A Lever Is Pulled - A ritual of control, a machine that no longer moves - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

A Lever Is Pulled

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

A ritual of control. A machine that no longer moves.

There is a gesture repeated in silence that feels like power, even when it does nothing. A switch thrown. A lever pulled. The room responds with flashbulbs. The statement lands like thunder. But the machine remains still. No policy transforms. No system yields. Yet the lever is pulled again.

This episode sits inside that moment. It explores the symbolic afterlife of sovereignty in a globalised economy where rituals of governance persist long after material power has been outsourced, automated, or abstracted. We ask: what does it mean to perform control rather than exercise it? And why does that performance continue to hold emotional weight?

Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the exception, Wendy Brown and David Harvey on neoliberal erosion of state autonomy, and Iris Marion Young on diffuse responsibility, we trace the rituals of policy that persist even when causality is broken. Achille Mbembe reminds us that sovereignty was always unevenly distributed—more idea than fact. The result is a theatre of decision: sovereignty re-enacted, not enacted.

Trade wars, Brexit performances, and pandemic logistics all echo through this space—not as ideology, but as infrastructure. The lever becomes a gesture of consolation, not consequence. A story we repeat to avoid the void.

What This Offers

• A meditation on the aesthetic of control in a post-sovereign world
• Exploration of symbolic governance as ritual rather than function
• Philosophical insight into how spectacle replaces authority
• A political reflection on what remains when power becomes narrative

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Bibliography

• Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
• Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
• Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
• Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
• Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
• Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
• Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso, 2006.
• Lakoff, George. Moral Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
• Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000.
• Rey, Hélène. “Dilemma Not Trilemma.” In Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, 2013.
• Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

The lever is still pulled. Not to move the world—but to keep the story from breaking.

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