Discourse is important. It affects everything we do. I don't know how many of you have read orson Scott Card's "Ender's" series but for those of you that have, you must realize that the power of discourse shapes th world. Therefore it is detrimental that we discuss the current state of the world and what to do about it. But First we must consider what I call...the problem of polemics....
We have a serious problem. A very serious problem and I have no idea what to do. We recognize the system is bad. We recognize that the system must normalize its participants to perpetuate itself. We know all this. But the people who know all this are either authors who have already been normalized by the state and perpetuate capitalism (which is an apparatus of disciplinary power) by selling their books, students that do very well in school which is the main institution of normalization, or crazy people that no one takes seriously because they are outside of the realist system. This is incredibly serious. How can we fight the oppression of the state when the people that are aware of it are deeply enmeshed in its framework already. It seems impossible. But there might be a way. Slavoj Zizek, unlike many authors who write on critical theory, believes that we can work inside the state. He believes that we can overthrow the realist system by working inside the realist system. We can do this by sticking the letter to the law and creating metaphoric condensations around policy options. That's all fine and good. But he also says that we have to sacrifice something for closing this gap for otherization. We must sacrifice the safety of ourselves. We must throw ourselves in the open, vulnerable to the super power as everyone else outside the superpower is vulnerable to it. Only by removing ourselves from this master (American exceptionalism as the one power) will we then realize that the master is superfluous. A lot of people ask me what kind of society we will have at that point but is it really so hard to imagine a world where one power does not control and oppress everything. Will this world be perfect? No, it can't be. We have to give up our dreams of perfection. There are too many local acts of power relations. At the end of the day we have to ask ourselves if we would risk our safety for the possibility of a better world. Whatever that world may be.
The ones who are not beaten down on must beat themselves hardest and it is hardest for them to beat themselves for so long they had been the one with the closed fist.
Now where does this fit in polemics? Well....if we don't take action, what is criticism but polemics?