An understanding of power requires that we initially consider the dialectic between structuralism, which holds in various ways that power emanates within structure; and voluntarism, which holds that individuals hold and exercise power. We should consider that both positions are correct but incomplete; that human agency exists within structure. This is why it is so important to understand structural factors such as ideology, language, values, the distribution of wealth, and other cultural beliefs. It is equally important to explore the degree to which individuals have some conscious autonomy to affect change. This raises questions about the nature of freedom, subjectivity, critical thinking, deception, and how beliefs are shaped through ideology.
We can ask questions about the nature of power; whether it is a thing that can be possessed; how it is exercised; what its effects are and how we can now them. Perhaps power is a thing, like money, that can be used to influence others. Perhaps it is just a word that is an alias for a strategic and tactical grid of relations that uses language, ideology to create truths and goods. Even so, it is my deep belief that structural violence implies non-egalitarian and non-mutual social dynamics, the features of which I will explore in a later chapter on sado-masochism. First, though, I must consider the basic inter-relational characteristics of human beings, i.e., how we relate to each other; how we structure our relationships; and how think of relations with non-human, sentient beings.
We can imagine a continuum encapsulating the most mundane behaviors between human beings and deep structures in social infra-structure, language, and institutions. At every level, there are common practices that are mediated by technologies of power that colonize us consciously and unconsciously. We live these common practices daily as we traverse our hodological maps, primarily interacting with family, friends, work colleagues, and strangers along our typical routes. Components of power come from custom, habit, tradition, law, etiquette, religion, geography, education, politics, science – every major institution of a society – as they are interpreted by each nodal point – a person – as they are manifested in human relationships of all kinds.
While it is true that some power comes from the state and ultimately from the dominators, because of the structural unconscious, and because of the implied consent I addressed earlier, in the end it comes from everywhere, and traverses everywhere. We become participants in it; embedded in it; indoctrinated by it; and ultimately produced by it, to the extent we do not engage in insurrectionist resistance. I suspect that this is part of why it is hard to detect and resist: it is an unclear target.
It is my view that capitalism supports a system of oppression and repression, as I have outlined. In this perspective, power is something held by the wealthy and the powerful, such as money, property, and opportunities. Those with it repress those without. That is the classic line. But there is a second step, which involves indoctrination and mass deception. This surpasses strategies of simple repression, and inverts them into strategies of complacence, agreement, permission, and production. Repression does not end, but it does produce another dimension that can be largely unconscious, is structural, and which inverts repression into production.
In this system, each of us becomes a nodal point of power, passing it, transmitting it, agreeing to it, and producing it. The repressed become complicit in their own repression. Each person, therefore, exists at a socio-political location within and through which complex, multi-dimensional vectors pass. As we agree to them or they are forced on us, we become “selves.” This illuminates how it is that power is embedded into structure as well as a function of conscious and unconscious forces, concatenating and integrating.
There are, therefore, intentional elements built into structure, but at the level of roles or classes of individuals. We can see how different cultures have different structures and, therefore, different systems of intentionalities, unconscious and conscious. This helps us understand how structure underlies our cultural values, for example, our choice to maintain a capitalist system that exploits most people. Some individuals desire to possess money and property to fulfill a psychological goal. They acquire these items through intentional means and participate in inter-relational dynamics with others who might be exploited or harmed by them.
Because there are so many people, it seems an impossible task to analyze the behavior of billions of people, individually. Instead, it becomes more feasible to consider the various classes of individuals, the dynamics within which we situate our lifeworld, and to make judgments about the outcome-structures, as they relate to oppression, power, and violence. We can also analyze intentional structures between individuals of a type and other individuals of another type. This can help us understand social structures that are laden with violence, and inter-relational dynamics that are, as well.
