Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 15:51:37 -0500 From: JON WILSON <216844-AT-newschool.edu> Subject: Re:Foucault and Agency As people have said, Foucault would not have asked a question such as "Who acts ?" but would be concerned with how certain actors are constituted 'historically'; how the multiplicitous power relations tend to coalesce and clot at certain nodes. Asking the question "who acts" or "who desires" seems to take too much for granted; it already assumes the possibilitity of coherent, self-present subjects. With 'Power', 'intentionality without a subject', as he puts it in HS 1, Foucault is not interesting with ascribing agency, with writing a history where 'agency' is presumed as on of the building blocks of the'social sciences', but instead with writing the history _of_ processes of 'subjectification' and the accompanying notion of agency &c... As "Who acts" seems to ialso ask "who {or what} causes", and Foucault is always concerned not to write in terms of causalities (although I think he slips up at times; e.g. the section in 'Governmentality' where he suggests that 'demographic forces' result in the unblocking of sovereignities obstacle to governmental rationalities). To say that "multifarious power devices" are "societal forces" is then also to presume too much; the question is how these power devices come to constitute certain 'societal forces' discursively - for example "the economy", or "the market" in neo-liberal economics, or "class" in Marxist sociology. There is clearly a representational problem in dealing with these 'multifarious power devices'. How does one write the genealogy of social forces without at least strategically essentialising. i.e. - is it possible to write history without causality or 'agency', when the very epistemic 'structures' of historiography rely on such concepts ? There always does have to be some sort of slippage i think. And Foucault is almost explicit about this in the chapter on methodology in 'HS I' where he writes of the nominalism of power. He implies that he is not interested in what power 'is', (so there clearly can be no ontology of desire), but uses the word as a convenient way to refer to lots of different things/processes &c. (I forget the actual words he uses). Spivak writes interestingly on this question of the nominalism of power in her essay on Foucault and Derrida in the book 'Outside in the Teaching Machine'. Here she critiques 'dogmatic' accounts which do tend to ontologise power and agency, by urging the terms 'critical' usage, where the potentially ontologising tendencies present within the project of writing 'history' are always examined . Jon Wilson ------------------
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