“The state governs through the political terrain, dictating in that process the forms and sites of contestation. Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and practice are imagined. This is not to argue that cultural struggle can ever be the exclusive site for practice, for the struggles over legal and political “rights” have historically been a crucial site for critiques of the inadequacy of political enfranchisement. It is rather to argue that if the state suppresses dissent by governing subjects through rights, citizenship, and political representation, it is through culture, broadly defined, that we conceive and enact new subjects and practices in antagonism to the regulatory locus of the citizen-subject, by way of culture that we can question those modes of government.”
“The Power of Culture” (1998) by Lisa Lowe
