Ian Hacking Quotes

I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

... politics of meaning

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

I don't think you can impose a social order from the top down.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.

Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.

We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.

Rather than being any longer a threat to the established … order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.

Society receives its momentum from power.

More and more, we’re willing to give up certain elements of a personal autonomy to gain greater control over others.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to.