“culture comes into play at precisely the point where biological individuals become subjects, and that what lies between the two is not some automatically constituted ‘natural’ process of socialization but much more complex processes of formation”

“Reflective processing allows us to handle highly complex choices, but it is slower and more tiring than the automatic system. It requires motivation and significant effort.”

“Revolutionary art need not be overtly political in content; what is more important is that it demand a new means of perception on the part of its spectators. The subject in process/on trial can thus be fundamentally transformed. Change here, at the level of individual consciousness, is a necessary element of social change. Seen in this way, the arts are not merely reflective of social relations but are productive of social relations.”

“We need instead to ask, what possibilities of mobilization are produced on the basis of existing configurations of discourse and power? What are the possibilities of reworking that very matrix of power by which we are constituted, of reconstituting the legacy of that constitution, and of working against each other process of regulation that can destabilize existing power regimes? For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again. That subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power's own possibility of being reworked. It is not enough to say that the subject is invariably engaged in a political field; that phenomenological phrasing misses the point that the subject is an accomplishment regulated and produced in advance. And is as such fully political; indeed, perhaps most political as the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself. To perform this kind of Foucaultian critique of the subject is not to do away with the subject or to pronounce it's death, but merely to claim that certain versions of the subject are politically insidious.”

“If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don't want to be. ”

“Identification then becomes a process of imaginative wish fulfillment which can be, and is, criticized from at least two points of view. The moralists criticize it on the grounds that it is mere escapism, and in encouraging people to imagine a better existence for themselves discourages them from working to achieve it in reality. At the other end of the spectrum, the ideologists argue that identification is the process whereby the values of the dominant ideology are naturalized into the desires, almost the instincts, of the individual, and are thus endlessly reproduced and perpetuated.”