hydrarchist writes:
The following essay was recently published by the Bureau d'Etudes and subsequently translated by Brian Holmes. The Bureau d'Etudes operate the Research center about autonomous knowledge and power.
autonomous knowledge and power
in a society without affects
(introduction)
Walking through cities connected to world distribution networks, we shift from one
imaginary to the next, from Monoprix™ to UGC™, from Friskies™ to the Guggenheim™
or Pinault™ foundations to MacDonald's™. Each time we activate fields of relational,
communicational or sensational possibilities, equivalent and interchangeable. The
commodity-possibilities© offered by world supermarket culture are born of desires
and needs conjured up by advertising and the media. They can only be actualized with
the money we have at our disposal, through our work and our credit at the bank. The
richest has a good chance of being right, because he's got the cash for it. He can
create his own commodity-possibilities©, and impose them on everyone else. An
equation associating truth, money, technology and power takes form: it allows you
to work on your own indoctrination, your own subjection. Foucault speaks of "regimes
of truth" by which he means the self-tightening circle in which the subjection
of individuals and the production of subjectifying truths reinforce one another.