SYSTEMS
A lecture by Sydney Pasquinelli
What is a System?
• A system of power
• Systems function to establish (an) order
• Systems have two components:
1. Theory / Ideology / Ideological Justification
2. Practice / Implementation of that Ideology
• Systems are tautological / fold into
themselves
• All systems have flaws, but some are more
oppressive than others
What is a System?
• Power is exercised, practiced
• Where there is power, there is resistance
• We can attempt to define and understand
systems of power
• So that we can understand how systems function /
order / oppress
• HOWEVER,
• Systems of power are up for interpretation
• (Systems are discursively AND materially
constructed)
• Systems intersect and interact
• (Interactions effect systems)
Why Systems?
Why do you need to know about systems?
• So you can engage better in debates about
social, political, and cultural theory
• Many debates come down to a comparison of
systems
• Framework debates
• K vs. K debates
• Impact turn debates
PARTICULAR
SYSTEMS
Anthropocentrism
Language
Related Concepts:
• Knowledge formation
(epistemology)
• Dominant discourses
• Suppression
• Censorship
Religion
Most systems can be conceived as
analogous to a religion: a system
ultimately requires participants to
have faith in the system in order
for the system to maintain itself
Normativity
Normative: based on what is considered
to be the usual or correct way of doing
something; prescribing norms
(Merriam Webster Online)
Heteronormativity
• Naturalizes a correlation between 1) sex and 2) gender roles
• Naturalizes the existence of 2 distinct sexes/genders
• Normalizes a heterosexual, monogamous, and nuclear family orientation
Patriarchy
• Privileges (biologically) male bodies
• Privileges masculinity (a gendered category)
• Involves the objectification of females and femininity
• Related Concepts:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Heteronormativity
Paternalism
Feminization
Gender Violence
The home as a system
Matriarchy
Racism
• System of categorization and hierarchization based on
racial (phenotypical) distinctions
• Involves the dehumanization and/or objectification and exploitation
of differently-raced bodies
Related Concepts:
• Whiteness
• Anti-blackness
• Colonialism
• Exceptionalism
• Feminization
Whiteness
• White bodies are privileged by whiteness
• White as the ideal; white experience is normalized
• Non-white bodies and experiences are de-valued, dehumanized
• Whiteness is not as much a biological category as a
social construction
“Who counts as white depends on what is at stake… Whiteness
is best thought of as a form of property... Whiteness can be seen
to provide material and symbolic privileges to whites, those
passing as white, and sometimes honorary whites”
(Audrey Thompson)
Related Concepts:
• Anti-blackness
• Eurocentrism
• Capitalism
• Liberalism
• Enlightenment
Phiolosophy
Anti-Blackness
• White bodies and experience are
only privileged IN NEGATION to
blackness
• Blackness as absolute dereliction,
disposability
• Humanity is established in
negation to black; blackness is
inhuman; a population is human
insofar as it can be distanced
from black
• While anti-blackness and
whiteness are intrinsically
related, some argue that the
frame of whiteness papers over
the means of enacting white
supremacy and potentially reifies
the valuing of white as a category
Anti-blackness can
found in black
communities
Related Terms:
• Slavery
• Social Death
• Whiteness
Orientalism
• Divides the world into the “orient” (the
east) and the “occident” (the west)
• Peoples “of the orient” are de-valued;
they are considered to be uncivilized,
under-developed, “backwards,” unenlightened, and sexually deviant
• Orientalism is perpetuated through
government, media, and scholarship
• Related Concepts:
•
•
•
•
Colonialism / Coloniality
Whiteness
Islamophobia
Dominant Discourses
Colonialism
Colonialism: The forcible taking and claiming of another peoples’
land; involves literal and/or cultural genocide (imperialism)
Coloniality: The ideology which informs colonialism but which
continues to linger even in “post-colonial” societies
“The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be
more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was
established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic
today presupposes an element of Coloniality”
(Anibal Quijano)
Related Concepts:
• Sovereignty
• Militarism
• Hegemony
• Globalization
• Neoliberalism
Neo-Colonialism: Using capitalism, business globalization, and
cultural imperialism to influence a country
“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is,
in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international
sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is
directed from outside”
(Kwame Nkrumah, former president of Ghana, 1965)
Militarism
• The belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a
strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or
promote national interests
(Oxford Dictionary Online)
• Related Concepts:
•
•
•
•
Hegemony; Power Projection
Paternalism
Anthropocentrism; Environmental Degradation
Negative Peace v. Positive Peace
Democracy
A form of government where “all eligible citizens” participate “equally”
in the proposal, development, and creation of laws and policies
Related Concepts:
• Liberalism
• Liberal Democracy
• Republicanism
• Oligarchy
But who are the people?
