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What's difficult to understand about the current moment is that, although we perceive a great and terrible power, it's not clear who is wielding that power. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.
The postmodern theory of knowledge intersects with the ascension of woke power in the thought of Michel Foucault, the #1 most cited researcher according to Google Scholar. We will see why this is important. https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1171911758715523073 …
Foucault taught that power does not inhere in individuals, but in networks of people, that it is manifest between everyone and everyone else at all times, that it cannot be possessed, only enacted, and that it coerces by manufacturing "truth"
"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced by constraint. Each society has its regime of truth: the types of discourse it accepts; the mechanisms which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned"
Power is induced by "truth", which is contingent and socially constructed. This makes conservatives bristle, because they rightly know that there is an immutable reality, but they refuse to understand how much flexion their own minds have with regard to the absolute
The dissident right breaks from the "mainstream" right precisely when realizes, along with Foucault, that "truth is not the privilege of those who have liberated themselves." Moldbug's famous dictum is "The sovereign determines the null hypothesis"
Moldbug also identifies the distributed nature of sovereignty, and he gives the name "cathedral" to the "decentralized conspiracy". The cathedral is not any specific people, it is a network of power relations defined by incentive gradients and sustained by our institutions
Even so, I suggest you avoid fixating on "the cathedral"; it soon becomes an embarrassing mental prison, a fully general scapegoat that clouds what it was intended to clarify. There is no truth that can be rescued from power.https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1020322404751441921 …
The cathedralite has no power of her own, but she is able to exercise power on behalf of the cathedral by acting according to its truth. Anyone, no matter how lowly, is able to wield Foucauldian power to control others as long as they act in accordance with power's truth
Knowledge constrains action; Foucauldian power operates by means of knowledge; the sovereign sets the null hypothesis. Cathedral power justifies itself thus: "there is no evidence that my truth isn't true"pic.twitter.com/ieEsetiISl
Power is decentralized. If a single node in the knowledge/power nexus flips, the cathedral treats it as damage and routes around it. If a Harvard dean or NYT editor goes rogue, they get ignored or ejected.
Everyone knows more or less what power expressed through truth demands. We can sense it; we know the magic words we can say to give orders to others. "That makes me uncomfortable." "That's hateful." "That could offend some people". The words sound innocent but they aren't
If you challenge a person who is enacting power, they can escalate. Your nearest authority knows the "truth", and will side with power. If he doesn't, his superior will, or his, and so on. In rare cases, these things go to court, where truth is constituted as law and precedent
Usually your little rebellions won't get that far, because your social group, acting in concert, will reject or correct you. No one needs to tell them what to do. The algorithm "everyone move towards your neighbor" creates emergent patterns called flockingpic.twitter.com/L7Aj2JeBDl
Truth is manufactured by academia and disseminated through media. "Citation" is the mechanism that is used to manufacture truth. Their science is not empirical, it is prescriptive. Once a decree is published, it can be "cited", and becomes "evidence" https://twitter.com/jcbonthedl/status/1280277382910410757 …
Power-Knowledge is not broken by simply pushing back against it. In many cases, resistance can reify it, as many in this sphere have noted. This is because facts are only loosely correlated with knowledge. La Wik on Power-knowledge contains a synecdoche of thispic.twitter.com/nhvJ0pgdB6
Power is the source of social discipline and conformity. To challenge power is not a matter of seeking some ‘absolute truth’, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of social, economic, and cultural hegemony within which it operates
In some ways, Foucault's ideas are quite reactionary, and he drew criticism from his leftist colleagues, because his ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, undermine the idea that any kind of "emancipation" is even possible. This is undeniably true.https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1075401124918714370 …
Foucault recognized that humanitarianism is a form of totalitarian control, and that sincere concerns for rights and justice are inadequate for challenging power. If we ever want to reclaim power, we must create truth that is discontinuous with humanitarianism.
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