:41
  causality in either culturally or politically or legally speaking. Yeah, I also go
• 27:47
  ahead. No, what I want to ask is like, is that always
• 27:52
  true? Because it seems to me that in some cases, versus the internalization
• 27:56
  of legal mores, power operates most effective when it is displayed through an act,
• 28:03
  but there's no overt reference to the source of power itself. Right.
• 28:08
  You know they have the old anecdote about you know how it is that if
• 28:11
  you see the king and his authority and operation, that probably means the state
• 28:17
  is falling apart. And sovereign power is that it's most effective when there's really
• 28:22
  no need to display it because everyone knows it's operating. It's omnipresent and so
• 28:26
  on. And so forth. So like, what kind of performances or jets
• 28:30
  us need to be done to demonstrate the continued operation of power without making it
• 28:37
  so visible that people can call it into question. This is what I was
• 28:41
  going to ask, Mirian, because I think these examples are going to be
• 28:44
  really helpful to people that are listening to this. So I always can speak
• 28:48
  in abstract terms, but I always have like a very concrete form in my
• 28:52
  head. So when you're thinking of FUCO, what is the most concrete example
• 28:56
  that you have sticking in your brain? Miriaan the famous chapter at the end
• 29:02
  of this like surveyor Puna, right when he speaks about the Panelticon and he
• 29:07
  says, this is how society and the norm process it works, right like,
• 29:11
  and this relates to what Victor was saying and what Matt was saying,
• 29:15
  right like the fact that we internalize all these norms in society, right and
• 29:22
  even though we act as if someone was enforcing them, even though there's no
• 29:27
  one there enforcing them, or even if we don't know there's someone there enforcing
• 29:32
  them. This is one of the reasons I like to go the most is
• 29:36
  because he says at this power becomes part of our subjectivity. Right, it's
• 29:41
  basically becomes who we are. Yeah, I mean my favorite quote by him
• 29:45
  was always the soul is the prison of the body, right. I thought
• 29:49
  that was really I'm intervene. I'm sorry, I'm an intervene on behalf of
• 29:53
  our viewers because we had the word drop that people are not going to know
• 29:57
  what it means. Probably nless you've read FUOC. But the Panopticon, oh
• 30:02
  yeah, is a circular prison where there's a tower at the center, and
• 30:07
  there's a guard in the tower or not in the tower, you don't know.
• 30:10
  But if you're a prisoner in one of the cells, you have to
• 30:12
  act as if there's a guard in the tower, whether or not they're watching
• 30:17
  you, because you can't see inside. So the direct correlation to our society
• 30:22
  would be surveillance cameras or security cameras. You don't know if anyone's watching on
• 30:29
  the other side of that at any point, but they could be, so
• 30:33
  that, like Mirian just said, you act as if they are there,
• 30:37
  whether or not there's anybody there, So that becomes a part of your own
• 30:41
  behavior. Whether or not there's actually power there, you don't know, but
• 30:45
  the power itself is that relationship, which is exactly I think fits with the
• 30:48
  example I'm Att was giving of, Like that person at the red light,
• 30:52
  right. I guess you could argue that he doesn't know if there's a red
• 30:53
  light camera, could be a red light camera, but you act as if
• 30:56
  there's someone watching, or that there's a red light camera or whatever. I
• 31:00
  think this story is better if there is no red light camera and he's just
• 31:03
  sitting there by himself anyway, Well there usually isn't. Yeah, yeah.
• 31:07
  I also just think it's such a Canadian story, right, Like there's this
• 31:10
  guy and he's like, well, that's the law though, and you know,
• 31:12
  I'm not going to go through this red light even if there's not another
• 31:15
  person for one hundred and fifty kilometers. Well, they probably can't afford red
• 31:18
  light cameras in Saskatchewan selling canola all day. I don't know how much money
• 31:23
  canola makes these days. But so I wanted to pick up on something before
• 31:27
  that. Marian was talking about the way like it's sort of a constitutive of
• 31:30
  subjectivity power, and I think often like the term power, especially in leftist
• 31:36
  discourse, is kind of like talked about in a mostly negative light. I
• 31:41
  would say but I think, especially in the Fucodian definition, if I remember
• 31:44
  correctly when I was reading Discipline and Punish, like, there's really a strong
• 31:47
  sense in which power is productive. Right. It's not just something that that
• 31:52
  just that like stops people from acting, but in some ways it creates the
• 31:55
  conditions for people to be, Like, it creates subjectivity, like, it
• 32:00
  constitutes a lot of relations that maybe wouldn't be possible without it. So like,
• 32:06
  I think the Fucodian definition kind of broadens what it means because it's like,
• 32:09
  you know, in some ways you like be I don't know, like
• 32:12
  I felt like some of the implications of the account and discipline and punishes,
• 32:15
  you know, to some extent, subjectivity itself may not even be possible without
• 32:20
  power. And can you furnish us with an example of its productivity? Well,
• 32:25
  like the fact that our personalities like so language, our personalities like that,
• 32:32
  our cultures or like our norms, anything that anything that like gives us
• 32:38
  a sense that in a social situation, this is appropriate and this isn't is
• 32:43
  a result of power. But that's also kind of what makes us human beings,
• 32:47
  is like to have some sort of sense of what's appropriate and what's not
• 32:50
  appropriate in a given situation without that, right, Like, I mean,
• 32:54
  in some ways, I actually I think I've only read like a little bit
• 32:58
  of madness and civilization, so maybe this is actually an example from that.
• 33:00
  But like it could be like, isn't people who suffer from mental illness?
