File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2001/foucault.0101, message 55


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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