Miyö's War Room

Introduction

What type of power is it that is capable of producing discourses of power that have, in a society like ours, such powerful effects?
— Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76.

From a philosophical standpoint, power is far removed from the actors who use it as an instrument of intimidation, and even from the structures in which those actors operate. Power raises itself as the body of domination, and by domination, as Foucault describes, it’s not the brute fact of the supremacy of one over the many, or of one group over another, but the multiple forms of control that can be exercised in society. So, in this sense, and reflecting the structure of Western culture, the King, the President, or God are not the central figures where power lies, as power can transgress the rules of right that those figures organize and sometimes decline in violent ways.

To understand the form of power this project seeks to describe, we need to look at the history of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class and how controlling sexuality became a powerful means of domination. Religion defined sexuality as a sin and moved women from the battlefield to their homes, as the female body was deemed impure, fragile, and inferior. However, Greek mythology teaches us that sexuality is an instrument of war; when Helen was kidnapped by Paris in the Iliad, the Trojan War began. This is not a story about two ruling classes deciding to dominate each other, but an example of the power of sex and how it can be the most fearsome form of domination. Wilhelm Reich argued that since the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the human body essentially became a productive force, and all forms of expenditure that could not be reduced to these relations, or to the constitution of productive forces, were banished, excluded, and repressed.

Such deductions are still possible. We can deduce that for the bourgeoisie and contemporary ruling classes, controlling or repressing sexuality helps control the labor force, allowing the capitalist system to function efficiently. But what about war, violence, and destruction? Are these unproductive forces? In fact, in Western society, violence as a historical phenomenon tied to the patriarchal system is merchandise—a product that, for the greater capitalist system, can be as lucrative as the level of destruction it produces.

Today, as the destruction of the patriarchal—and therefore capitalist—system becomes a key aim of contemporary feminism, we must remember that the true fight for equality must integrate all genders, especially those politically and legally undefined. The transfer of power from one sex to another reflects traditional Western behavior as we move from one ruling class to another. But our generation, the labor force trying to change the ruling class and possessing real power over communication and information for the first time in history, witnesses levels of violence not seen before. We must understand that previous wars were silent genocides, and before World War II, the destruction and domination of one group by another were orchestrated by the dominant class. Today, access to information does not give our young generation time to understand the behavior of the forms of power.

Is our contemporary society doomed as sexuality and war transition from forms of power to vulgar merchandise? For this project, I aim to describe power by examining these two forms of domination. With this decision, my artistic and conceptual approach will not be from within power, as those who have power will never be part of a perpetual state such as the forms of domination. Power is not something divided between those who have it and those who hold it exclusively; power is a perception that relies on society but passes through individuals.