• 33:06
  Right? Maybe they are like some some types of mental illness people. These
• 33:09
  people haven't instilled like any norms in them in themselves at all, so they're
• 33:13
  kind of like outcasts because they don't fit into like any They don't they almost
• 33:19
  can't have an inter subjective relationship with with with people in a society. So
• 33:25
  in a sense, I think it like it creates the conditions for like a
• 33:29
  shared world, you could argue power. One thing I'm gonna say before anyone
• 33:35
  else says anything. We're getting very abstract, and every time I'm going to
• 33:39
  press you for examples unless you bring it up on your own, so make
• 33:43
  sure to do it. I was gonna give two examples. First one was
• 33:49
  precisely making reference to what you said before, like democratic, liberal, capital
• 33:55
  liberal societies, whoever you want characterism, right, think about the like all
• 34:01
  the devices we are using to be to make this podcast possible, right,
• 34:06
  like they are the product not only of course of technological innovation, but a
• 34:10
  lot of complex arrangements of the political economy of states that make this invention possible,
• 34:15
  right and also to communicate. And that would be like I think in
• 34:20
  focus, since this kind of non repressive, productive right like outcomes if you
• 34:28
  want to look at that way of power. And the second example was going
• 34:31
  to be was like our survival as the population of a state. Right when
• 34:37
  when you mentioned biopower right like before, by basically it co refers to biopower
• 34:43
  as this interest the state takes on keeping us alive, right, and today
• 34:50
  that may be like that means as Victor was saying, this can be associated
• 34:53
  to a lot of negative like things like the state denying you your right to
• 34:58
  abortion or not having access to health care. Right. But if you think
• 35:02
  in another light, like the state also took an interest on having us leaving,
• 35:08
  maybe out of selfish reasons because they want to us product it right for
• 35:13
  their own development of state. But even under those selfish reasons, right,
• 35:17
  eventually the state created the conditions for populations to try. You could talk about
• 35:24
  healthcare as an example of biopower because you get free healthcare of course, but
• 35:30
  they're also tracking every movement you do in there, So is it good or
• 35:32
  is it bad? There's not an answer to that. It's obviously better to
• 35:37
  have free health care than to not, But it's an example of biopower.
• 35:40
  Sorry, Matt, continue, No, no, I just was thinking exactly
• 35:45
  the same point, which is that if you look at what's going on right
• 35:47
  now with the COVID crisis, a lot of people are calling for the state
• 35:51
  to intervene in a bioltical manner, precisely because they think it's the only institution
• 35:55
  or set of institutions. However, we want a character is it that's actually
• 35:59
  able to maintain the health of the body politics through sound policy and so on
• 36:02
  and so forth, Right, And there's a strong democratic mandate for this and
• 36:06
  a lot of countries across the globe. So biopower even doesn't have to be
• 36:10
  intrinsically negative. Right, Maybe it can have a useful and even democratically legitimated
• 36:15
  function. But generally, when we talk about power, we're thinking about the
• 36:22
  centralized authority and the exercise of power from above, like from the state level
• 36:30
  down to the people. Right, Like my impression of biopolitics and biopower that
• 36:36
  Fuco talks about is it's what characterizes the modern state. So you move from
• 36:42
  sovereign power, which literally just means the power to kill, so it's like,
• 36:46
  don't fuck with me or I'll kill you. Otherwise, go do what
• 36:50
  you want, pay your landlord. You get to the modern state, which
• 36:53
  says like I'm going to collect demographic information, and now I'm going to understand
• 37:00
  what general age my population is, what their health is, what their gender
• 37:05
  is, what their what their whatever, what their jobs are. That's more
• 37:08
  like character It characterizes the modern state in a fundamental way. It's not just
• 37:13
  like something that we talk about later on nowadays, from now that we're all
• 37:16
  like leftists and woke and shit. I mean, apparently the French state even
• 37:21
  collected data on how often the citizens were having sex, just because they thought,
• 37:25
  like, wow, this is an important bit of health information to know,
• 37:29
  since if people are having sex two or three times a week, that'll
• 37:31
  lead to a healthier, more psychologically stable population. So if it's lower than
• 37:37
  that, we're gonna have to have policies to encourage it. It's either fud
• 37:39
  Co or Della's quoting Fuco. I can't remember which because I've been absorbing both
• 37:46
  this week, but they said Napoleon single handedly dragged an entire nation from sovereign
• 37:52
  power into this managerial disciplinary power by collecting censuses, since his data is the
• 37:59
  perfect example of biopower. I had a quick question for everyone because I've been
• 38:05
  absorbing this kind of literature and partly in preparation for this, but also just
• 38:07
  partly because it interests me. It's kind of nineteen nineties work by Wendy Brown
• 38:13
  and Judith Butler, particularly their books States of Injury and the Psychic Life of
• 38:17
  Power. And I think you could also date this argument to actually the Frankfurt
• 38:22
  School as well, people like Eric from where they said, essentially, you
• 38:27
  know, these French philosophers in particular always see power as something that people try
• 38:31
  to resist or they submit to because they can't resist it. But it's almost
• 38:36
  always uniformly viewed as a negative thing from a psychological standpoint. And what Brown
• 38:42
  and Judith Butler following, you know, people like Eric Frohm said is actually
• 38:45
  a lot of people can really crave a degree of submission to power. And
• 38:51
  they go back to our talk last week. One of the things that they
• 38:54
  pointed out was that a lot of identity politics. Movements now that frame the
• 39:00
  identity around being a victim in some sense crave a powerful authority figure to juxtapose
• 39:06
  themselves against, and that becomes foundational to their sense of self. Right,
• 39:10
  unless I have this figure, this antagonist, who's a power that's impacting my
• 39:16
  identity, I wouldn't know who I was, So I must always make reference
• 39:21
  to who I am in terms of my victimization. Right, really controversial thesis,
• 39:25
  really racy kind of stuff. But I was wondering what we thought about
• 39:30
  that, particularly given all this hoopla about cancel culture, victim culture PC and
• 39:35
  all that stuff. Well, I find it to be an interesting thesis,
• 39:38
  and I feel like to some extent, Jijik has said similar things right about
• 39:43
  like sort of the way like people like whatever politically correct discourse, or people
• 39:50
  who do a lot of on the politically correct left, sort of their identity
• 39:52
  is sustained by being in opposition to this thing that is trying to oppress them.
• 40:00
  And I think to some extent, like the I think like right wingers
• 40:04
  who are like kind of obsessed and fixated on s JW's these days, to
• 40:07
  some extent, I feel like their identity is also now being sustained by the
• 40:12
  fantasy of the neomarxists trying to destroy freedom or something like that. There's something,
• 40:17
  there's something to sustaining or something productive of the fantasy of a stable identity
• 40:24
  that comes from being in opposition to something. I think that to go to
• 40:30
  right wingers for that that's everywhere. That's no, that's me, that is
• 40:36
  that is plastic pills. As an individual, I'm only going to get my
• 40:40
  I'm only going to uh develop my individual identity as resistance to university, as
• 40:49
  a resistance to state, as resistance to yeah, the order. Yeah,
• 40:55
  well, I just always thought this was really interesting to kind of go off
• 40:59
  with was saying right, because you know, she's Juda Butler and Whinnie Brown
• 41:04
  draw a lot of the co right, and they say he's absolutely right that
• 41:07
  power is omnipresent and that you know, it creates certain kinds of subjectivities and
• 41:12
  so on. But Juda Butler's point in the psychic life of powers, but
• 41:15
  we should never underestimate how people might actually create this kind of subordination, even
• 41:21
  if on the surface they want resisted, right, Because if they don't have
• 41:27
  this kind of sense of subordination to push against what are they going to do
• 41:31
  with their lives? Right? They might just sit there and say, well,
• 41:35
  now it's all my responsibility what I do. I alone am responsible for
• 41:38
  my actions, which means I alone, I'm also responsible for all my own
• 41:42
  failings, right, which is not a position many of us want to pick.
