I remember reading an interview with Foucault. The interviewer asks him something like "who are the subjects who oppose power?" His reply was something like, 'the bourgies are fighting the proles, the proles fighting the bourgies, and within we are all fighting with each other. inside there are always internal struggles within ourselves." (paraphrase)
What I remember most of all about that, though, was that he said, to paraphrase, "I really don't know the answer. It's something I struggle with. It preoccupies me some days. Other days not" (that's from memory)
it seems to me, as I once wrote awhile ago, that it's worth while saying, "you know, I just don't know. And you know, Carrol and Miles and vouyou and shag and Chuck, they don't know either."
Looking for the right questions to ask my answers an' all....
And then I thought, well, I suspect that, in the past, it must have felt like "we" didn't know what the fuck "we" were doing either. And there must have been people in a corner wringing their hands at the timidity or paltryness of this or that action. I mean, how many actions were there that we'll never know about because they weren't big enough for anyone to take notice?
And then I thought, wait! Is the expectation that we can control the future, shape it, decide precisely what to do as if it were a science, not something recent? A new thing? Which is why we don't really have people sitting around, in the past, worrying about what, oh what, to do about "us" and "we" and an appropriate response to oppression and tyranny. In other words, is this just a peculiarity of, for lack of a better term, modernity?
I guess it's just a discomfort with radical uncertainty? With not knowing if we're on the right path? As I describe it, I'm reminded of novels of middle class angst where the protagonists worries that he's not on the right path to success in his career.
Rambling....
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)