discourse::pathways

John Hopkins 01::October::2009 17:32 → permalink

Looking at Foucault’s conception of discourse as a conflation of semiotics and postmodernism (gag on that stone-like term). Of course, the State (or, in my terms, the Techno-social system), when exercising power has to project power along more or less defined pathways. That is a fundamental characteristic of the TSS — its cumulative ability to (and process of) refining and ultimately reifying the pathways through which power (energy!) moves through the system. This power/energy ultimately and necessarily moves between human participants in the system and the pathways are, ultimately, sourced and targeted through the space of flows (between individual beings) to the individuals themselves, the Continuum of Relation. (see my comments on code in the previous posting, where code is a reified or institutionalized discourse pathway that carries energy between humans.) The expression of power, though, comes not from some externalized and monumental State. The concept of State is simply the active collectivization of individuals life-time/life-energy which dynamically coalesces into a relation or constellation which is a source of projected power. The force of projected power being the ability of a collective to gather excess energies, and organize them (negentropically) in such a way that they may be projected along a chosen pathway. This is where various levels of both subtle and overt control and coercion find their exercise — within individual lives as those lives are mapped into a collective space of more singular flow (vs flows).