• 41:46
  Oh yeah, Marian, does food co ev or develop that thesis that
• 41:52
  people actually want to be, you know, controlled by space and so on.
• 41:58
  I think I think he was hitting some like kind of note there when
• 42:02
  he said we can erase power, right. I don't know if he kind
• 42:07
  of declared it like I say, kind of psychological neither or some sorts.
• 42:10
  I do think he understood it was a fact, right or I that's how
• 42:15
  I understand it. He understood like there is no social relation or no social
• 42:22
  reality without power. Right. That's why this is why first kind of these
• 42:28
  revolutionary aspirations fail, right, because you get like this, some of them
• 42:32
  operate under the assumption that they will conquer power and then kind of eliminate it,
• 42:37
  right, like in this kind of the power of the state, for
• 42:43
  example, going back to hegel Mark's line, right, that's it. I
• 42:49
  like it. So he would have vouched for that. You think if you
• 42:52
  hadn't died, or did he vouch for that? I don't know. Oh
• 42:55
  no, no, no, I don't think so. I don't think was
• 42:59
  invested it all in revolutionary ideas. Okay, all, No, it's just
• 43:04
  it's like fitting people into boxes. I watched a documentary where he said the
• 43:08
  happiest day in his life was apparently dropping acid, going out into the desert
• 43:15
  with a couple of buddies of his and watching the sunset. And this is
• 43:19
  the same time I was super involved in like the BDSM movement in San Francisco,
• 43:23
  trying all kinds of weird shut out. And then they wrote both the
• 43:28
  History of Sexuality, right, so I know the answer, We all need
• 43:31
  to do acid and get into BEDSM. Yeah. And that was just just
• 43:36
  get a little kinky with it, you know, like it's a little sadomasochistic.
• 43:40
  It's it's like the reason why why did why did Kant make the categorical
• 43:45
  imperative so strict that nobody could follow it? Because he liked getting punished.
• 43:50
  He wanted somebody to whip him. He wanted he wanted a domb daddy,
• 43:54
  you know, he wanted somebody to bring the hammer of justice down on his
• 43:59
  ass. If only I can't have a dub daddy, we wouldn't have had
• 44:01
  to read the critique of no practical reason. He would have gone back to
• 44:07
  his second critique and been like, nah, do what you want, man,
• 44:10
  it's all good. But no, he didn't have it twenty. This
• 44:15
  is like our sort of I was thinking about this before, but it's it's
• 44:16
  I'm thinking about it more now. Like I remember when I was reading Discipline
• 44:20
  and Punished. I remember being kind of frustrated by the like the way he
• 44:24
  wrote things to make everything seem kind of nefarious. Like I remember he was
• 44:29
  like he's like, you know, the regularization and the systematization of everything,
• 44:35
  and it's like and I remember in my mind thinking like okay, like yeah,
• 44:37
  like building codes like good, we should have building codes. Like things
• 44:40
  need to be regulated. Things need to be otherwise they're not going to work.
• 44:43
  And you know even in BDSM circles, right, which are like there's
• 44:46
  like you know, there's like rules, right, there's like a bunch of
• 44:50
  like you know, don't do this and whatever, like extremely structured. It's
• 44:53
  like it's extremely structured. We had here's our safe wards, here's the thing
• 44:57
  you can do it. But like, but that's kind of the pleasure in
• 45:00
  it, right, It's like you can be dumbed without the while within the
• 45:07
  categories of that rule base. Yeah, this sounds like this is j point.
• 45:13
  I'm making that up. I don't know. It definitely sounds while you
• 45:20
  are, while you are smacking him into faith. Then now I was making
• 45:27
  this jack point because he compares it to the because it to Courtly Love.
• 45:30
  Right. The reason that the night like debases himself in front of the lady
• 45:35
  is is because he wants He's sort of he's role playing like the servant when
• 45:40
  really he's the white male knight. So what the fuck's he doing kneeling to
• 45:44
  anybody? But that's the that's the cultural code, right, That's how power
• 45:47
  exerts itself is through those internalized mores. But I was I had an idea
• 45:53
  I throw out there. I just want to say, this is gonna sound
• 45:57
  really bad. But I thought you said Courtney Love for a second, Eric,
• 46:00
  really he wrote it about like fans. Yeah, I'm going there.
• 46:05
  I didn't know. No, I think power like in the humanities. I
• 46:09
  kind of resisted ever writing about power because power just seemed to me, like
• 46:14
  today, what vitalism was to the nineteenth century. It's so ubiquitous, it's
• 46:19
  so everywhere, and it's so nowhere, but it explains everything, but at
• 46:22
  the same time it explains nothing. It's just like, vitalism is just the
• 46:28
  living force that animates all life. Power is the living force that animates all
• 46:32
  social life. Great, we've outlined that, and it's completely fucking useless.
• 46:37
  So why could not agree more? Although can you elaborate? Can you draw
• 46:45
  attention to some disciplines or projects that you would say require this element of power
• 46:51
  just to be like there ubiquitously require this element of power. Well, no,
• 46:57
  because power is the explanation for everything in certain circles of com Yeah,
• 47:02
  so give me a circle. Give me an example. So I was dipping
• 47:06
  a little bit into Bruno Latour and if you don't if you know him,
• 47:09
  great, if you don't know him, he's he looks at the social and
• 47:15
  thinks that it's the same way that I was just saying. It's this sort
• 47:17
  of this hypothetical existing force that somehow mysteriously acts on us, but it can't
• 47:24
  be found anywhere. And so when you talk about social theory, for example,
• 47:30
  like why I don't know why boys or boys and girls or girls because
• 47:36
  society tells you you have to be one or the other. And then we
• 47:38
  don't we're satisfied with that explanation. We don't ask then, well, why
• 47:43
  does it have to be one or the other? We just cut it off
• 47:45
  right there, and it becomes this just mysterious, That's what I'm saying.
• 47:50
  It becomes this mysterious force. There's no examples of it because it's everywhere and
• 47:53
  nowhere. Anything. You can point to my house as a result of power.
