On Sun, 19 Jul 1998, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Steve D'Arcy writes:
> <<Foucault's point is not that I don't have power, nor that it is not
> reproduced over time, but only that it cannot be understood by looking at
> me alone or my relationship to the student alone, without taking into
> account the network of agents who align their conduct with mine and THEREBY
> constitute my relationship to the student as a power relationship.>>
>
> Sure. That sounds about right. But Foucault still can't (or doesn't want
> to) explain what gives rise to the 'network of agents' through which power
> gets exercised.
>
> I think your reading of Foucault with regard to how Foucault might explain
> power of capital is fine. I'll check out the Wartenberg piece you
> mentioned. But your reading only confirms that Foucault can be read in a
> manner that is consistent with Marx. On this point, both JanMohamed and I
> agree with you. (And you would know this if you read the JanMohamed piece
> or my previous posts.) However, the point is that Foucault doesn't (or
> doesn't want to) explain the generation of what JanMohamed calls 'surplus
> power' and how and why 'surplus power' crystalizes in the manner it has--in
> the hands of the ruling class + the governing elite.
>
> Yoshie
>
It seems to me that to force certain Marxist terms on Foucaultian analyses
is to miss the significantly different and potentially radical angle of
critique that Foucault opens up.
To speak of a 'surplus of power' is to already reify what Foucault is
trying to relationalize. We can trace a genealogy of current power
relations and try to see how certain groups and certain ideas have been
positioned advantageously or not within particular power relations. But
Foucault, I thought, had disabused us of the ideal that we could posit a
metaphysics of power that would explain in a normative or universalizing
way, why some 'had' power and were 'allowed' (by whom, I would adk) to
'keep' that power.
While I am intersted in Marxist influences in Foucault's work, the more
productive line of thought seems to me to ask how Foucault takes us beyond
Marx.
IMHO,
Joanna