I chose this animated gif as my last entry in the Concepts journal not only because its a nice break for Barbie to be able to express herself in an intelligent manner, but also because I think what she is saying, that “authority should be derived from the consent of the governed (and) not from the threat of force” is a concept that encapsulates not only a majority of the news items in my journal project but also involves many of the political perspectives that we have discussed throughout this semester.
We began our semester-long class discussion with the concept of sovereignty leading into the concept of obligation. The idea that a state could be sovereign and therefore its member’s were obliged to that state is a concept that I struggled with, the fact that the state was not inherently obliged to its citizens or members was something I didn’t really want to grasp. I thought of it as a primarily two way street kind of relationship. The lack of consent in the state’s obliging of its citizens was something I couldn’t quite go with. I realized later on in the semester that my struggles with this consent conception was most likely related to two key things 1)my more rhetorical than political world view and 2)my American-democratic upbringing.
However, these two key things that were holding me back in obligation and consent don’t always go together so well, the “threat of force” concept that Barbie is bringing to the table is not so clear, once again. I would argue that my American-democratic upbringing would lead me to assume that “threat of force” means things like violence and oppression, dictatorship and imprisonment—everything in the typical first and second dimensional views of power, where force must be overt. But if we view power in a third dimensional, faced manner or in a Hayward like de-faced manner, then the concept of “threat of force” is not so up front and volatile. From a third dimensional viewpoint, Barbie is telling us that authority should derive from the consent of the governed and the governed should be free from whatever normative behavior the authority wishes to impose upon us. And from a de-faced conception of power, Barbie is saying that authority should derive from the consent of the governed and that the governed have the right to be continually re-authoring that concept of consent as well as re-defining force.
