{"id":12925,"date":"2014-07-02T11:24:29","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T15:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12925"},"modified":"2014-07-02T11:24:53","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T15:24:53","slug":"12925","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/07\/02\/12925\/","title":{"rendered":"stavrakakis agonism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Challenges of Re-politicisation: Mouffe\u2019s Agonism and Artistic Practices.” Third Text<\/em>, Vol. 26, Issue 5, September, 2012, 551\u2013565<\/p>\n

Check out Mouffe’s take on agonism\/art<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, are we really conscious of the ease with which the post-democratic malaise is accepted and legitimised, of the ease with which people accommodate themselves to power strctures and resist change?.”<\/p>\n

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic \u2013 or at least relieved \u2013 to submit themselves to conditions of subordination<\/strong>, to the forces of hierarchical order? What had already emerged with Etienne de la Bo\u00e9tie as the troubling question of voluntary servitude, and through Stanley Milgram\u2019s experiment as an elementary psycho-social structure of obedience to power, is today further reinforced through the transformations in the ways in which the social bond is regulated and obedience secured.<\/p>\n

And it is not a problem of false consciousness or education. It is a problem of desire<\/em>.<\/p>\n

No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.<\/p>\n

In his preface to the Anti-Oedipus<\/em>, Michel Foucault locates this problematic at the centre of their explorations. In his view, the strategic adversary of Deleuze and Guattari is the fascist tendencies implicit in all of us<\/span><\/strong>, informing our judgement and behaviour: \u2018the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us<\/strong>\u2019.<\/p>\n

Foucault was right when he observed that power does not only denote coercion and repression: power relations are tolerated and even desired<\/strong>, because they produce identity, give meaning, procure pleasure<\/span><\/strong>. In a similar vein, Jacques Lacan indicated the crucial role of enjoyment ( jouissance<\/span><\/strong>) in securing obedience \u2013 in Lacan the super-ego command is \u2018Enjoy!<\/span><\/strong>\u2019. Indeed, in late capitalist societies, it is the command to enjoy \u2014 through consumption \u2014 that increasingly constitutes the ethical foundation of the social bond<\/p>\n

Hence it is utopian to think that persuasive critique and a (local) de-legitimisation of hegemonic discourses alone can threaten their smooth reproduction. Very often we ourselves function as the worst enemies of our freedom, of another more enabling structuration of our desire.<\/p>\n

to thematise and highlight our personal implication in the reproduction of power structures and of the inability of conscious knowledge to effect a shift<\/strong> in this relation.<\/p>\n

What is called for, in other words, is a restrained re-politicisation able to function at both the cognitive and affective levels in order to make us assume responsibility for our multiple accommodation to power structures.<\/p>\n

Can contemporary art function as an agent of such a re-politicisation?<\/p>\n

The first step in any subjective \u2013 or collective \u2013 change is to assume responsibility for our direct and indirect, conscious and unconscious, cognitive and affective implication in our symptom: to put it in Lacan\u2019s terms, we need to identify with our symptom<\/span><\/strong>, to thematise our own attachment to what secures our servitude<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In this way we can also avoid the fetishisation and demonisation of the enemy figure as an alien intruder destabilising our supposed harmony, characteristic of \u2018speculative leftism\u2019; Kentridge\u2019s use of his own image in the depiction of Eckstein offers a useful mechanism sublimating violent antagonism into democratic agonism<\/strong>: true change always requires an ambiguous struggle against our own selves<\/span> and no easy solution is available here, no purity can ever be achieved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Challenges of Re-politicisation: Mouffe\u2019s Agonism and Artistic Practices.” Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 5, September, 2012, 551\u2013565 Check out Mouffe’s take on agonism\/art Indeed, are we really conscious of the ease with which the post-democratic malaise is accepted and legitimised, of the ease with which people accommodate themselves to power strctures and resist … Continue reading “stavrakakis agonism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laclau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12925"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12927,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12925\/revisions\/12927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}