Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Saturday, July 2, 2011

sovereign power. . .

simply produces the obedient social subject it needs. Such a notion of the production of the subject by power, the complete alienation of the citizen and the worker, and the total colonization of the lifeworld has been hypothesized since the 1960s by many authors as the defining characteristic of "late capitalism." The Frankfurt School, the Situtationists, and various critics of technology and communication have focused on the fact that power in capitalist societies is becoming totalitarian through the production of docile subjects.

To a certain extent the nightmares of such authors correspond to the the dreams of the strategists of full-spectrum dominance. Just as the capitalist yearns for a labor force of obedient worker-monkeys, military administrators imagine an army of efficient and reliable robot soldiers along with a perfectly controlled, obedient population. These nightmares and dreams, however, are not real. Dominance, no matter how multidimensional, can never be complete and is always contradicted by resistance.


-Multitude, pp 53-54


I wonder, true or false: is "power in capitalist societies becoming totalitarian through the production of docile subjects?"