"The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of the power is based on its optimizing the system’s performance—efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is commensurable) or disappear."
— Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979: p. xxiv)
"what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, on the knower’s straying afield of himself?"
— Michel Foucault 1986, p. 8 (In Shaviro, Without Criteria)
"Expansion of the neoliberal market is not the application of an instrument or model that has been scientifically proven to work best. Markets are social and political worlds with their own cosmologies. Each is a cosmos of its own, an intricately functioning field of power. The expansion of the neoliberal market is much more than the selling of an economic device. It is a political project par excellence; it is a massive exercise of power aiming at no less than creating a world—the whole world—in the image of neoliberalism."
— Elyachar, Julia. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. (2005: p. 214).
"Political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign… What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problem of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done."
— Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (1980, p. 121) (via fuckyeahanarchism)
"Between every point of a social body… there exists relations of power which are not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign’s great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign’s power is grounded, the conditions which make it possible for it to function… For the state to function in the way that it does, there must be, between male and female or adult and child, quite specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative autonomy."
— Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977 (1980, p. 187-188)
