In a message dated 5/17/99 3:17:33 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
kjkhoo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> Again, I may be wrong, but while his works may be 'microstudies',
> they are hardly studies of micro-power but indeed address that larger
> context within which power(s) is exercised. Aren't his studies
> precisely of the operating and operative parameters?
Understanding Foucault's analysis of power relates to another thread about
the difference between Adorno and Foucault's anti-enlightenment views. Both
of these writers are critical of the enlightenment and its effect upon the
entire population.
However, their practices of resistance are quite different. Adorno followed
Hegel's
trenchant critical attitude of contradiction, determinate negation, and
dialectic, whereas, Foucault applied these and similar concepts to sexual
practices. In several secondary texts about Foucault, his attitude towards
the typical sexual identity of
the basic modernist personality is viewed with incredulity. I believe he
advocates the rejection of our heterosexual orientations! Where Adorno
recovers from the Hegelian philosophy with a strong version of imminent
dialectical critique, Foucault takes more seriously those aspects of Hegel
which invert the individual-societal interconnection.
Foucault was quite interested in critical theory during his youth. He views
the ideological relationship between society and the individual similarly to
Hegel who
transcended the simple notion that the society overdetermines consciousness
by placing the center of societal power within each consciousness. The
former notion of society's effect upon the individual was taken up in an
objectivist manner by Marxists, but the inversion of the power dynamic from
something objective and outside of our heads to something deep within our
consciousness or unconsciousness, as something absolute, was taken up by the
postmodernist/poststructuralist Foucault. Hence, his studies of the clinic
and of power merely point to the determination of subjectivity from within
itself and not from objective parameters.
Fred W.
kjkhoo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> Again, I may be wrong, but while his works may be 'microstudies',
> they are hardly studies of micro-power but indeed address that larger
> context within which power(s) is exercised. Aren't his studies
> precisely of the operating and operative parameters?
Understanding Foucault's analysis of power relates to another thread about
the difference between Adorno and Foucault's anti-enlightenment views. Both
of these writers are critical of the enlightenment and its effect upon the
entire population.
However, their practices of resistance are quite different. Adorno followed
Hegel's
trenchant critical attitude of contradiction, determinate negation, and
dialectic, whereas, Foucault applied these and similar concepts to sexual
practices. In several secondary texts about Foucault, his attitude towards
the typical sexual identity of
the basic modernist personality is viewed with incredulity. I believe he
advocates the rejection of our heterosexual orientations! Where Adorno
recovers from the Hegelian philosophy with a strong version of imminent
dialectical critique, Foucault takes more seriously those aspects of Hegel
which invert the individual-societal interconnection.
Foucault was quite interested in critical theory during his youth. He views
the ideological relationship between society and the individual similarly to
Hegel who
transcended the simple notion that the society overdetermines consciousness
by placing the center of societal power within each consciousness. The
former notion of society's effect upon the individual was taken up in an
objectivist manner by Marxists, but the inversion of the power dynamic from
something objective and outside of our heads to something deep within our
consciousness or unconsciousness, as something absolute, was taken up by the
postmodernist/poststructuralist Foucault. Hence, his studies of the clinic
and of power merely point to the determination of subjectivity from within
itself and not from objective parameters.
Fred W.