The Cultural Machine of Interpretation: Nietzsche, Guattari, And Foucault on The Production of Meaning

Ferry Agustian Sukarno, Yohanes Maria Restu Dian Raharjo

Abstract


Human beings are simultaneously the producers and the products of the cultural machine of interpretation they themselves generate. Reading Friedrich Nietzsche, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault together yields a single layered model of that machine: interpretation as a drive that is never neutral but always imposes a particular perspective and value, expressed as the will to power; a mechanism through which that drive settles into culture as a machine that produces, reproduces, and standardizes texts, signs, and practices; and a set of discursive and disciplinary conditions, namely discourse, episteme, and biopolitics, through which that machine becomes socially operative. Four basic human potentials, intelligence, creativity, personality, and adaptability, serve as an anthropological starting point: the capacities through which human beings engage the world and are drawn to interpret it. On this basis, culture is better understood not as a finished outcome but as a temporary sedimentation of an unending, circular process: humans interpret the world and produce culture, while the culture thus produced returns, through its discourse and episteme, to shape humans as the subjects who interpret.


Keywords


interpretation; culture; power; discourse; cultural machine

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24027411

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