Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world', but also - and above all - to 'change time'.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience
👍6
Widespread dissemination of the practices of mental hygiene and the norms of development and personality, as articulated by biopolitical authorities and the agents of advertising, resulted in new technologies of the self. Adults and children were educated about norms of behavior and affect in order that they might assume responsibility for monitoring their families’ well-being. Mental hygiene was presented to mothers as a logical extension of nineteenth-century sanitation practices as they were instructed in how to care for their families. As mothers assumed responsibility for their families’ mental hygiene, the locus of governmental relations shifted from the state, the institution, the hospital, and the clinic to the daily micropractices of individuals engaged in their everyday routines (see Nettleton, 1991). From surveillance technologies to development of technologies of the self, the problematics of physical and mental health, and their links to citizenship, became increasingly individualized. Did this new model of medical subjectivity and new apparatuses of normalization produce a ‘freer’ subjectivity? Although the mental hygiene movement and the development of the study of ‘normality’ deemphasized repressive force, they also ushered in new panopticons of power/knowledge that fragmented old binary formulations of difference and normality with nuanced continuums while implementing new surveillance strategies and technologies of the self that circulated across the spaces and practices of everyday life […]
Majia Holmer, Nadesan Governmentality, Biopower, and Everday Life
Majia Holmer, Nadesan Governmentality, Biopower, and Everday Life
❤1
In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have no meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of the cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]. There are no “weekdays.” There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion
👍7