(cross-posted with Exploding Beakers)
A few friends of mine recently made a passing reference to the period of time starting in the post-grunge years (1994) to some unidentifiable terminal year that has only recently passed, as being a kind of “neo-Sixties.” Their evidence, and none of them made any kind of claim to academic accuracy, was the resurgence of pot use, focused demonstrations against global capitalism (notably the Battle In Seattle and anti-G8 protests), and other protests against the “unjust wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. While this might be superficially true, I’ve always thought that the general rebelliousness and questioning of institutions during the 1960s was much more far-reaching than we tend to remember it today. One of my favourite classes of stories was the surprisingly common one I call “The Day the Hippies Came and Took over My High School.” The number of incidences of “hippies,” whether they be actual bearded longhairs, or members of the SDS, SNCC, Weathermen, sympathetic Black Panther group, or other civil rights/anti-war group, storming the local high school to institute “teach-ins” is pretty high across the eastern US. The same cannot be said for the period 1994-present. Part of this might be the difference that the Internet has played in distributing information, but I wonder how much might also be the case that the K-12 system, and high school in particular, is no longer seen as the part of the general “system of coercion” that it appeared to radicals in the 1960s. Or maybe that idea is now just taken for granted, but attacking it is assumed to be futile. I’m not sure, but this extended 1971 quote from Michel Foucault seems to outline the thinking at the time pretty good:
“…in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.
It seems to me that the real political task in a society in such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attach them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of supports; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible, the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.”
- from The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature
