Power and Resistance

A Being Without Employment

Giorgi Vachnadze
3 min readNov 23, 2021

What are the equations? I cannot find them. To write an archaeology, you have to get this; structure is an invention. It’s very useful, granted and if lying to yourself; saying “nature exhibits patterns” or some such… helps you maintain an agreeable state of mind, then by all means: Keep chanting. But also keep that measuring rod away from my world, or else you might encounter resistance. There is a fine, yet well-hidden line that separates — or should I say — links; power with knowledge. I have given my life to examining this line. Because I have felt the anguish of being disciplined, trained, incited, cured, saved, instructed, motivated, warned, detained and incarcerated. But now being healed, educated, rewarded and rehabilitated; I’m ready to be “productive”.

Why can’t I find your equations? Because your calculating vapor. And it smells of your rotten sins. “Knowledge” — sure. Well let me educate you, as an archaeologist, I feel obliged and compelled to explain to you, how you “discover” your own fictions; scientist. The “patterns” you see in “nature” are an emanation of power. The order of things is a crafty grid and an artefact. I know, I know… it helps you sleep and I bet you sleep like a child. Oblivious to the consequences of your own cowardice.

We’re all rational children now, making up stories to account for all the strange events in our lives. To calculate our equations. No, I still can’t find them, I cannot see. Maybe I wasn’t trained correctly. Maybe I just can’t follow a simple rule. Or I wasn’t motivated properly? Am I being diagnosed? Where you see meaning, I see power; and wherever you spot the pathology, I embrace resistance.

All I have to work with are contextual clues, irregular patterns and the discontinuity of discourse. The rule for interpretation emerges along the interpretation itself. I stand unarmed. On my own two feet. The solution is a life without theory, a practice; a lifeform. You cannot start at the beginning, all beginnings belong to the dream of the Other, someone who knew how to really begin. All beginnings spring from either violence or petty quarrels. In order to begin, you have to find where you have already begun and embrace that ugly origin.

And then you see that you have no time or energy left for beginnings, because you had already started without your own consent. Useless to ask “what is the point?” when you have departed towards your destination before you even acquired the language to question it. It’s never the real issue to find a meaning, but only to voice the actions you had already taken. It’s just a confusion of words, a linguistic misunderstanding, a picturesque enchantment that dazzled your impressionable mind in order to trick it into posing nonsensical questions.

Perhaps now and then you could catch a glimpse of why I am angry. And why my answer to your question concerning reason is met not with a dialogue, but subversion. The most effective way to disobey a rule is by following it to the extreme. To stage how ridiculous your commands are, disguised as they be through your claims to “knowledge”. So pardon the audacity as I refuse to be what I am, unwilling to remain the same, countering every deployment of the normal with parrhesiastic resistance.

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Giorgi Vachnadze
Giorgi Vachnadze

Written by Giorgi Vachnadze

Scholar of Michel Foucault and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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