Date: Tue, 1 Aug 1995 23:54:48 +0100 (BST)
From: "S.S. Walker" <ssw11-AT-cus.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: What is Power?


On Tue, 1 Aug 1995 CCOLWELL-AT-ucis.vill.edu wrote:

> Re: Power as intentional and non-subjective, see History of Sexuality, I 
> pp 92-6
> 	Power is intentional to the extent that there are intentions imbedded
> in power relations, e.g.,heterosexual or patriarchal intentions imbedded 
> in most if not all institutions in this country. It is non-subjective tot
> the extent that there is no subject to which origin or responsibility
> can be assigned for these intentions. The effects of our 'actions' 
> (conceived as broadly as possible) not only escape or intentions but 
> generate effects of power to which we can ascribe, or simply perceive,
> intentions. Indeed, if F coherently argues that subjects are the effects
> of power/knowledge relations then power relations must be non-subjective.
> 
Yes power is "subjective", but for Foucault, power creates the very 
subjects which then perpetuate or resistpower relations. In this sense 
there is no subject prior to power-knowledge. However, this does not 
necessarily mean that Foucault dispenses with some conception of agency - 
if we read Foucault through Judith Butler's work on the 'citational' 
production of identities then we begin to gain a sense of the force of 
law ( which Foucault sometime underplays) with the micro- and repetative 
technoogies that Foucault articulates through the conception of 
bio-power. The 'subject' is a difficult subject in Foucault - he 
recognises the suject as bot the product of power-knowledge relations and 
as an intransegent site of resistance. To understand his ambiguous 
stance, the whole process of 'subjectification' has to be put into 
motion - i.e. the repeated marking out of fields of possible actions and 
knowledge. However,this repitition (and this is Butler's point- although 
a more thorough interogation of Butler's relation to Foucault and its 
relation to the more Lacanian and Derridian aspects of her work would be 
an interesting project) is also the condition of possibility for resistance. 
However, Foucault's ambiguous stance towards he subject is perhaps best 
illustrated in 'What is Enlightenment' : here he elaborates a temporal 
model of self-creation while advocating the search for 'limit 
experiences'. He pursues such experiences again in 'Remarks on Marx' in 
his references to Bataille and Neitzsche. But this desire for the 
disolution of the subject remains problematic if we look at his later 
works on 'ethic of the care for the self' (and also problematic in 
Nietszche - I don't know enough about Bataille to comment). 

Anyway - any thoughts on the above would be interesting. I think that 
Foucault's thoughts on power are fluid, continually responding to new 
constellations of power relations, in the truely agonal sense which he 
elaborates in the 'Subject and Power' (1982- in Michel Foucault, Beyond 
Hermenutics and Struturlism - ed Rabinow (I think))


Saul Walker
Cambridge (though soon to be Warwick)


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