File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1996/f_Mar16.96, message 1


Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 00:49:30 -0500 (EST)
From: John Ransom <ransom-AT-dickinson.edu>
Subject: foucault on power


On Thu, 14 Mar 1996, Richard Turner Clark wrote:

>I am a fourth year student with a question about Foucault.  I am
>trying to come to a conclusion as to why Foucault was so
>interested in ower.  Can anybody out there help me out?  I am 
>just beginning to see how magical his works are but am having 
>trouble with the origins of his interest surrounding this topic.
>               Thank you, Rich Clark                             

Mr. Clark,

I think one of the motivations behind Foucault's use of this word as a 
theme was his desire to find some other rubric or paradigm through which 
to elaborate oppositional possibilities. Quite simply, I think Foucault 
saw a lot of problems with the practical effects and even simple 
persuasive power of traditional left ways of schematizing social 
dynamics. Instead of talking about the bourgeoisie or the state, Foucault 
says he wants to talk about "power." In a way, this is kind of a joke. 
One of F's problems with the terms "bourgeoisie" and "state" was that 
these hypostastized--may as well say it, reified!--terms were such 
inadequate, poorly designed, and only occasionally insightful 
intellectual tools. So what does Foucault do? He hyper-hypostastizes the 
whole thing by out-abstracting everyone with the move to "power." This 
hyper-abstraction was designed to keep the label itself at arms distance, 
as needing clarification *before* habitual assumptions could categorize 
and file. Foucault's intent, I feel, was to move the discussion away from 
the significance of the label--"power" being too general to permit 
meaningful analysis--and towards the actual mechanics and strategies of 
intersecting spheres of power. 

But in fact this move failed. I wonder if Foucault knew there was a 
fairly big literature on "power" in the United States? Did F know about 
Steve Lukes' book? About Dahl? I wonder. For a very long time, in fact, 
the label "power" and its companion "power/knowledge" distracted people 
from actually reading F. 

--John Ransom
ransom-AT-dickinson.edu

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