• 47:58
  No, no, no, I mean exam Oh yeah, well then
• 48:00
  Latour Latour thinks that way because I have easy examples of people who think that
• 48:07
  way. If you spend any amount of time on the internet, then it's
• 48:13
  like capital did this, and capital did that, and capital is making these
• 48:16
  decisions, which is exactly It's kind of ubiquitous force that has no particular Yeah,
• 48:21
  I mean it is a bit like geist or spirit too, Like there's
• 48:23
  nothing. You can't do anything but further unfold geist or further manifest power,
• 48:30
  and it just becomes this. It's so universal that it explains nothing. This
• 48:34
  is the very first chapter of Hegel's logic. Is when you have something that's
• 48:39
  everything. It's also nothing at the same time. Because it's pure, it
• 48:43
  has no properties whatsoever. So uh yeah, when people talk about power or
• 48:47
  capital or patriarchy or all of these words that just are meant to be er
• 48:52
  explanations, they have no specific properties, which is exactly why fu Co wrote
• 48:58
  every book the way that he did. And it's like, let's sit in
• 49:00
  a bed in a psychiatric hospital. What happens when you're in that bed,
• 49:05
  people come and give you medicine. When you stand up, they ask you
• 49:07
  why you're standing up. And this is the way that power is internalized by
• 49:10
  specific actions, not by miasma. Power doesn't come into your head. It's
• 49:15
  put into your head by the actions of these authorities and uniformed authorities specifically around
• 49:22
  you. Huh. And this is what my theory of cause and effect comes
• 49:24
  into play again about it because in the Latin terms, right, the explanandumb,
• 49:30
  the thing we're dumb about, the thing we want to know, becomes
• 49:32
  the explanads. It becomes a thing by which we explain everything. And in
• 49:37
  this grand reversal, power and society and geist and vitalism they become the things
• 49:44
  that we want to explain. They transform into the things that just explain everything,
• 49:49
  and then in doing so, they explain nothing because they're just that's metaphysical,
• 49:52
  it's useless. Well, I do want to say, I do think
• 49:57
  there's something you could as playing the pervades all human relations, right, I
• 50:01
  mean, I think he makes the case pretty clearly that even in seemingly neutral
• 50:06
  disciplines like medical inquiry, right, you can see the influence of power when
• 50:09
  it comes to things like hiring, or which scientific paradigm is respected at any
• 50:14
  given time, and so on and so forth. Right, What I think
• 50:16
  the problem is Eric's not criticizing fu CO. He's criticizing people who read fou
• 50:22
  CO and go, oh, power, now we've an explanation for everything.
• 50:25
  Oh yeah, you know, I'm getting to them because I don't like them
• 50:28
  either. Because one of the best readers of for CO that I've encounted recently
• 50:32
  Marian recommended him, actually was Thomas Lank, who wrote a very good book
• 50:37
  on pco's governmentality, and he said the problem with developing such a total critique
• 50:43
  is that eventually you feel there's not only no reason to try to resist power
• 50:49
  anymore, but you don't even have any conceptual resources with which to resist it,
• 50:52
  right, because any value to judgment you make has just gone to establish
• 50:58
  a new form of hegemonic idea or hegemonic discourse. It's going to be just
• 51:01
  as bad as the one before. So why bother trying to resist anything?
• 51:06
  And I think this is the problem with trying to say power is everywhere.
• 51:08
  Yes, it may be everywhere, but that doesn't mean we can to make
• 51:10
  a valuative judgments using other methodological and philosophical approaches to try to decide what exercise
• 51:17
  of power might be better than another. Right, Like some of the examples
• 51:22
  we're bringing out, right, Like, I don't think that there's anything wrong
• 51:23
  with an exercise of power to establish sound building codes, or an exercise of
• 51:28
  power on behalf of democracy to try to establish universal Oh yeah, there you
• 51:35
  go, or you know, a healthy environment except zing. But I mean
• 51:40
  this is the problem that you get with like just kind of totalizing explanations that
• 51:45
  are meant to just explain something but then ultimately end up just encompassing your entire
• 51:49
  worldview. Right, you lose the capacity to actually evaluate from a normative or
• 51:53
  a setek or whatever standpoint, which exercise is a power might actually be helpful
• 51:58
  or useful and which ones are probably worth. Yeah, it becomes like a
• 52:02
  fifth element, like an ether quin essence. It just stands in for what
• 52:08
  we can't explain. But I mean, yeah, you're you're right about all
• 52:13
  that. The and the approach to it is to whenever you're making a study
• 52:16
  of something like you're doing organizational studies or gender anything, you have to carefully
• 52:22
  circumscribe the context that you're looking at or else, or if you have no
• 52:25
  boundaries, then power again just becomes this sort of all encompassing explanation of things.
• 52:32
  Yeah, Marian, when you were doing your your your thesis work,
• 52:37
  did you focus on a specific element of go in application? What interested me
• 52:44
  was analyzing biopower in a liberal and societies, right like because to me,
• 52:52
  but then it seemed like like neoliberalism and tailor a lot of like on seen
• 53:00
  uses of these biopower that were that were deemed as acceptable without being like criticized.
• 53:08
  Like let's say traffic cameras. Right when you now get like a camera
• 53:14
  and it like basically snaps your picture when you commit like a traffic violation,
• 53:20
  right, Like we think that that's kind of okay, right because it prevents
• 53:23
  like accidents or whatever. But it's kind of a way of like surveillance,
• 53:28
  right, because it's used to gather data about the population for example. Right.
• 53:32
  And and also in interests me as a feminist, in the way the
• 53:39
  state approach women's bodies for example, right, that it's their right to control
• 53:46
  our bodies. I think that's another way, like another form of biopower.
• 53:51
  And just going back to this, like, yeah, these concepts that are
• 53:53
  all encompassing and then they end up not encompassing anything. This idea of patriarch
• 53:59
  is I think, and in some context patriarchy can rather be for example,
• 54:05
  understudent's biopower that's rector throwards like women's bodies and that kind of stuff. I've
• 54:13
  driven in western Mexico and there wasn't a fucking single traffic camera that I ever
• 54:17
  saw in my life. Yeah, I agree. Like as a Mexican,
• 54:23
  it's very interesting because in in western developed the countries, all the academics are
• 54:30
  like, oh, this is something that we have to oppose, this is
• 54:32
  wrong, And as a Mexican he's like, no, maybe discipline needs something
• 54:37
  that we need. I think that, Yeah, I think that at least
• 54:42
  in some parts of Mexico they do need. They could use some they could
• 54:46
  use some fucking cameras, because it's just the intersection and everyone's honking, like
• 54:50
  driving through each other's cars, being like, and I'm sitting there like,
• 54:54
  no, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go I'm gonna drive into someone's car.
• 54:58
  So then I'm sitting in the middle of an intersection for like thirty minutes.
