Agon culture: The ideology of conflict and the order of domination

This dissertation is an examination of contemporary culture through the critique of domination. The dissertation is an analysis of the problem of imposed human domination as a problem of knowledge, where knowledge is both a type of rationality and a cultural fixation on conflict as something productive. The study is premised on the idea that the cultural ideology of conflict in contemporary Western society is materially related to the problem of increasing human domination; that the order of social, political and economic domination that prevails in the world today, is effectively maintained and normalized by a dominant rationality, a type of cultural knowledge, one which is based on the philosophy of the agon. The agon is the site of adversarialism and competition, the scene of battle, and the locus of conflict and domination. The philosophy of agonism is based on the idea that transcendence, growth and truth, are generated out of the outcome of contest and conflict. The ideology of conflict, which is the cultural expression of agonism, has numerous manifestations, including the drama of popular culture, the hegemonic rationality of the State and the historical mythology of progress. Agonism forms part of the power and the character of domination in contemporary Western society. The ambivalent character of agonism is that it presents itself as a mode of transcendence while remaining intricately tied to the mode of destruction. The ideology of agonism has been so prominent in the project of domination that it has become part of the psychic structure of individual consciousness in the formation of the agonal subject. The manner by which agonism fits into the conscious formation of the subject is explored in here through the concept of reification. Reification is the process through which domination is exercised at the level of the formation of the subject. Reification is discussed in this study as a form of ‘positive domination’ because it transmutes repression into forms of subjective satisfaction and realizes itself as a form of self-incurred psychic defeat. Reification is also fundamentally tied to agonistic reason, which conflates destruction with production to culminate in the celebration of conflict and war. The critique of agonism is a critique of championship as a military/agonistic value that supports the order of reification and domination in the present geo-political context. The agon, which is the society of domination and war, is conceptualized as a combination of forms of power promoted and legitimated by a particular type of dominant rationality arising out of the normalization of instrumental force. At present this force, the network of military, technological, ideological, cultural, political and economic convergences is unprecedented in human history. The critique of agon culture stretches from a consideration of the modern origins of agonism in the Western Enlightenment project to contemporary modalities of agonistic power, and thus concerns the formation of mass consciousness, political order and global domination.