fuck yeah theorists

let's try and unthink what we mean by the term 'theorist.'

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The word police normally evokes what is known as the petty police, the truncheon blows of the forces of law and order and the inquisitions of the secret police. But this narrow definition may be deemed contingent. Michel Foucault has shown that, as a mode of government, the police described by writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered everything relating to ‘man’ and his ‘happiness.’ The petty police is just a particular form of a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community. It is the weakness and not the strength of this order in certain states that inflates the petty police to the point of putting it in charges of the whole set of police functions. The evolution of Western societies reveals a contrario that the policeman is one element in a social mechanism linking medicine, welfare, and culture. The policeman is destined to play the role of consultant and organizer as much as agent of public law and order, and no doubt the name itself will one day change, caught up as it will be in the process of euphemization through which our societies try to promote the image, at least, of all traditionally despised functions… [In spite of their general shittiness,] [t]he police can procure all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable to another. This does not change the nature of the police, which is what we are exclusively dealing with here. The regime of public opinion as gauged by the poll and of the unending exhibition of the real is today the normal form the police in Western societies takes. Whether the police is sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics.

- Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (via lowendtheory)

(Source: lowendtheory, via youlikemealready)

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