Status Updates From Poststructuralism: A Very S...

“The commitment to consensus promotes a bland centrism, appoints the compromise candidate that no one really wants, satisfies nobody, and leaves things much as they are. Conversely, intellectual difference, inventiveness, lateral thinking, heterogeneity all promote modifications of the existing rules and conventions. Dissension challenges the status quo.”

“… desire is always unconscious, and the object of our conscious wishes is only a stand-in for something unrecognized, however much we seem consciously to want that, and only that.”

“But its agenda is a discipline that subjects the inmates, body and soul, to a regime designed precisely to construct them as conforming citizens, which is to say subjects, in both senses of that term, who learn to work by themselves in submission to the values of their society.”

“These institutions [ISAs], while not homogenous in their output, and not without internal conflict, sometimes bitter, have the effect of securing our conscious or unconscious consent to the way things are, by making them appear at best in our interests and at worst inevitable.”

“Moreover, they argue, in order to represent its own interests as the shared values of all members of the society in question, the ruling class has to invest its views with the character of inevitability and convince everyone that these ideas are the only serious option, the one way of understanding the world that is genuinely sensible and valid. … Capitalism becomes synonymous with nature.”

“This new vocabulary still elicits some resistance, but the issue we confront is how far we should let the existing language impose limits on what it is possible to think.”