Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>Abdul JanMohamed isn't saying that power should be treated as commodity.
>One of his points is that a marxist understanding of commodity is missing
>from Foucault's account of power, to the detriment of Foucault's social
>theory. A different argument, you see.
One of the things I like about JanMohamed's argument is that he points to
common features of Marx's notion of capital and Foucault's of power - that
they're not static and thingly but come alive only in movement and
circulation. But he also points out that (and I'm doing this from memory,
since I can't find my copy of the article) unlike Marx's notion of capital,
F's notion of power can't explain why some people and groups (individuals,
families, classes, and nations) retain power over time while others don't.
The ownership of capital can be retained, even expanded, over time, which
allows power to be retained and expanded, and even inherited. This
continuity characterizes real societies over time; what about Foucaultian
power?
Doug
>Abdul JanMohamed isn't saying that power should be treated as commodity.
>One of his points is that a marxist understanding of commodity is missing
>from Foucault's account of power, to the detriment of Foucault's social
>theory. A different argument, you see.
One of the things I like about JanMohamed's argument is that he points to
common features of Marx's notion of capital and Foucault's of power - that
they're not static and thingly but come alive only in movement and
circulation. But he also points out that (and I'm doing this from memory,
since I can't find my copy of the article) unlike Marx's notion of capital,
F's notion of power can't explain why some people and groups (individuals,
families, classes, and nations) retain power over time while others don't.
The ownership of capital can be retained, even expanded, over time, which
allows power to be retained and expanded, and even inherited. This
continuity characterizes real societies over time; what about Foucaultian
power?
Doug