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From: Asher Haig <ahaig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 18:55:15 -0500
on 1/28/01 6:47 PM, Bryan C at kirk728@xxxxxxxxxxx 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dartmouth 2004
