The universal character of repression invalidates it as the means by which something can be claimed to have a uniquely local integrity.

As a mechanism of power, repression belongs to a schematization that has long been inadequate for its very universality of ‘efficaciousness,’ as that which, in the Kantian sense, is common to all members of a class.

It’s a problem because, if I’m going to survey various localities, I would normally aim to present the most characteristic element of each in order to give emphasis to it. These differences might fall into greater relief over time. They can even be used to mark historical phases, especially where there is overlap. But what is characteristic about a universal class other than its universality, and how could this be represented in any but the most unerring of ways?

Exactly because the use of repression belongs to a universal and therefore inadequate way to establish local authority, its use should be resisted precisely at the local level.

Instead, what is seen is repression as an effect of reified forms of consciousness that is carried out at all levels.

To say that repression is an effect means it is without a natural development of its own in an organic sense that unfolds over time according to its own logic and stages particular to it. In this sense, repression is not in itself power. Rather, repression is the imitation of power at the margins, as a power grab of sorts. Repression is the means by which power is reinscribed, in which I can only repeat endlessly my own powerlessness to act otherwise.

As Michel Foucault argued in his classic 1972 essay, “Two Lectures,” continual war ended with the winning of the arms race, the “contest of strength” already settled. “The political battle would (have ceased) with this final battle.” This supports the correct perception of the present war as outmoded, historically unnecessary, and plainly avoidable, maintained only by provocation and propped up by a readily recognizable universal language of war. In this sense, repression can be viewed as an effect of manufactured war to the extent it is appealed to for its universal reach, and this to cover over through coercion its status of having been made. As to justification, repression justifies itself on the basis of an imagined charisma wherever charisma really is that which rests on the fact of repression.

Similar to the above is the turn to formal and informal networks of local authority as an answer to globalizing institutions. The rebirth of “the local” connotes an on-the-ground, ‘down to earth’ authenticity that simultaneously signals added spiritual cache insofar as it purports to be a knowing repudiation of worldly temptations associated with global finance centers.

Of course, the salient point about local character doesn’t reside in postures of an easy folksiness or the xenophobia it covers over. Foucault observed in the predominant feature of the events of his time (1960-1975) a “local character of criticism indicating in reality an autonomous, non-centralized kind of theoretical production, whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established regimes of thought.”

Given that the absence of the original referent is the condition for the existence of what has been made, why do those outside of centers of sovereign power, those at the peripheries of place and time, even and especially those disadvantaged by these centers in the past, continue to point to their authority? Why unthinkingly call into place that which has passed and doesn’t apply presently because it was there previously? I think this is in part what Foucault tried to make more visible, that a properly conceived local network of governance is at odds with a local politics that rests primarily on inert pillars of already established authority.

To return to the notion of what is an effect, I think it can be said the nature of the effect consists in how it is bounded in the rights, and that the effect thereby produced is determined on the basis of the exercise of the “juridical” power Foucault described.

But it obviously isn’t the case that the effects of power are negligible simply because they are contrivances. Neither should the takeaway be that these effects must rely on repression insofar as they are without an originating nature of their own.

To say that which is an effect is without an independent nature, or only that which has a nature is capable of change, might give the conclusion that repression is an effect of war like truth is an effect of power, that it doesn’t exist absent that power.

This line of reasoning holds too closely to the Aristotelian model of phusis that is used to account for changes in the natural world. To use such a model to account for what is man-made is the problem, and repression and war are man-made problems.

If it’s said that the cyclical nature of war can be analyzed according to a process model that approximates nature, this still doesn’t do enough to correct for the distance and forgetting effected by such analyses. That is, in the case of what is man-made, what gets in the way of change is precisely forgetting that it is man-made. Changes made at the level of perception should therefore be done in view of this fact rather than trusting it to mystical unfoldings that obey the unquestionable logic of a mechanized imagination, one that says: Everything Happens for a Reason.