• 55:02
  Anyway, So I think we can agree that that power is never neutral,
• 55:07
  but it's not always something negative exactly something to be decried. It's not
• 55:15
  neutral though, and even if we think it's sort of beneficial, it can
• 55:19
  turn ugly in a in an instant, like facial recognition technology or something like
• 55:24
  that. That's which is why I think Matt's Matt's like sort of account of
• 55:31
  sort of maybe the better question from a perspective of political theory or like normative
• 55:37
  political theory would be, you know, what's It's not so much like power
• 55:40
  escaping power, but more so like what what are like better states of affairs?
• 55:45
  What are what's better uses of power? And what are the reasons for
• 55:47
  subverting power, decentralizing power, like avoiding these concentrations of power that just seem
• 55:54
  to be like endemic to the neoliberal setup of things, right, Like those
• 55:59
  those those are ways like you're not combating power, though, you're exercising power
• 56:05
  just in a sort of new way exactly to make up more egalitarian, democratic
• 56:08
  sort of exercise of power instead of that sort of classic because if you're like
• 56:13
  a Frenchman writing in and around the sixties, you're probably very concerned with authority
• 56:17
  and centralization and fascism and those sorts of things. Yeah, I just want
• 56:22
  to interject and say, also, I don't think these are new questions in
• 56:25
  some way. Like one of the things that always I think about when this
• 56:30
  occurs to me, it's like the Athidities has book The Peloponnesean War, which
• 56:34
  has a lot of interesting ruminations on when is power legitimate when it's not.
• 56:38
  And my favorite quote from that book is when the democratic Athenians land on the
• 56:43
  island of the Milians, who are purportedly an ally of them, and they're
• 56:46
  basically going to subjugate this people, and the Milians are like, well,
• 56:50
  how can you do that? You know, you have this democracy and you
• 56:52
  believe in individual freedom and civil rights and so on, and the Athenian delegation
• 56:55
  basically says we're not going to bullshooit you. We're better than that. We're
• 57:00
  not going to say that there's some noble reason for this. The reason we're
• 57:02
  doing this is because the strong do what they will and the week suffer what
• 57:06
  they must, and you're the weak and where they're strong. So get used
• 57:09
  to it, right, But kind of in the Malian objection is this notion
• 57:14
  O, Well, if you are exercising this power for a democratic reason,
• 57:19
  then maybe a legitimate maybe we'd even buy into it, right, But because
• 57:23
  you're just exercising it for your pure self interest, now it's illegitimate and we're
• 57:29
  going to resist it. Right. So decidity seem to me to be pretty
• 57:31
  aware that this was a problem, right, And I imagine you could look
• 57:35
  at other Greek authors and Chinese authors and there'd be parallel discussions at that point.
• 57:39
  And I think the fun thing about talking about power too is it's very
• 57:45
  like the way we see power most is in mundane things and in everyday things.
• 57:52
  Right. Like an example I was just reading about is like, of
• 57:55
  course, like to drink, thirst is a biological need, but then everything
• 58:00
  from there on is power. What you drink, how you drink when you
• 58:05
  drink it, whether you drink green tea or coke, Like, those are
• 58:07
  all power structures that are negotiated in everyday cultural discourses depending on where you're from
• 58:15
  and what time period you're from and all that sort of thing. Like power
• 58:20
  is very mundane, like that's we talk about power, like these grand applications
• 58:24
  the Peloponnesian War and Spartans, But really like power is something like like even
• 58:30
  when you're talking about women's bodies, right, like fashion is one of the
• 58:34
  most fascistic applications of power to women's bodies you can imagine. And it's so
• 58:40
  it's so mundane at the same time, but it's so insidious, yeah,
• 58:45
  totally, And it forces you to look and think in certain ways. It
• 58:49
  forces you to conduct yourself in certain ways and try to gauge how other people
• 58:53
  see you. And I mean it can be really anxiety provoking for a shame
• 59:00
  producing anxiety provoking even discuss even the way we're discussing power, it's so right
• 59:06
  now, top down, and even if it is top down, the question
• 59:09
  that you should ask to power is like, what do I feel like I
• 59:14
  should be as soon as I walk out of my house? And obviously that's
• 59:19
  much difference for women's bodies than for men's bodies. But even like, how
• 59:22
  would you conduct yourself if you knew someone might be watching? As opposed to
• 59:25
  how would you conduct yourself if you knew someone wasn't watching? And this has
• 59:30
  a lot of implications, especially for sexuality in terms of FUCO, particularly because
• 59:36
  you wrote the book literally on it. But yeah, how do you conduct
• 59:39
  yourself in what could be public space? And then even when you're in private
• 59:46
  space, how do you still internalize how you should be acting in public space
• 59:51
  in the way you respond only to yourself? And that's that's power at its
• 59:54
  most fundamental, even just as fundamental as language too. Language is infused with
• 1:00:00
  power relations, right, Like, even when we talk about legitimate power,
• 1:00:06
  we're using a we're using a legalistic metaphor for power, right do we assent?
• 1:00:13
  And a lot of people, for instance, think that wearing a mask,
• 1:00:15
  being forced to wear a mask is an illegitimate use of power on the
• 1:00:21
  on the part of the state. But it's it's in our that's off the
• 1:00:25
  pot topic. Yeah, it's built into our language as well, the way
• 1:00:29
  we use language in the way then as a result, we sort of perceive
• 1:00:32
  the world and interact with each other. It's fair. I just want to
• 1:00:36
  say, Eric, whenever you want to start the revolution against Louis Bata or
• 1:00:39
  adultch in Gaban or something, I'll be right there in the street with you.
