"Ana L. Valdés" on Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:53:48 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Network, Swarm, Microstructure


I has been working a lot with power and powerstructures. Lived in an anarchist collective in the 80:s
and we studied our own structures, how we did take decisions, what kind of "social matrix" we
developed, etc. We did a year long workshop with some French psychoanalitics adressing the issue of
the power and how the power is reproduced. I don't know how many on the list are familiar with the
work of Cornelius Castoriadis, one of Europes most important theorics in the 50:, 60:s and 70:s,
pivotal for the 68:s movement in France. He was one of the founders of the magazine "Socialisme et
Barbarie", http://www.agorainternational.org/index.html, where intellectuals as Jean Francois Lyotard
wrote.

One of Castoriadis main work, "The Imaginary Institution of Society", coined the expression "imaginary
structures of the society", the corpus of myths and "memes" where the knowledge and the shapes of a
society is written, implemented and transmitted with the aim of reproducing itself. The reading of the
Oedipus myth as a fundational myth is very relevant to understand how the state is reproduced in the
nuclear family. Pierre Clastres, an anarchist anthropolog, spent many years living with the Guarani, a
indigenous nation of several thousands individes, living maily in Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela. The
Guarani developed a very clever form of selfgestion based on rotatory chiefs and avoid any structure
related to stateship or central administration.

Clastres book "Society Against the State" is a very interesting complement to Castoriadis work and
show the pattern where the power and it's metaphors, state, patriarchy, god, act in the level of our
subsconscient and internalizes in us.

We reproduce a society based on values such as private property, nuclear family, heterosexual
normativity, stateship, and we became the power's allies and complices.

Without our cosent and complicity the power can't be exerced or reproduced.

Ana



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