"We are not trapped. We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it. So what I’ve said does not mean that we are always trapped, but that we are always free—well, anyway, that there is always the possibility of changing … [r]esistance comes first, and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with the resistance. So I think that resistance is the main word, the key word, in this dynamic."
"Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged minds’ would take the part played played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain-essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration."
"Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth."
"Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is excised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations"
Institutionalism does not entirely compute with a realist theory, it is merely seen as a reflection of the great states powers and its work can be manipulated into aiding the self-interest of those states.
”Institutions are essentially arenas for acting out power relationships”
- John J. Mearsheimer
"Meritocracy is a paradoxical thing, best pursued obliquely. Efforts to test ‘talent’ end up being rigged, while stuffy institutional rituals often have the side effect of acting as economic and political ladders. The reason for this is that tests and audits themselves become unwittingly institutionalised - ‘rituals of verification’ - and unseen, unwritten forms of power and cultural privilege are mobilised in order to ensure that the winners carry on winning. Tests, in contrast to institutions, have no reflexivity or self-knowledge; they are designed to discover the ‘truth’ about people, but unintentionally develop into rituals in their own right, whereby the middle classes slavishly practice techniques for gaining and holding on to power. Having no concept of what lies outside of the test, beyond the numbers, these anti-institutional institutions collapse into forms of cronyism. By contrast, self-desribed institutions, such as trade unions and universities, have at least the capacity to speak honestly about the immeasurable values that they are upholding and the political agendas they are pursuing, if only because they (unlike the positivists) see values and politics as part of social reality."
