Abstract
The publication of the Phenomena of power: Authority, domination, and violence into English allows for the English-speaking world to engage the work of Heinrich Popitz. Popitz provides a thorough and organized description of how power operates in social relations that should be valuable to any scholar of the human sciences. This essay is supportive of Popitz’s project, but seeks a critical engagement by extending the analysis on violence and technical power. I argue that reading Popitz alongside the decolonial thinker, Franz Fanon and the media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan can provide important correctives. In particular, Fanon’s analysis that the colonial use of rhetorical power to dehumanize the oppressed and McLuhan’s comment on the importance of the control of medium are missing in an otherwise very thorough philosophical anthropology on the phenomena of power.
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Notes
It is helpful to remember that violence and violation share a similar origin.
Lewis R. Gordon argues that one of the sources of this misreading is actually Hannah Arendt, but she is responding more to Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction; which could be seen as actually betraying Fanon’s nuanced argument. Also, only the first chapter deals with violence while the rest of the book documents the alienating and dehumanizing impacts of colonialism on the colonized.
Stewart et al. (2007) have a very thorough textbook analysis of social movements that makes this argument.
Lance Strate has a series of interesting blog posts reflecting on the concept of violence in McLuhan and Arendt that is very interesting. http://lancestrate.blogspot.com/2011/12/violence-and-identity.html.
As of the writing of this essay Twitter is “officially” banned in China, Iran, and North Korea.
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Garrett, E. Heinrich Popitz and the Power of Violence and Technical Action in the Revolutionary and Information Ages. Hum Stud 41, 493–502 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9476-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9476-6