Date: Sat, 4 Feb 1995 08:35:12 -0800 From: hagen-AT-violet.berkeley.edu (Hagen Finley) Subject: Social Interaction & Power It seems to me to be extremely important to always add the following >to Foucault's reading of power: that while knowledge and power are >co-extensive, and while power displays itself in every act of cognition, it >is enormously important to attend to the specifics of how this power is >enacted, the way in which it takes shape, how specific objects, identities, >texts, persons are codified, normalized, organized and monitored. It's not >that power exists "behind" or "in back of" these processes; rather, these >processes _are_ power, and the way in which this occurs is remarkably >specific, concrete, local. I'm not up to speed on Foucault jargon and probably not as familiar with the texts as many of you, but I have been taking classes with Dreyfus and Wacquant here at Berkeley and those discussions have lead me to venture the following interpretation of power. It seems to me that social interaction demands a coordination of behavior and that coordination is both enabling and disabling. It is disabling because biologically possible modes of acting and being are either overlooked or ruled inapproriate. It is enabling because (echoing Kant) the kind of existence we share in communities is creates a miriad of possible ways of acting out our lives which are not options to the isolated individual. My thesis is that the more people want to reap out the productive potential in social interaction, the more they must assent to and conform to the patterns of action which make this interaction possible, the more they must disciplen themselves and/or be disciplened, and/or disciplen others in the direction of that social goal. The immanence of power is due to the fact that the constraints of social interaction are woven into the social fabric. In itself, power is neither good or bad, it is simply a social fact. Clearly individuals and groups seek to shape the manner in which action is coordinated to their private benefit and comfort, but even the people who enjoy the best position on the social field and who reap the most social capital from that position (Bourdieu), are still subject to the broader disciplen of the community. Hagen Finley Berkeley, California ------------------
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