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Chaosophy - autonomous learning

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Power can only be maintained insofar as it relies on the semiologies<br />

of signification: "No one can ignore the law." This implies<br />

that no one can ignore the meaning of words. Linguists like Oswald<br />

Ducrot insist on the fact that language is not simply an instrument<br />

of communication, but also an instrument of power. 1 The law, as the<br />

culmination of sexual, ethnic, and class struggles, etc., crystallizes in<br />

language. The "reality" imposed by the powers-that-be is conveyed<br />

by a dominant semiology. Therefore, one should not go from a principled<br />

opposition between pleasure and reality, between a principle<br />

of desire and a principle of reality, but rather, from a principle of<br />

dominant reality and a principle of licit pleasure. Desire is forced to<br />

maintain itself, as well as can be expected, in this space between<br />

reality and pleasure, this frontier that power jealously controls<br />

with the help of innumerable frontier guards: in the family, at school,<br />

in the barracks, at the workshop, in psychiatric hospitals and, of<br />

course, at the movies.<br />

Thus, desire is so ruthlessly hunted down that it usually ends up<br />

renouncing its objects and investing itself and its guardians on<br />

these boundaries. The capitalist eros will turn into a passion for the<br />

boundary, it becomes the cop. While bumping on the all-too-explicit<br />

signs of the libido, it will take its pleasure from their hateful<br />

contemplation. "Look at this filth." It will become the gaze, the<br />

forbidden spectacle, the transgression, "without really getting into<br />

it." All the morals of asceticism and sublimation consist, in fact, of<br />

capturing the libido in order to identify and contain it within this<br />

system of limits. I don't mean, here, to oppose centralism with spontaneism,<br />

or the disciplines necessary for organizing the collectivity<br />

with the turbulence of the "natural" impulses; nor is it a matter of<br />

reducing this question to a simple case of morality or ideological<br />

strategy of dominant powers in order to better control the exploited ...<br />

The dualities morality/instinct, culture/nature, order! disorder,<br />

master/slave, centrality/democracy, etc., appear to us to be insufficient<br />

236 ,1

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