Introduction of Part II

Abstract

The task of conceptualizing domination has been a central concern of social critique. This has entailed the analysis of a broad range of power relations between groups, institutions and ideas. Social critiques can nevertheless differ significantly in emphasis. For example, in the work of Marx (2000c), economic forces such as “forces” and “relations” of production are given primacy in domination. Others, such as Gramsci (1971), attributed an equally important role in domination to culture or a group’s capacity to control the means of representation. More recently, and following the cultural turn in social theorizing, it has become rather fashionable to speak of domination in discursive terms. In the work of Foucault (2008), for example, power is abstracted from agents. It has become so diffuse that domination assumes an impersonal character, in the form of ideas or ways of seeing the world administered by contemporary institutions and reproduced in individuals’ practices. Domination is here said to manifest itself in the form of a normalization of conduct, in line with the dominant ways of seeing the world administered by institutions such as the capitalist market. Given the increasing influence such impersonal forces as markets exert over Western societies under the neoliberal age, it is not difficult to see why this particular approach has appealed to contemporary critical theorists (see, for example, Miller and Rose 2008; Lazzarato 2009). The neoliberal condition, it seems, requires critique to locate the sources of power and domination in forces detached from accountable systems of power.