• 1:00:44
  Right. You know, there's some things that wouldn't march and fight for,
• 1:00:46
  but you know, to end the reign of you know, adulching Cabana,
• 1:00:51
  I'll be right there. Yeah. Maybe maybe we're the only anti dulching
• 1:00:54
  Gabana podcast. Yeah, yeah, fuck your Gucci. I think it's one
• 1:01:01
  of the interesting things too, because I just growing on what Miriam was saying
• 1:01:05
  earlier. I wonder if women have always occupied a kind of peculiar position when
• 1:01:09
  it comes to buy a power, And I knew a lot of feminist theorists
• 1:01:13
  have argued this right, since women have historically, you know, putting aside
• 1:01:19
  all the qualifications about sex and gender right now, been the locus for the
• 1:01:22
  reproduction of society. Some have argued that the state has always paid a peculiar
• 1:01:28
  amount of attention to their body and to their sexuality, since they're capable of
• 1:01:32
  doing something that that men fundamentally aren't. Because that's something that's worth exploring,
• 1:01:37
  Well, I would ask Mirian because I've never been a woman before, so
• 1:01:42
  very true. I don't know that I can attest to the veracity of that
• 1:01:49
  statement, But what the menix that came up? Can you say? Well,
• 1:01:52
  there are a number of feminist theorists drawing on Fuco who made the argument
• 1:01:59
  essentially that well, one of the things that we need to talk about when
• 1:02:02
  it comes to the bioltical power isn't necessarily these kinds of brand things that people
• 1:02:07
  talk about, you know, the regulation of migration, or keeping the Polish
• 1:02:14
  pure in some ethnic sense, but actually the kind of one more mundane activities
• 1:02:19
  to police women's bodies and police women's sexuality, precisely because the state is always
• 1:02:24
  known that women are going to be the primary caregivers, the ones who are
• 1:02:28
  responsible for reproducing the native population, and so it's always taken a kind of
• 1:02:32
  special interest in women's sexuality and reproductive life. Yeah. Well, just to
• 1:02:38
  make apprecision, I think we're referring to mundane, like the mundane expressions of
• 1:02:45
  power. We're referring to what goes is micropower, right, like all these
• 1:02:50
  like like biopower is the characteristic of modern states, right for fuc it didn't
• 1:02:59
  make cist in states that are not modern, and of course theys that are
• 1:03:05
  not kind of in this European tradition. I don't know if like free I
• 1:03:10
  would say there are no free modern uses of biopower in that sense. Maybe
• 1:03:17
  I have to think more about that in but I do agree that what some
• 1:03:22
  people called patriarchy is biopower, right, Like this regulation of women's bodies wasn't
• 1:03:30
  one of the first exercises have something like biopower came around during the Black Death,
• 1:03:37
  where like they were doing census data on and you know, marking whose
• 1:03:44
  house has had the had the bubonic plague. And I mean that's that's sort
• 1:03:49
  of in Fucao's mind where it all started, Isn't it like that that sort
• 1:03:52
  of laid the laid the model for them what would become the sort of general
• 1:03:59
  modern state, that microcosm of the Black plague. That's kind of meat though,
• 1:04:05
  what does he say about that? Well, about the about the Black
• 1:04:11
  plague? Right, it has to do with Uh, it's again this this
• 1:04:15
  discipline, this disciplinary force where you'd be quarantined in your house and you'd probably
• 1:04:21
  have a big red cross marked on your door, right, is. I
• 1:04:26
  think that's where the red Cross came from in the first place, is when
• 1:04:29
  the plague victims had a red cross drawn on their door, which was like
• 1:04:32
  a sort of very primitive early modern exercise of biopower. It's like who's sick
• 1:04:38
  and who's healthy, and that's sort of where it all started. And then
• 1:04:42
  you just from there healthy sick, you get more subdivisions and more subdivisions.
• 1:04:46
  But that that that's where it all begins. And other other states don't have
• 1:04:50
  that sort of idea of power. Their idea of power is more like if
• 1:04:55
  you look at even like early modern, well medieval literature like Beowulf, right,
• 1:05:00
  the way they are all positioned around the table, the way the women
• 1:05:03
  bring the drinking horn from man to man, like, that's a different exercise
• 1:05:08
  of power. It's more metaphorical. It's more analogical. Or even if you
• 1:05:13
  look at like throwback organizations like the Masonic guilds or something like that, the
• 1:05:16
  way they sit around the table is very reminiscent of like the Last Suppers and
• 1:05:21
  singing songs and that sort of stuff too. So I don't know, I'm
• 1:05:26
  rambling. Now, somebody else take over, Marian. I hope You can
• 1:05:30
  correct me on this if it's incorrect, But I think the best way to
• 1:05:34
  understand biopower is that the state always believes, and the state politicians in particular,
• 1:05:41
  they always believe then when they're exerting biopower that they're doing it in the
• 1:05:45
  interest of the population. It's never a mechanism to actually hurt the population.
• 1:05:49
  They say, No, if we have all this data and this might be
• 1:05:53
  interesting relation to COVID in this case, No, Yeah, you are totally
• 1:05:59
  right, right, always like to go burn, to administer, to manage
• 1:06:03
  the population. Right, Because yes, as you're saying, it is mostly
• 1:06:09
  referring a positive way, right, how the state wants, as would go
• 1:06:14
  say, like make us live. Right, This is like a females like
• 1:06:18
  things. But it can also have some very necropolitical expressions like genocide. Oh,
• 1:06:30
  you're gonna have to explain that. So the quote that you're saying right
• 1:06:32
  now is I think when he says sovereign sovereign power controls death, that means
• 1:06:39
  they control when you die. If you like, disobey your lord, for
• 1:06:42
  example, then modern societies control life that they want you to be healthy,
• 1:06:48
  not just so that you can be like a good worker but so that they
• 1:06:53
  can stay in power more or less, they want you to be here.
• 1:06:56
  So why don't you explain necropolitics as like a development within that modern state.
• 1:07:02
  Yeah, like we didn't talk about this. This was like the later ideas
• 1:07:06
  developed, like drawing upon right and necropolitics basically refers to this state even by
• 1:07:14
  omission and active participant of your death a drive I don't know, Like yeah,
• 1:07:21
  like saying go out and buy COVID doesn't matter, We don't need to
• 1:07:27
  worry about COVID. Yes, yes, exactly, or if you think,
• 1:07:31
  for example, like war seeking states, right, like states that's actively want
• 1:07:41
  to go to work, for example, I'll say that our other expressions of
• 1:07:45
  necropolitics in the context of Mexico, for example, it's been said that the
• 1:07:51
  necropolitical kind of dimensions or the state is when the state doesn't do anything to
• 1:07:58
  prevent the killing up women, right because they are women, for example.
• 1:08:02
  So I'd say that, yeah, most of it is positive, right,
• 1:08:05
  how the state wants you to live, but it can have this like also
• 1:08:10
  when the state doesn't do anything to prevent you from dying or actively makes you
• 1:08:15
  die. I wanted to bring up like one final example actually because This was
• 1:08:18
  a really interesting one that I learned about some time ago, and I can't
• 1:08:23
  fucking remember the name of the author who did this study, but she drew
• 1:08:27
  on for Ponian accounts of biopolitics and associated with a feminist analysis, and she
• 1:08:33
  pointed out the way that prostitution had been treated in England for about two hundred
• 1:08:40
  years. And she pointed out, interestingly enough, that like during the Christian
• 1:08:43
  book, prostitution was generally not seen as a social problem because it was perceived
• 1:08:47
  as an individual expression of sinfulness, but because everyone was sinful, it was
• 1:08:55
  also broadly tolerated. It's like, wow, there's nothing we can really do
• 1:08:58
  to get rid of it. People are fallen and they're going to give into
• 1:09:00
  their bodily urges. But starting in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of
• 1:09:04
  vitalistic philosophies, to go back to Eric right, in this kind of scientific
• 1:09:09
  managerial style, the state took an intense interest in prostitution as an instance of
• 1:09:15
  social vice where people are going to be having children outside of wedlock, and
• 1:09:20
  that would undermine the British Empire's capacity to actually control all of its territory because
• 1:09:28
  there wouldn't be enough children coming from legitimate families to actually replace those who are
• 1:09:32
  never going to die. And this was particularly with reference to the city of
• 1:09:38
  London, where during the nineteenth century there were more prostitutes than ever before.
