Re: What do you mean - power? (fwd)


Dylan Riley said:
" Weber argued that domination means the probability that a given
individual will act on the basis of acommand regardless of its specific content.Power for him, had a very specific meaning, as did discipline.
The attempt to establish amicro-physics of power is problematic
because the notion becomes divorced from a specific relation between subjects.
To be constituted as a subject isalready for Foucault to be dominated."

I don't think that we can attribute to Foucault Weber's
conception of power. This is not to minimize Weber's influence on
Foucault's thought, but Foucault's concept of domination is not
Weber's. Power is divorced from the subject as such, but not from
'specific relations between subjects'. It is precisely in such
relations that power is manifest. To be consittuted as a subject
is not necessarily, not only domination. Constitutions as a
subject entails implication in a variety of power relations.
Domination, Foucault says in _THe Final Foucault_, is a power
relation that has become stuck, that is not fluid. It occurs when
someone cannot resist, even to the point of not being able to take
their own life. THis is not the case in the formation of the subject.

Joanna Crosby

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