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Enlightenment and Tradition
Scheibler nicely illustrates the disagreement between Gadamer and Habermas about the value of tradition. Habermas rejects tradition and 'authority' as mere dogma and prejudice. Gadamer sees tradition as the Heideggerian world into which we are thrown - the background against which any enlightenment must emerge as figure.
Michel de Certeau - The Practice of Everyday Life
This is an easy to read and informative take on the notion of the active audience. De Certeau draws some interesting comparisons between the way groups adopt and modify language to make it their own, and how cultures adopt and modify other cultures when forced to live within them, for example Soho or Little Italy. When a medium is imposed, groups make of it what they will and take something personal away. Of course there are limits to interpretation, however this particular essay really puts the notion in to context and makes its plausibility apparent.
Power = knowledge = discourse
Foucault is hard to read. Maybe start with a primer. The primer will tell you that knowledge is power, and access to discourse is access to power. But, it's a little more complicated than that.
Or... when people tell you "it's little more complicated than that", in that patronising way they do, ask them why they think you wouldn't understand? Actually, by telling someone that they don't understand, that you understand something better than they do, you're actually exercising power over them. I know more than you. I know better than you.
For Foucault, knowledge is power. The history of medicine may be partly about understanding malady and improving health. But it is equally about giving medical institutions power over your body. The history of psychiatry is also a history of making people subject to head-doctors, who can section you. The history of sexuality is a history of the norms of society exercising power over the individual. Being someone who has the authority to define illness, mental health, or sexuality, means being someone with power. And being someone without power means being a subject - subject to society, subject to institutions.
And being a person who can access discourse - who can stand up and speak, or sit down and write, or log on and blog - also means being someone with access to power.
Tags: authority citizenship culture media-participation power
Authority is good.
Thomas Hobbes' contempt for the rabble of humankind can probably be forgiven in light of the fact that he was writing towards the end of the 17th century and had witnessed the civil war in which the English decided to murder each other. Human life is meaningless brutal and cruel.
However, his main point - that the mass of mankind needs a sovereign to rule over them unquestioned, in order to lift them out of their natural state of animality - while it may be a good argument for the hereditary principle and the absolute power of a monarch, is about as pessimistic, patronising, and authoritarian as it gets. Perhaps he would have liked living under Stalin. Apparently many Russians did. I don't think I would.
Rebellion is good.
Tags: authority brutality citizenship civilisation elitism humanity media-participation
Carnivalesque
Since his ideas were actually deeply subversive in Soviet Russia, Bakhtin can be abstruse to read. In an authoritarian regime, it is possibly advisable to disguise your celebration of subversion and heterogeneity.
Bakhtin casts the 'epic' form as the voice of authority, and in opposition to this is a folk language which appropriates the material of the epic, and ridicules and subverts it. People seek zones (like the market place, or the festival and carnival, or parodic literature) where they can 'turn the world on its head' and appropriate discourses, which are normally intended to be serious and lofty, into humour.
In short, real people laugh at authority. See the internet, generally.
Tags: authority carnival carnivalesque epic heterogeneity humour laughter media-participation
The Active Reader
This reader contains a really useful section on 'Reading as Resistance' - the notion that the reader has interpretive freedom... 'Preferred' meaning, as perhaps intended by an author, can be 'ripped' by an 'active' reader.
This work is based partly on Stuart Hall's ideas of encoding and decoding, and ideas about the active reader/audience which came out of the Birmingam School.
These ideas are (sort of) parallel to the writerly text of Barthes (but, ironically, easier to read).
Tags: active-reader author authority birmingham-school media-participation
The Writerly Text
Barthes' classic close examination of Balzac's story Sarrasine is introduced through an exposition of 'what is in the practice of the writer and what has left it'.
'What can be written' is the 'writerly' text - the creative space in which the reader becomes the writer. Contrast with the 'readerly' - the meaning we can only recieve from an author, that closes off interpretation, and that demands our submission to the authorial voice...
This is an important moment in understanding the subversion of the author - and therefore of authority. And yet can we not overplay its significance? Is it not a paultry kind of freedom to produce meaning, merely when consuming another's text? Why not simply write our own?
Tags: author authority media-participation readerly writerly