• 1:09:43
  And at the same time there's this extreme hyper regulation of people's sexuality that you
• 1:09:48
  find expression of in all kinds of Victorian novels. And the point that the
• 1:09:54
  author was trying to make is that this goes to show you how it is
• 1:09:57
  that women have always occupied this very central position in the biopolitics of the state,
• 1:10:03
  because they're seen on the one hand as a necessary and even the kind
• 1:10:09
  of vital source for the reproduction of society and in this case, the reproduction
• 1:10:13
  of imperial British power, while at the same time they can potentially be a
• 1:10:17
  great danger if anngage and vice ridden activity and have children out of blood law,
• 1:10:24
  which will undermine not just you know, the individuals that they're engaging with
• 1:10:27
  now, but the whole society as a whole, like in total right,
• 1:10:30
  and the British Empire will fall because there's too much of this going on.
• 1:10:34
  And it's really interesting the kind of drama that was associated with all of those
• 1:10:38
  This is exactly what the duality of power that we've been talking about the whole
• 1:10:43
  time is like, yeah, we need to protect women, but why do
• 1:10:45
  we need to protect them. It's because they're raising the next generation of men
• 1:10:53
  or something like that. Well not just men, but like men who are
• 1:10:57
  going to go into other countries to impose ritish well across the world. Right,
• 1:11:01
  one thing I wanted to finish off, because we're sort of running up
• 1:11:05
  against time here is the way that I look at the way that power is
• 1:11:12
  discussed, at least online, which is sort of my new stomping ground,
• 1:11:17
  my new area to do research in. We have not a single time brought
• 1:11:23
  up capital except for the very beginning of the discussion. But if you go
• 1:11:27
  into these online spaces, the only thing that they care about in terms of
• 1:11:30
  power is like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and the Democrats and the Republicans,
• 1:11:40
  and they're all colluding and this is what power is. But I think what
• 1:11:45
  we've done a good job of today is we could have gone there at any
• 1:11:48
  point if that was what we were concerned about. We will we probably will
• 1:11:51
  in the future. But the point is that power is far more mundane than
• 1:11:57
  some people with money that dictate people decisions. Power is inside of your brain.
• 1:12:03
  It's not inside of Jeff Bezos's brain. Yeah. Good, Yeah,
• 1:12:11
  we didn't go there, maybe because well one Fuco is a little bit hostile
• 1:12:15
  to to uh talking about maybe capital which leads to Marxist right. But the
• 1:12:21
  topic power was the topic, but we just all drifted to well, something
• 1:12:29
  something we didn't bring up was hegemony. Right, that's another deliver discussed.
• 1:12:34
  So when whenever you see some people online arguing about cultural elites and cultural elitism,
• 1:12:42
  what they're talking about is Grahamcian hegemony, and it's almost what what is
• 1:12:46
  the ruling class and what ideology is being imposed on us from above? So
• 1:12:54
  Jeff Betso's and the Silicon Valley whatever his fucking name is, and the in
• 1:13:00
  the Silicon Valley technocrats, right, they're they're the head at least for once,
• 1:13:05
  it's not my pronunciation as being attacked. So academic academia. Did you
• 1:13:11
  see the did you see the article I posted yesterday, Eric, the one
• 1:13:15
  by the Federalists, Yeah, the one I'm about to speak, Yeah,
• 1:13:17
  yeah, that's exactly it. Like the Favoralist, for those of you who
• 1:13:20
  don't know, is a far right basically block where people talk about how the
• 1:13:25
  United States is the greatest country ever is and it's the Santana Leftism is going
• 1:13:30
  to destroyed not just you know, the United States, but the Western world
• 1:13:32
  as a whole. But like the author of this piece, who's a PhD
• 1:13:35
  student, was talking about the ideological superstructure and how it had been captured by
• 1:13:42
  the left and how the goal of the political right was to recapture control of
• 1:13:47
  the ideological superstructure to establish a new form of cultural hegemony. And it was
• 1:13:53
  amazing to me because I was like, I can't believe that in the twenty
• 1:13:56
  first century there are now conservatives were Grahmcians, Yeah, there are conservative Bramhewes.
• 1:14:02
  That sounds crazy. So I don't want to go into neo Marxism for
• 1:14:08
  this episode because we're about at time. I just thought it was interesting that
• 1:14:13
  we give the topic of power and we just talk about Fucaut the whole time,
• 1:14:16
  which is not really surprising because I think Fuco is the best diagnostic of
• 1:14:23
  power that we have. And the reason is just what Marian said, like
• 1:14:27
  at the beginning of this conversation was that it becomes your subjectivity, and that's
• 1:14:31
  what true power is. It's not something imposed, it's something that you put
• 1:14:35
  into your own mind and then act it out as if it's real. Yeah,
• 1:14:41
  I was gonna say it's one of the perspectives like feminists prefer FUCO,
• 1:14:45
  but some are also Marxist feminists, which we didn't get into. Would have
• 1:14:49
  been nice to talk about. Yeah, as I said, this is going
• 1:14:54
  to be probably a six week series and we've only done one. Thinker,
• 1:15:00
  Marian, are you free next week if we just want to do one specific
• 1:15:03
  fu Code book? I was thinking Discipline and Punish. Sure, Yeah,
• 1:15:09
  I love to discuss that book. I love that book. I don't like
• 1:15:12
  what Victory I think I was saying. I do think there's a lot of
• 1:15:15
  marks in that book. I actually have signaled it to where it's Marx.
• 1:15:21
  Do you guys want to do that next week? Well, sure it's gonna
• 1:15:25
  be. It's gonna be. That's a that's a good that's a good idea
• 1:15:30
  for Patreon only. Yeah, fuco our patrons. So we're gonna do final
• 1:15:38
  thoughts and we're gonna go at least on my screen from right to left.
