industryterm:power systems

The Rise and Decline of a Heterotopic Space : Views from Midan al-Tahrir
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23668/the-rise-and-decline-of-a-heterotopic-space_views-
Une lecture vraiment bien articulée et intéressante (peut être un peu académique) du moment Tahrir et du reflux qui a suivi
Il faut vraiment Jadaliyya ces jours, il y a des textes passionnants

Coupling the work of Foucault and Lefebvre offers us a robust analytical concept that can enrich our understanding of urban space, and revolutionary moments. By offering a modality, a counter arrangement, an alternative way of being and doing, heterotopic space reflects, inverts, and reconstitutes social processes. In powerful ways, Tahrir critiqued the existing system that was corrupt, violent, and inefficient, and offered a model that promised to fulfill the aspirations of many Egyptians. Yet it was quickly unmade as a heterotopic space when dominant groups managed to appropriate it, put it to different uses, and invest it with different meanings. While Lefebvre saw heterotopic spaces as providing “the seed-bed of revolutionary movement” (Harvey 2013: xvii), he also emphasized that they could be quickly appropriated by dominant forces. Thinking of heterotopic space as mediating the utopic and isotopic reveals the multiple possibilities embedded in urban encounters, and the new opportunities they offer for the reproduction of power systems, as well as their transformation and reconstitution. Exploring such spaces, and their changing meanings and uses, especially in the constitution of urban publics, is an important part of any adequate understanding of political mobilization, emerging meanings of citizenship, claims to the city, and the relationship between power, space, and resistance.

#Egypt #Tahrir

#Noam_Chomsky, the Salon interview: Governments are power systems, trying to sustain power
▻http://www.salon.com/2013/12/29/chomsky_governments_are_power_systems_trying_to_sustain_power

We’re developing technologies that will be used by our own governments and by commercial corporations and are already being used to maximize information for themselves for control and domination. That’s the way power systems work. Of course, they’ve always played the security card. But I think one should be very cautious about such claims. Every government pleads security for almost anything it’s doing, so since the plea is predictable it essentially carries no information. If after the event the power system claims security, that doesn’t mean it’s actually a functioning principle. And if you look at the record, you discover that security is generally a pre-text and security is not a high priority of governments. By that I mean the security of the population — security of the power system itself and the domestic interests it represents, yes, that’s a concern. But security of the population is not.