To some, it has seemed positive that we have a system comprised of industrial-capitalism, competition, regulations, and laws that are designed to drive production. We hear of financially successive people living the good life, gaining the esteem of their colleagues, and acquiring properties, money, people, and other items they value. We also hear about people at the other end of the spectrum, the very poor, who live in abject misery, but we are indoctrinated into belief systems that ignore these phenomena. These are the invisible, forgotten people who never have enough to eat; whose shelter is non-existent; and who always lack a fair share. We engage in various perceptual deceptions about these matters, in such ways that we retain our positive ideologies about capitalism even though the truth is otherwise.
Said in another way, the sum of our intentionalities usually – and I think always at the cultural level – leads to unpredictable consequences. Right before our very eyes we are seeing how capitalism continues to distribute more wealth to the wealthy and take the remaining wealth of the poor. If this trend continues, at some point we would be able to assert that the wealthy own all the wealth and that the poor own none. Thus, building an economic theory on human desire and a structure of individualism, autonomy, and capitalism – even though it appears positive – unfortunately does not lead to a well-functioning social state. It is, therefore, my belief that there is a relationship between the negative subtext of capitalism and resulting violence.
Let’s break these parts down into three regions to help us clarify our understanding. First, there are the conscious and unconscious intentionalities of specific individuals. Second, there are the dyads, roles, groups, and classes of individuals that form common patterns of intentionalities, but these are not from specific individuals. Third, there are the structures that form from these first two. While it is possible to analyze specific intentionalities of specific people, to understand how they lead to structure, it may be less feasible to do this as a universal project for a population. Instead, it is more feasible to do this in terms of the types of intentionalities, then link these with structural elements.
It would be a valuable project to link intentionalities with structure in both directions because we could potentially create implementations for important political goals. However, even beyond the complexity, we do not have a closed analytical system. In historical analysis, we are constantly evolving, which is the work of the individual and social, ontologically transcendent dimension. This precludes us from forming a fully systematic understanding of strategies and tactics in a society. Thus, there are foundational paths for thinking and action, and within these social paths, there is room for specific, individual choices. There is also the unknown, often unpredictable future within which we have some influence.
One of the chief areas of interest for our purposes is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory, in which he argues that the selfish interests of individual agents will lead to an equilibrium of supply and demand, and thereby maximize the best interests of society. It would be intriguing and perhaps useful to see how individual actions lead to structures of social distribution, as modified by various levels of governmental regulation. At this point, however, we see that capital attracts capital, and that there is a rapidly growing and inequitable shift of money and good moving to the dominators and the wealthy. I am particularly interested in this type of analytic, but moreover, the types of self-structures it involves, and the types of self-structures that lead to both structural and individual violence.
In reverse, I am also interested in how structural and subjective violence modify the various topologies of self-structures, all within a capitalist-industrialist lifeworld. Even thought, at this point, it seems a daunting task to make analytic correlations between the behavior of specific agents and structure, or vice versa, we might first approach the task of understanding structure, hierarchical power, and the actions of individuals within types of relationships. For example, there is a structure that contextualizes the relationship between doctor and patient; lawyer and client; husband and wife. Although we might argue that each instantiation of these types is unique, I would hypothesize that there are common power dynamics with variations that could be analyzed secondarily. In general, I think my hypothesis leads back to a basic premise that there is structure which is, itself, comprised off commonalities – recognizable patterns – that shape the very way we talk to each other.
At an even deeper level, the languages we use contain within them power structures, values, and expectations of the speakers who use them. Furthermore, and with even greater interest, I am interested in the unconscious noosphere, the mindscape that is isomorphic with and that duplicates the social structures within the bodies and minds of individual agents. I assume that each one of us has a different level of awareness of how structural strategies shape and influence – perhaps even determine – the way that we agents think, feel, and act tactically within structure. I suppose that some agents do not understand at all the way that structures influence their thinking and behavior. Likewise, I suppose that some agents have some understanding. Why is this important? I believe that what we don’t know and understand, we cannot change. To the extent that we do not have perspective about the underlying paradigm in which we live, we lack empowerment and facility to examine it, analyze it, understand it, and change it.