• 1:15:43
  So Victor, you're up first. What'd you get out? What did you
• 1:15:45
  get out? Today and what do you think people should get up today?
• 1:15:50
  It was a wind Yeah, it was a very wanting conversation. That is
• 1:15:55
  a very tough tough thing to answer. But I guess, like I think,
• 1:15:58
  like the important takeaway, like for for because I think Fuko, like
• 1:16:01
  the popular reading of Fuco, and like these these accounts of power, like
• 1:16:05
  I'm like overemphasize the negative aspect, and I think like the important like an
• 1:16:10
  important takeaway would just be that like power is incorrectly interpreted if it's just talked
• 1:16:15
  about in a negative connotation, in some ways, it's just like productive of
• 1:16:18
  a social worlds, and then there could be like good versions of power and
• 1:16:23
  then bad version. I think that's like an important takeaway, all right,
• 1:16:26
  Matt, mm hmmmm hmm. No, I completely agree with Brizonia on that,
• 1:16:30
  right. I think, not speaking for everyone, but kind of speaking
• 1:16:33
  for everyone. The kind of consensus view I got was that we all admit
• 1:16:38
  that or we all think that power is pervasive and it takes many different forms
• 1:16:43
  that can exist in the mundane world as well in these much more spectacular forms.
• 1:16:46
  If you talk about state power, but not all power is intrinsically negative
• 1:16:51
  if we evaluate it from a normalive point of view, and when it comes
• 1:16:57
  to trying to make assessments about which kinds of power or we should accept him,
• 1:17:00
  which ones we should rejack, those are all very complicated questions, especially
• 1:17:04
  because power is so all pervasive, and it testifies to our need to have
• 1:17:09
  a fairly robust moral outlook in order to make these kind of subtle judgments.
• 1:17:13
  But that's a whole topic for a different conversation, right, And then Marian,
• 1:17:17
  had we do I don't. I don't think none of us have read
• 1:17:20
  FUCOT as much as you or as recently as you. So was it all
• 1:17:24
  right? And what do you think our listeners should get out of FUCO?
• 1:17:28
  If nothing else? Now? If anything I was thinking, Eric is uh,
• 1:17:35
  that's why I didn't want to do this last week because Eric, Eric
• 1:17:39
  got Eric got canceled by the storm. Yeah, okay, I did so.
• 1:17:46
  Yeah. I think what you were saying is so right, and I
• 1:17:53
  like, go we're talking about power because it allows us to think is many
• 1:18:00
  levels about power. You can think of how power is exercised from the state,
• 1:18:04
  as legal as biopolitics, as biopower, but you can also think about
• 1:18:09
  all the other institutions that also exercise power in a disciplinary way, right,
• 1:18:13
  like the school, family, like religious like the church. Right. And
• 1:18:17
  it also allows you to think about how power, for example, shapes language,
• 1:18:25
  as Eric kind of Rughly mentioned, right, Like in Spanish we have,
• 1:18:31
  as you might know, feminine and masculine. Right. And when you
• 1:18:34
  want to say in Spanish, you don't say thank you all. You usually
• 1:18:39
  say thank you all the men, right, for example. That's the way
• 1:18:43
  of schooling women, et cetera. Right. So, but no, I
• 1:18:45
  like to go because it allows you to think of all the different ways in
• 1:18:50
  which what power is exercise and all the different effects that it has, like
• 1:18:57
  at the level of the state or subjectivity, et cetera. And that's why
• 1:19:00
  I'm sorry I made this conversation about football. You didn't. You didn't.
• 1:19:04
  I think we all did together. Yeah, but you brought some focus to
• 1:19:11
  it. Yeah, we would have just been shooting the ship and been like
• 1:19:14
  remember that traffic camera in Saskatchewan. If you have any listeners in Saskatchewan,
• 1:19:21
  we should point out that we don't hate them. We certainly don't think that
• 1:19:25
  we don't have any Maybe we will one day, Well we do. I
• 1:19:29
  just want to point out that's just to reference our favorite Canadian think you're JP
• 1:19:34
  Peterson when he says that, Yeah, exactly, when he says that women
• 1:19:40
  are the agents of agents of chairs, that's wrong. We women bring the
• 1:19:45
  discipline. Well, that is definitely closer to my experience of women. Anyway,
• 1:19:54
  you're left with the final word up on the pill pod on state power.
• 1:20:00
  Yeah, yeah, sure, I agree with all the praise that was
• 1:20:03
  directed towards me. Listen, would I say and take what all these other
• 1:20:08
  clouds say for a grain of salt? Because my word is gospel. That's
• 1:20:12
  a great final thought. No, seriously, it is. No. I
• 1:20:16
  think I wish we got into more of my semiotic territory. I would have
• 1:20:23
  had a few more things to say about speed bumps and traffic lights. But
• 1:20:28
  that's okay. Yeah, we got into one dimension of power, and I
• 1:20:31
  think we dug in pretty deep. But there's a lot more out there to
• 1:20:35
  talk about. And I think those mundane manifestations of power are the most powerful.
• 1:20:41
  Yeah, totally, And we have a few more weeks to do that.
• 1:20:43
  So we're going to sign off. We've been through the ringer a little
• 1:20:48
  bit, but I think it was a productive discussion. I think it was
• 1:20:50
  fun I hope, I hope everyone was tracking along. I was trying to
• 1:20:55
  intervene on behalf of listeners that might have not known what's going on. This
• 1:21:00
  is you were being you were being a good disciplinarian task Yeah, exercising his
• 1:21:04
  show host power. No, I gotta I gotta discipline you, guys.
• 1:21:09
  I gotta really making that power dynamic quite uneven between us. Now. The
• 1:21:15
  question is really that I got to internalize it into your mind so that you
• 1:21:18
  can stop dropping jargon and uh say in my name on the podcast, specifically,
• 1:21:26
  Matt. If I decided to say your name, that's an active resistance
• 1:21:30
  at this point. All right, Rye. I was gonna say goodbye to
• 1:21:34
  Eric Audios, Bye Mirian, I hope you can come back next week.
• 1:21:41
  Bye bye Matt. And again Matt, you can't wave because no one can
• 1:21:47
  see you waves. Looking forward to the next one. By the way,
• 1:21:54
  I was also going to say, we should maybe like record the video on
• 1:21:57
  these one time and put them up on YouTube. Maybe. Yeah, that's
• 1:22:00
  a bit. Oh my gosh, I know you, I know you're freaking
• 1:22:02
  honey for the YouTube. I'll get to it. You'll be the first to
• 1:22:06
  out. Okay, Okay, Bye, Bye guy,