I recently bought the first body weight scale of my adult life. Remembering the robust and everlasting mechanical scale I spent my childhood and adolescence with, I assumed procuring such a mundane device would be anything but unspectacular. What a misconception! Once the sleek, disc-looking thing came out of the box, I realized with consternation that I inadvertently purchased a “smart” scale. Holding the ugly glass plate in one hand and the user manual with its gibberish about “tracking body composition metrics” in addition to instructing me to scan a QR code, install an app, and open an account in the other hand, I was ready to return the odious gadget and just forget about getting a scale altogether. I just wanted a damn scale! Only after spending at least half an hour on the internet before coming across a well-hidden user forum post claiming that the scale can be utilized despite my unwillingness to create an account and install an app (and providing all my information) did I grudgingly decide to keep it. Something as ostensibly trivial as a weight scale tucked away under a bathroom vanity has now been engineered into a surveillance device with an insatiable appetite for our data. Shoshana Zuboff cautions that gadgets such as the so-called Nest thermostat and its “brethren [smart] devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power,” and that what once might have originated as a common good-oriented approach to smart/ubiquitous computing with at least some guardrails in place (e.g. “Aware Home” project), has by now been taken over by unbridled market forces claiming total ownership of the extracted knowledge. While previously the raw material fueling capitalism was at least to a certain extent distant from humans, in surveillance capitalism human life experience itself has become (free!) raw material. The business model: Prediction of future human behavior, which is achieved by reaching into our most intimate spaces and mining them for free “raw material” that will be reinterpreted into behavioral data. Ultimately, “these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that [Zuboff calls] behavioral futures markets” (15). The goal is to know and influence human behavior so that it leads to profitable (and predictable) outcomes. Zuboff recognizes in this a “new species of power” that “knows and shapes human behavior toward other’s ends. Instead of an armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things, and spaces” (16). In this set-up we are not surveillance capitalism’s customers; we are the raw material. The enterprises trading in surveillance capitalism’s markets for future behavior are the actual customers. Zuboff rightly deems surveillance capitalism as a “rogue force” that wrecks foundations crucial for the survival of a democratic society. Overall, Zuboff draws a rather bleak picture of the future. Yet, she does mention that the “overthrow of the people’s sovereignty” and the concomitant demise of the Western liberal democratic model can be reverted (28). However, since the publication of Zuboff’s book in 2019, things have only gotten worse. Just think about the signification of the smirking tech oligarchs surrounding Trump at his inauguration. How swiftly some of them adjusted their stances and consolidated behind a right-wing politician. Or Zuckerberg’s recent ramblings about the need for “masculine energy.” Think about the findings of scholars and UN investigators that Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar. Or DOGE’s post-puberty tech-bros who fantasize about being “disruptors” and get off from wreaking havoc in unionized workplaces and destroying people’s livelihoods. Zuboff didn’t quite foresee how much worse a situation we find ourselves in just a few years after the publication of her book.

In the first sentence of the excerpt from The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, Foucault uses two terms we have encountered earlier in the current module on ideology/hegemony/power: “repression” and “bourgeois.” And we might be tempted to exclaim: “Aha! Marx and his successors! We must know something fundamental about Foucault’s coming discussion of the functioning of power!” Far from it, this assumption would be a grave simplification. While Marx previously presented us with an understanding of power characterized by an asymmetric power constellation, a clash of irreconcilable class interests, as well as an understanding that it is exactly that antagonism that propels history forward, Foucault pushes that idea to the periphery — perhaps even rejects it. He does this primarily by turning away from Marx’s materialism and the preoccupation with material conditions and instead focusing on language, discourse, and knowledge. Foucault says that with the emergence of bourgeois societies in the 17^th century, speaking about sex as it was practiced previously became highly regulated and restricted. On the one hand, talking about it became more and more difficult, and on the other hand, sex was dragged out of the realm of the practical and the relative obscure — the lights directed towards it. Suddenly everything related to sex mattered, had to be examined, and was accompanied by a “discursive explosion” (1421). According to Foucault, this sudden change doesn’t happen in a vacuum but concomitant with a broader epistemological break, in which a new constellation of ideas suddenly emerges and takes dominion. Power is here not understood as simply repressive but rather as a productive force that shapes discourse. Power is therefore not primarily exercised vertically (top-down), but much more equally distributed and functioning in all directions. As a result of taking us through several of those discursive breaks (confession/pastoral – political/economic/technical – population – schools), it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that Foucault argues for an understanding of history that is largely shaped by repeated discursive breaks, i.e. successions of power/knowledge constellations, that can go in all directions. It seems beyond question that this conveys a linear, let alone a progressive understanding of history, and I would argue that right here a problem of Foucauldian thought becomes clear. After all, it’s not unfair to say that Foucault draws a picture of society where “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” When it seems likely that one repressive regime will be replaced by another repressive regime, ad infinitum, it’s difficult not to feel defeated and hamstrung. I wonder whether we need to say goodbye to Papa Foucault. I’m struggling myself with the thought of having to let go of him. He’s been everywhere. Hugely influential in poststructuralist/postmodern thought — my entire undergrad experience was marked by him. And I loved it! I still enjoy writing papers that examine a text’s underlying discourses and dispersed power formations. But maybe he’s just not quite able to give us the tools we need for the current moment. Maybe it’s time we knocked him off the pedestal.