I contend that the logic of any Western power grid – both structural and subjective elements – is based on the logic of industrial-capitalism. This logic acts as a bulwark of power within which each human agent acts – shaping, mediating, conditioning, and influencing our behaviors both consciously and unconsciously. Depending upon where a person is located in the strategic level of relevant power relations, their behavior is structurally contained, just as is the behavior of those corresponding agents within the same strategic field.
There are many examples of this strategic map of power relations, for instance, an average student at a public high school is limited in his academic and attendance behavior depending upon his social class, race, gender, class rank. A medical professional’s testimony about the events in an operating room is weighed relative to his or her station relative to others in the room. Normally, a chief surgeon’s testimony outweighs a nurse’s testimony. Here’s another: In a competitive professional industry – for example in major law firms – there are rules young associates must follow for promotion and bigger salaries, but these are all governed by structural expectations, that some know and that some do not. If the master signifier is capitalism, then all actions are ultimately evaluated, structured by capitalist values and weights instead of other values.
Moreover, all other values and truths are interpreted in terms of the master signifier, which means that our very understanding of the suppressed and marginalized elements is distorted. Insurgencies, insurrections, violations, modifications, battles, wars, and other conflict can change these rules but are still contained within the master signifier and its constellation of effects. In a sense, this can be explained by the notion of worlds. Specific actions make some more likely and others less likely. Some actions appear together, and others are suppressed together. This is a matter we can understand philosophically, psychoanalytically, and politically with the assistance of mathematical category theory, a topic for a companion text.
Thus, in my conception, the master signifier founds a world. Different master signifiers create different worlds. In these world choice-constructions, once a new master signifier attains dominance, then it both suppresses other world possibilities and structures all human conscious and unconscious interpretation, motivation, values, virtues, and knowledges. The field of possible behaviors is logically more constructed than the correlative field of possible thoughts, although thoughts that break with the matrix also change behavioral possibilities. This implies struggle. This more deeply implies the possibility of transcendence. We will consider these possibilities further into this text, but first let’s consider the effect power has on the bodies of humans. This assumption seems reasonable given that violence comes from the actions of humans. It is physical and comes from our bodies. It is physical and bodily in its nature even though it is structured by thought and language.
To help me in my discussion, I refer to the work of Michel Foucault, in his Discipline and Punish. In this work, he outlines a genealogy of the Western body as docile, malleable, and a receptacle-transmitter of power relations. This is the thesis that our bodies and minds act as nodal points in the matrices of power. He argues that the concept of “individual” is socially constructed and is based upon categories produced by the social sciences. He says that the emergence of the constructed individual is an effect of the power relationships existing at this time in Western history.
This is an arresting and intriguing idea, that power does not just operate in our minds but that it is invests itself in our very bodies. In Discipline, Foucault also makes the claim that power, which he calls “bio-power,” is now positive and producing rather than merely repressive and closing. This implies that we live out power within our very bodies, no matter our level of awareness of these processes. Also keep in mind that the government is, itself, a nodal point and relay for power relations. Thus, bio-power is concerned with two domains. One is the administration of the social body in activities such as human reproduction. The second is the manipulation of human bodies.
According to this conception, the state invests in fostering life and promoting the growth and care of populations. Interest in human sexuality, production, and health becomes paramount. Scientific knowledge of the human body and its processes explodes. But the state is also interested in the human body as an object to be manipulated. A technology of the body as an object of power is formed, the goal of which is to produce a human being who can be treated as a docile and productive body. This is discipline, an aspect of this new conception of power.
Within this evolution of the effects of power, now viewed as both repressing and producing, there has also been a series of changes with regard to how power has an impact on the bodies of individuals. In the seventeenth century (in some European countries), when power was exercised by a sovereign upon its subjects, it was imprinted directly on their bodies through torture and other forms of punishment. By the nineteenth century this manifestation of power gave way to a much more complex set of power relationships wherein people became docile and mute, dominated by techniques of surveillance.
