I fully agree with Jacqueline. And this is also Rorty's critique of Foucault:
that if power is everywhere, it loses its distinguishing edge and becomes
vacuous. It seems to me to be extremely important to always add the following
to Foucault's reading of power: that while knowledge and power are
co-extensive, and while power displays itself in every act of cognition, it
is enormously important to attend to the specifics of how this power is
enacted, the way in which it takes shape, how specific objects, identities,
texts, persons are codified, normalized, organized and monitored. It's not
that power exists "behind" or "in back of" these processes; rather, these
processes _are_ power, and the way in which this occurs is remarkably
specific, concrete, local.
Rob Leventhal
rsl9b@xxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------
that if power is everywhere, it loses its distinguishing edge and becomes
vacuous. It seems to me to be extremely important to always add the following
to Foucault's reading of power: that while knowledge and power are
co-extensive, and while power displays itself in every act of cognition, it
is enormously important to attend to the specifics of how this power is
enacted, the way in which it takes shape, how specific objects, identities,
texts, persons are codified, normalized, organized and monitored. It's not
that power exists "behind" or "in back of" these processes; rather, these
processes _are_ power, and the way in which this occurs is remarkably
specific, concrete, local.
Rob Leventhal
rsl9b@xxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------