The pattern of argument goes like this: All revolutions in history only implement an act that was preconceived by minds — you don’t get Lenin if you didn’t have Marx first. The argument continues that political majorities can only be achieved in the long term if there are previously ideological majorities, i.e. if there is a revolution, it begins with the values of the existing system crumbling and generating opportunities to create new paths that lead to a new political constellation. What ostensibly sounds like an adequate account of (part of) Gramsci’s message has been central for the cultivation of the field of political culture by right-wing “intellectuals” of the so-called New Right since the 70s/80s. (Giorgia Meloni and Steve Bannon are reportedly fans of Gramsci!) Curiously enough, these extreme right-wing “intellectuals” draw on Gramsci, a founding member and leader of the Italian Communist Party, for strategic ideas. Indeed, Gramsci did something very unusual for Marxists at that time: Namely, moving away from the fixation on economic questions and toward cultural questions. The essence of which is that a successful revolution can only be made if the cultural and intellectual prerequisites for it have been created beforehand. Right-wing intellectuals take up this line of thought and simply transfer it to the right. It is thus an instrumentalization, a misuse, of a strategic approach originating with Gramsci. Nevertheless, the observation he made is quite accurate; after all, if we look at revolutionary upheavals or major social changes, it always has something to do with the influence of intellectual currents. Would the French Revolution have happened without the ideas of the Enlightenment? Would the 1968 revolt have happened without the thinkers of Critical Theory like Adorno, Horkheimer, and others? Most likely not. Here we can see a connection between intellectuality and phases of social upheaval, which, however, does not imply causality, but where such upheavals occur, they are often “thought” in advance. This is also why it is important to know something about the discourses of right-wing extremist intellectuals, because what they think today may become political practice tomorrow. Of course, these extremist right-wing intellectuals read Gramsci very selectively by focusing on the cultural-ideological aspects of his idea of “hegemony,” while conveniently ignoring the fact that for Gramsci this must be understood not merely in a culture-framework, but also in the context of the material base-structure and antagonistic class relations à la Marx.

The ludicrous right-wing hallucination that the left has been ruling society through alleged “cultural Marxism” in media, educational institutions, pop culture, arts, etc., perhaps stands for the dangers that lie in the cultural emphasis; after all, it provides convenient points of contact for the radical right’s historical preoccupation with questions of culture and identity. Since Marx’ materialist conception is incompatible with the ideology of the radical right, it is all the more important not to allow them to pretend that Gramsci can be read independently of basic Marxist assumptions.

There is some irony involved in writing about Friedrich Nietzsche in the context of higher education. After all, he would most likely regard our university — in fact, our way of speaking — as a manifestation of the prison-like “edifice of concepts” built by language (originally) and science (subsequently). For Nietzsche, the original human misfortune starts with the emergence of cognition, which he equates with deception as it deceives humans about the value of pure being. The human intellect, he continues, “shows its greatest strengths in dissimulation, since this is the means to preserve those weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature, are denied horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (753). Nietzsche seems to idealize the state of being pre-cognition (before it gets corrupted by language and reason) where humans experience existence not just as a type of unmediated onslaught of sense impressions and feelings, but also as a struggle for survival. This confrontation of reason and intuition recurs in part 2 of Nietzsche’s essay where he describes the empirical world of reason and concepts as being challenged by the invincible human drive to form metaphors, which persists despite “the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products — concepts — in order to imprison it in a fortress” (759). It is in myth and art, Nietzsche claims, that humans find a new sphere for their drive to form metaphors. In so doing, the “liberated intellect” uses the framework the reasonable man clings to “as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions” (761). Shortly after, Nietzsche harks back to the motif of existential struggle by saying there are eras where “the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side,” both seeking “to rule over life. . . .”  The motif of intensity, pure-being and struggle in conjunction with the recurring terms intellect (pejorative) and intuition reminds me of Umberto Eco essay “Ur-Fascism.” In his analysis Eco outlines several characteristic traits that commonly appear in fascist movements. One of those traits is the rejection of modernism, which Eco describes as an aversion to the rationalistic intellectual and philosophical development of so-called Western culture since the Enlightenment (17^th and 18^th century). Fascist movements tend to view this as a descend into degeneracy, and I would argue that Nietzsche, considering his repeated pejorative use of the words intellect and reason, emits a similar rejection of the empirical world. His return to antiquity (myth and arts) as an area for humans to draw on reinforces his rejection of modernism. According to Eco, the cult of action for action’s sake is another common element of fascist movements and understands action as valuable in itself and to be taken without reflection. Eco emphasizes that this is connected to an anti-intellectual, essentially irrational impulse. In this regard we can recognize an additional echo in Nietzsche’s writing; for example, the motif of struggle, intensity and pure-being, or the emphasis on intuition at the expense of reason. The scene where the ”liberated intellect” uses the framework reasonable man clings to as a sort of staging ground for his wild jumble of actions illustrates this in an impressive way. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay should be read as a proto-fascist text; however, it strikes me nevertheless how neatly central points of his argument fit into the structure of fascist thought as described by Umberto Eco.