Visible forms of punishment were supplemented by new forms that were, and are, more difficult to see. For Foucault, a docile subject is not autonomous and is easily manipulable by power effects. It is produced and guided by the effects of power. This produced subject is different from the repressed subject, who is allowed to produce himself as a subject, although his aims and desires are repressed. A “mute” subject is one who does not speak autonomously, not one who does not speak at all. For instance, with regard to sexuality, the effects of power forced mute subjects to speak about it in a certain way, using a certain discourse which was full of value assumptions that were instituted by the effects of power. In this docile and mute state of affairs, behavioral control by discipline has replaced brute torture. Because there are many more points of the emanation of power the state is now mostly a superstructural embodiment of the totality of power relationships. It is important to show how the effects of modern power relationships on the body have changed over the years.
The goal of contemporary disciplinary technology is to control the behavior of individuals through self-surveillance and systems of normalization. Just like in the penal system, docile bodies are utilized by society for economic production and are mimetic, mechanized, and desirous. That is, their productivity typically originates from the effects of power, not from the autonomy of individuals who engage in resistance.
In this system, subjects are forced to comply with institutional and governmental control or suffer punishment. By mechanizing this system, individual subjects are offered various roles to play that have already been established by governmental and bureaucratic systems. This disciplinary technology is pervasive, and both obvious and subtle, as it permeates relationships between individuals and the state, and within individuals in their inter-relationality.
In addition to Discipline, we see analytical analogues in Birth of the Clinic and in Madness and Civilization, in which Foucault studies the medical gaze, effects on docile bodies, constitution of mental illness and immorality, and the condemnation of the unproductive. This perpetuates a political technology of the body in which can read a history of the relations of power. By substituting out vulgar forms of violence against bodies, and substituting in the gaze of the Other, which forms a system of self-surveillance, we produce our own individual morality that actually comes from the government. This forces us to conform our own behavior and thinking to current patterns of morality. I hypothesize that ontically and concretely, this forces us to comply with violent algorithms that invade our minds, bodies, social relationships, and presencing within the physical world.
These algorithms, in contemporary culture, are violent. They are delivered through major social institutions such as medicine, religion, education, military, art, science, politics, and love, creating disciplinary codes – normalization – that force us to produce our desires and our truths within them. This includes work policies, ethics codes, architecture, interior design – all of it carefully constructed to control, dominate, and maximize efficiency. In this type of system, our bodies and minds are determined. This is the structuralization of individual subjects. We are constituted this way. This topology of subjectivity begins to look like there is no self-constituting subjectivity possible – that we are the playthings of language and culture.
What is at stake here is profound. Not only is this system totalitarian with transcendental closures, but it also implies the erosion and destruction of the integrated, whole human being. By fracturing the mind and body with disciplinary technologies, including the normal, right, and good ways to play a role in society, this sort of totalitarianism exercises absolute constitutive power over subjects. Thus, the cultural noetic structure is replicated within all the sets of subjects – the individual and the social are, therefore, isomorphic. The matrix of power relations in a society or culture is deposited onto and into the minds and bodies of its individuals. Thus, we can map an ontology of bodies and of subjects onto a ontology of culture through the phenomenological method. It is within the body that is given through governmentalization that we “construct” our personal identity, our individuality. It is this individuality that operates as the critical agent who engages in this analysis and inspection.
Disciplinary technologies operate, therefore, through surveillance and through discourses of and about normalization. They seem impossible to escape in any meaningful way, and therefore, our thinking and behavior are always conscripted and limited. Deviations from the norm are punished, and the violator often loses participation in the role he or she chose not to play. I believe this goes further than the power-knowledge formations involved in many social institutions to include all dialectical processes between the true-false and the right-wrong. If we apply this hypothesis to all major existential domains, then we can see that power is involved in all questions about self, sociality, the natural-material world, spirituality, temporality, uncertainty, and all other ontological questions.
