Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 18:55:15 -0500 Subject: Re: Power and the Subject From: Asher Haig <ahaig-AT-warped-reality.com> on 1/28/01 6:47 PM, Bryan C at kirk728-AT-hotmail.com wrote: > But if agency exists outside of power relations and they only limit it, > what of Foucault's claim that the individual is a modern construction, > likely to dissapear in the future? It seems to me that he thought that > agency wasn't real but instead it was power flowing through individuals. There is no outside to relations of power - that was my point about emergence. Agency is a construct of relations of power - it emerges in that relation and exists while there is a relation. I'm not sure he says "likely" to disappear in the future so much as that it's a possibility at some point. Or maybe likely in the long-term future. Certainly he doesn't see its demise near. Power relations constrain agency because they create it in teh first place. Perhaps my statement confuses the matter - it certainly does presume a notion of autonomous agency. I don't, however, think that such a possibility has to be real - just a concept. That absolute agency is "constrained" (although really created in a lesser fashion) by relations of power. --- Asher Haig ahaig-AT-warped-reality.com Dartmouth 2004
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