Subject: Re: What do you mean - power? Date: Sun, 05 Feb 95 11:38:37 CST From: walt-AT-epsilon.rhesys.mb.ca (Walt Stein) I've been avoiding entering the various "power" discussions because I've always found F difficult on this issue. Having said that, may I put a few questions to those involved in these threads. First: I note that many of posts use the positive-negative axis as synonymous with several value binaries (good-bad, etc). I've always read Foucault's use of positive in a way which avoids such value-oriented polarities. Power-knowledge is the value neutral name he gives to the process which 'posits', creates, enables, makes possible, new words, "objects" and practises. It also negates (de-posits? un-posits? hmmm.) Second: F recognizes that all subjects are engaged in this "economy" of power. Power is not a possession, an entity or object to be coercively applied by its "owners" on unempowered subjects who receive the power wieded by these others, but the description at any time of the truths (and of the permissions to speak these truths) produced on the agonistic field on which subjects struggle and resist. I've asked this question several times before, in other circumstances. Isn't our current discussion of power, emanating from a post dealing with McKinnon, slipping into the bad(power)-good(freedom from power)/they (wielders of powers)-we(unwilling, coerced, recipients of power) "repressive hypothesis"? Don't these binaries allow us the illusion of escape from our inescapable involvement and implication in the power-knowledge economy. Yours, Walt ------------------
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