If power is this pervasive, infecting the very way we think about everything, then there is no perspective that transcends it, and no obvious way to escape it. Thus, discourses about values, morality, etiquette, law, behavior, are all infected by relations of power. This necessarily includes values concerning violence. To be sure, we can argue about the definition of violence. We can have different interpretations of it. We can have different value orientations toward it. Yet, if we apply our axioms, we must conclude that our perspectives about it are determined and constituted by relations of power that use techniques of self-surveillance and normalization. To the extent that our perspectives about violence deviate from the norm, we would necessarily be divided against ourselves, wrestling against both external and internal norms, one produced by the Other, and the other produced by ourselves in conjunction with that Other. In addition, we might not be aware of much of what goes on in that regard. Even so, this battle occurs both in the mind and in the body, causing effects in both domains.
Let’s next delve into the notion that we are ineluctably affected by language, values, ontological structure, sense of reality, behavioral reinforcements, and all other aspects of shaping behavior in culture. It is difficult to believe that we can ever be completely aware. It is more plausible to believe that we are often very much unaware of truths about ourselves, others, the material world, and metaphysical questions concerning uncertainties. It is, therefore, reasonable to believe that we are affected by forces and influences that we do not know about it or do not understand. One way to talk about these forces is through the idea of power as an alias for these forces and influences.
We can talk about these influences and forces in straightforward ways by considering language and those other social and cultural elements that I just listed. We always inherit a culture. Our lifeworld is always within a culture. Thus, everything we experience always has a foundation within a culture. This foundation, I believe, is based on social commitments to signifying chains. It is these chains that manifest value, claims to truth, and claims to the right and the good.
I think it is accepted knowledge that a society or culture is structured by many elements, as both Lacan and Foucault assert, which can be discussed through discourses of power and language. Relationships are complex and unequal because people play different and unique roles in society and culture, with different degrees and levels of influence. This is more complex than the idea that power comes from above and suppresses people below, which is part of the equation but not all. In truth, we all produce power and, therefore, contribute to a complex matrix social matrix. Because “power” is not just repressive but is, instead, productive and participatory, we can shift the question from who holds power to an analysis of power relations. This is a valuable approach because it can help us understand why people have certain beliefs and behaviors rather than others – why people are affected by prominent signifiers – why people are affected unconsciously. This also explain why Internet media powerfully structures our thinking at a foundational level, from the ground up. This also diagnoses how difficult it is to gain perspective about these deeper levels of noospheric space. This also explains why people are drawn to thinking and behavior that they eschew. This is the divided self.
This model explains cultural paradigms, for example, a Cartesian-Newtonian universe, that women do or do not have the right to vote in elections, that white males are privileged, that animals are ontologically inferior and do not have rights, that some violence is legal and morally acceptable. We can just as easily state the negation of these values, in an alternative universe, but this would be a different cultural paradigm with different values and beliefs. We are, therefore, held in place by these underlying systems of power, for they structure everything we think and do.
An important query is whether we can gain perspective about them, have a critical view of them, and transform our position in them, or contribute to a transformation of them. Thus, while it is true that we have a sense of agency within these structures, the structures themselves can be largely unknown and obfuscated. This implies that our choices are already prefigured – reasons prefigured – behavioral options prescribed, for example, chess or checkers. Yet, this is not to say that the noetic structure of our intentionality cannot be critically examined. This is the phenomenological, philosophical-anthropological question of transcendence.