Republicanism
• Representative Democracy; heads of state are representatives of the
people who hold popular sovereignty (rather than people being
subjects of the head(s) of state)
• “The paramount republican value is political liberty, understood as
non-domination or independence from arbitrary power” (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Related Concepts:
•
•
•
•
Democracy
Liberalism
Elections
Monarchy (that which republicanism opposes)
Liberalism
• A political system or philosophy founded on liberty and
equality
• Related Concepts:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Enlightenment (Liberal individual subject)
Democracy (not only the democratic party)
Capitalism (Private Property)
Neo-liberalism
Rights (Civil, Human)
Freedom (Trade, Expression)
Capitalism
• An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership
of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private
decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that
are determined mainly by competition in a free market
• Based on the principle of individual rights, and in particular property
rights
• Correlates to the political system of laissez-faire (liberalism, freedom)
• When such freedom is applied to the sphere of production its result is
the free-market (the flow of capital)
Neoliberalism
• “Economic Liberalism” – whereas liberalism
emphasizes individual freedom (human rights,
individuals deserve freedom from the state), neoliberalism emphasizes economic freedom (property
rights, markets and businesses deserve freedom from
the state)
• Whereas capitalism primarily involves the means of
production and accumulation, neoliberalism primarily
involves the state’s relationship to the means of
production and accumulation
• Neoliberalism is a collection of economic policies that
have emerged in the last 2-3 decades and which favor
economic liberalization, open markets, free trade,
deregulation, removal of license and quota system, and
so on.
Liberalism
NeoLiberalism
Capitalism
Socialism
• A way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and
controlled by the government rather than by individual people and
companies
• Ideology holds that individuals should have access to basic articles of
consumption and public goods to allow for self-actualization. Large-scale
industries are collective efforts and thus the returns from these industries
must benefit society as a whole.
• Socialism is not mutually exclusive with capitalism,
but it is mutually exclusive with neoliberalism
• Related Concepts:
• Socialist Democracy
• Communism
Communism
• A political theory derived from Karl Marx,
advocating class war and leading to a society in
which all property is publicly owned and each
person works and is paid according to their
abilities and needs
• Communism is one example of a socialist
system
• The means of production are held in common,
negating the concept of ownership in capital
goods. Production is organized to provide for
human needs directly without any use for
money.
• Communism is mutually exclusive with
capitalism and neo-liberalism
Totalitarianism
• The state holds total authority over
society and seeks to control all aspects
of public and private life
• Fascism = leadership by a single political
party
• Totalitarianism = leadership by a single
individual
Sovereign Power
• The power exercised by the ruler (king, president, prime
minister) based on his/her elected or inherited or
violently won "legitimacy“ as a leader
• Sovereign power assesses taxes, enforces the law by
exacting penalties for violations thereof, raises armies in
time of war, and so on
• Sovereign power is typified by the intermittency with
which it is exercised
Disciplinary Power
• Disciplinary power is the kind of power we exercise
over ourselves based on our knowledge of how to fit
into society.
• Sovereign power is exercised through physical
punishment and rewards. Disciplinary power, on the
other hand, is exercised through surveillance and
knowledge
• Panopticon as a model of disciplinary power
• Sites of disciplinary power:
• Prison system
• Educational system
• Religious systems
Biopower
• "One would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life
and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault,
History of Sexuality)
• It takes as its target "the population.” The emergence of this term--the
population--is linked to the emergence of new technologies of
knowledge and power: the nature of the phenomenon that the state
confronts are now different, and the mechanisms the state uses to
intervene are also different
• “Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom
the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the
mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied
at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the
threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body” (Foucault,
History of Sexuality)
• Power is dispersed and difficult to locate as emanating from a singular
source