(no subject)

[schmevil]

Status of brain: utterly fried
Status of presentation: coming along

Have a quote from the book I'm working with:

"There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order."

Where natural order is actually 'natural order', or the naturalized order of social organization/domination.


ETA: What kind of dictionary doesn't recognize 'telos'? God dammit GoogleDocs.

Comments

[outlawpoet.livejournal.com]

Ranciere?

I thought his position was that there was no such thing as a natural social order, and that politics was an invented construct to preserve hierarchy.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's why it's 'natural order'. Ranciere says that the basic equality of humanity "gnaws away at any natural order." And by that he means naturalized order - that which seems natural, but is actually based on a lie; a wronging. The police order (what we usually call politics, but is actually... management, I guess), is the construct that preserves that hierarchy. Politics is what disrupts it.

[outlawpoet.livejournal.com]

so that would imply that most of the actions taken by 'politicians' is not politics, but police management?

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

Yeah. He says that politics is a rare and momentary thing. What happens most of the time is policing the social: ordering it, controlling it, distributing power within it.

[outlawpoet.livejournal.com]

How does he then characterize the groups that hold political opinions and promote them prior to such a moment? Suffragettes, Huey Long's apparatus, pre-Revolutionary Republicans, and so on existed a long time before the body politic proper took any action regarding their 'political' opinions.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

In his view the action that the body politic takes is more police ordering. Albeit it's ordering in response to a political redefinition of what belongs to the order.

The political is the moment where the police logic, and the egalitarian political logic meet, and a new subject is created: a new speaking being. So the moment of politics when it comes to Sufragettes, would be the moment where the protested the wrong of the status of women, and they were heard as more than noise; when they became speaking beings and not just noise. I think the moment can be extended for a period of recognition and struggle, before it ends in more policing. Once the wrong was righted, and the subject was brought into the social order, then they'd be part of policing: it would then be a matter of bargaining to get a better position in it.