One major problem in this thinking, which I will examine in a proposed Volume 2 of this work, is whether we could ever get groups of individuals together in a meaningful, consistent, and authentic way so as to intentionally design this underlying structure. Foucault does not believe we can. Sartre, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, which I also examine, believes that this possibility is highly problematic, which outlines in his theory of groups. This is a problem in social-political philosophy that I have been working on for decades. This is at the root of the problem I articulate in this book: whether the human anthropology is doomed to violence or whether we have enough freedom to make a different choice – with a different evolutionary path – and a different future. For me, the question is whether we can develop enough intellectual and moral perspective, noetic intentionality, and faculty of will that make these changes in a conscious and reflective way. This is the notion of taking our-selves to task or thinking against ourselves.
In this political struggle, everything each of us does, within the sub-field of our individual life, either promotes or hinders other actions. This is the realm of resistance and freedom, of which we have degrees of awareness. Each action contributes to the underlying, dynamic field of actions – the matrix of power – and becomes a part of its structuralization of current and future actions. Obviously, this structure changes through history, as individual agents act and are prevented from acting by the structure itself. We can see that this is a vision of struggle for these micro-fields of influence – of power itself – as human agents strive to gain influence in their social lives. I also note that our nation, our cultures, and our societies are primarily determined by the master signifier of capitalism, commodification, and [ontological] having, which perpetuates a win-lose social dynamic, especially because of the valorization of competition. I suspect that this [egocentric] drive to “win,” which is positively reinforced by the capitalist-competitive social model, is arguably a factor in motivational structures that lead to violence. This, however, does not preclude struggle, power reversals, and transformation, a subject I take up in a succeeding volume in this series on praxis.
The reason I believe this is true is that within the ontology of our self-structure, we are condemned to evaluate our interpretations of our experience, even though it may be true that we distort, close, or alter them. We are also condemned to seek meaning and value through our behavior and especially our behavior within the human population as we try to construct a self within our relations with Others. This is to attain a sense of a stable self- structure even though this is the futile strategy that is promotes by the possessive self, through capitalism and competition. This is the desire for an ontological fullness which, in principle, is impossible. However, it is not too difficult to see that the structures which promote a subjective, insatiable drive to quench constant desire can easily lead a human subject into an egocentric, narcissistic path in which he does not see the Other, recognize the Other’s life, value, or need; in which he loses his capacity for empathy and compassion; and in which he develops distorted, false beliefs to support his aggression, ones that lead to violence.
Let’s now delve more deeply into the structural elements that inform the self – how we are influenced by them without being aware of them – and how this is challenge to the resistance and liberation. I remind the reader that the subject of this volume is to analyze and diagnose the condition of violence within the human anthropology – to see if we are fated for it or whether we have the self-structural elements to transcend it.
I take it as common knowledge that humans are self-reflexive; that we think about who we are; and that this process is inter-relational. As Foucault would have it, we are “individualized,” requiring each of us to submit to bureaucratic examination and taxonomic placement for the major aspects of our lives. But we do this individually, as individuals, and this starts when we are born unto specific families, in specific regions, each with its own set of micro-values, principles, ethical codes, etiquettes, and truths.
According to Lacan, Foucault, and even Sartre, we attach ourselves early in life to various orientations in being, and placements within the body politic – society – culture. As children, we are forced into it, into various locations and intersections, depending upon the factors I have mentioned. This is our facticity, according to Heidegger. The situations we are forced into and the choices we make within them determine our personal identities. It is important to note that much of this process objectivizes us, turns us into objects, as it were. I find informally that these identities often revolve around socio-economic status, sexuality and gender, choice of occupation/profession, and religion, among other domains. For Foucault, we are constrained and pinned by our personal identities. What this means is that all the forces of power within a culture bear down upon individuals, in ways that are determined by a person’s locatedness within the social matrix. We can assume that various rewards and goods, as well as punishments and deprivations come from each location within a matrix. These are the structural forces that push humans into beliefs, values, and behavior. These are the forces that resist autonomous choices otherwise. It is a dialectic between governmentalization and individual freedom.
