Power
How has your thinking of power since Psychic Life of Power: When I was much younger I was trying to work within Foucault as far as I could go with it, I WAS very involved with Foucault, but last 15 years I’ve been less involved with Foucault. Power was helpful thinking about gender but he could NOT take into account the analysis of the psyche that Freud could provide. Foucaultian analysis of literary texts, not happening.
Ethics, global politics, human rights, Foucault wasn’t the framework I was using. Foucault is no longer essential. When we talk about systemic racism and capitalism, we’re talking about power, but we also need to talk about inequality is reproduced, and can’t be easily subsumed under a general theory of power.
Can Marx tell us anything about power in 2020
Return to a reading of Marx today. I’m happy we’re animating socialist values in USA. Marx has a huge amount to teach us. Today many contingent faculty members are being forced back to universities, asked to work in conditions that are hazardous to their health, like mid-19th Century England.
I don’t think about myself as pessimistic, and my friends call me too optimistic. There was initial moment when shutdown happened in March, Italy, Latin America were saying this is bringing capitalist machine to a halt, can we save the enviroment now, and rebuild on this cessation of capitalism, Arundhati Roy called this shutdown as a portal on to a new world and an occasion for a new kind of imagining. The virus affects all of us potentially, depending on age pre-existing conditions, black and brown suffer disproportionality, institutional lack of access to healthcare. But there is a kind of wierd equality, nobody is absolutley immune, we are all suscetible to viruses. A premonition of equality that the virual condition gave us. It was not a national problem, but an international problem.
But the re-making the world get re-appropriated by industry that wanted to re-start the market.
Radical Equality: Universal Health Care, Guaranteed Annual Income.
Black Lives Matter has been tremendous, defunding police, systemic racism widely debated. Health Care quality, social equality. I am still hopeful, but it is a struggle. A new world will not blossom at the end of this, it is a STRUGGLE but the TERMS of the struggle have been more clear.
Transnational Feminist Movements are enormously powerful movements. Climate justice, Racial Justice. I’m watching with some interest and a fair amount of optimism.
January 20, 2015 on Black Lives Matter
Georgy Yancy interviewing Judith Butler
So the police see a threat when there is no gun to see, or someone is
subdued and crying out for his life, when they are moving away or cannot
move. These figures are perceived as threats even when they do not threaten, when they have no weapon, and the video footage that shows precisely this is taken to be a ratification of the police’s perception. The perception is then ratified as a public perception at which point we not only must insist on the dignity of black lives, but name the racism that has become ratified as public perception.
When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.
Claiming that “all lives matter” does not immediately mark or enable black lives only because they have not been fully recognized as having lives that matter. I do not mean this as an obscure riddle. I mean only to say that we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter?
Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal
formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have
not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.”