Let’s acknowledge that the state forces its way onto its population, constantly seeking ways to subjugate, control, and manage its individuals. These days that management centers around productivity and capitalism. This means that we are all categorized in all state-important domains, for example, driver’s license, census, all forms of taxation, medical, legal, moral, religious, and any other area a locale finds important. This categorization process, therefore, utilizes underlying knowledges like the law, biology, health, psychology, religion, and so forth. Furthermore, we are categorized based on statistical dispersions such as the bell curve, each one of us subjected to these knowledges through their individuating power. It is inescapable. If we occupy certain positions in these taxonomic dispersions, we enjoy positive rewards, for example, status, income, choice of mates, ease of life, and other opportunities. On the other hand, if we occupy other positions, we suffer negative rewards, punishment, and so forth.
These categories are distributed based on what is considered normal, right, and good; in our present circumstance, these values are often defined by the signifying constellation of commodification, acquisition, and capitalism. Thus, any time someone attempts a gesture of freedom that tries to break free from these structures, unless there is some kind of positive capitalist valence involved, they are thwarted behaviorally, attitudinally, corporately, socially, legally, and otherwise. These social and cultural resistances are strong, and therefore they affect the way individuals attach themselves to anything of value. In a sense, they are always mischaracterizations, and in a Lacanian frame, are potentially mis-recognized, resisted, accepted, or distorted by their recipients. This is why we never feel fully ourselves as we each engage orientations, strategies, and tactics relative to our objectivized selves. As knowledges change, individuals change. Yet, let’s not forget that this process is never ending, pervasive, and divide us within ourselves with both conscious and unconscious elements. Thus, sometimes our inner self agrees with our objectivized self, and other times, disagrees. This is the constant dialectic that causes stress, aggression, and in some cases, violence.
In this structural system, unconscious factors also create pathways for self-improvement, growth, advancement, actualization, ideals, and all other related teleological instrumentalization of human motivation. Whether or not someone has originary experience that matches these goals and aims becomes suppressed as we are pushed into objective discourses that provide ontological pathways. It my personal experience that most people don’t consider this ontological under-fact but, instead, live in the ontic, everyday reality of the system that has already been structuralized for them. This is a crucial fore-element in a system of normalization and self-surveillance that reinforces cultural values that have already been chosen in the past. This is why it can be difficult to resist, to be unique, or to autonomous choose a new way in the world. Humans, therefore, risk much when they try to transform societies and cultures.
A model than can help us understand how we are tied to the values underlying our conscious-level personal identities is the multiple-self doctrine. Here, our conscious self-system sits atop very complex unconscious processes. These unconscious processes are isomorphic to the very same ones in culture, and they permeate each person’s “self,” thereby eroding its boundary with culture. However, this conceptual move helps us understand how easy it is to commit to values prominent in our culture, and how difficult it is to resist them, for example, sexuality, capitalism, attitudes toward those from a different race, and violence. Thus, if we live in a sexually repressed culture, we are pushed in this direction and punished when we do not comply. If we live in a capitalist culture, it is difficult to live a different way. If we live in a violent culture, it is acceptable to support violence. It is difficult to violate the boundaries of all three of these value systems either because others won’t understand, or they will disagree morally. Articulating more detailed theory about why this is so is the subject of this book. This is my aim, to clarify.
If we are desiring beings – if the objects of our desires are prefigured – then culture provides us answers to our desires and to the “truth” of who we are. Thus, instead of creating ourselves anew, we simply find out where we are located in culture. This becomes a question of choosing, to the extent we can do so, where we locate ourselves through personal identity, to the extent we can do so. “Discovering” ourselves just is this experience of location. It is not the creation of original, or partially original subjectivity, or autonomy. The question I have at this point in the discussion is whether or not we are completely determined by structure. If we are, then we are doomed to the violent subjectivity I outline. If we are not, then how can we clarify the factors that allow us creative autonomy for free subjectivity, a kind of subjectivity that avoids isomorphism with the power relations extant in one’s culture?
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