Re: Foucault & postcolonialism


>In the process, I also came upon Lentricchias's "Ariel and the Police".
>I have found his critique somewhat baffling.
>For instance, he says
>
>"If power is always productive, as [Foucault] says it is, then one
>wants to know what is _produced_ in the general domination of women, or
>homosexuals, or blacks, or Palestinians, or children."

It seems to me that Lentricchia answers his won
question, in that what is produced is relations of
domination. Productive does not mean "good" or
"humane," it means just that: productive. Relations
of "domination" or "liberation" are produced.
It seems to me that to equate productive/production
with "good" or "humane," as Lentricchia seems to
above, is to buy into the capitalist mythos of
"production/productive=good".

Power produces various knowledges, discourses, and variegated
relations between bodies and their practices, which are connected
to and organized by discourse/knowledge. At least that's my understanding of
Fouacult. I'm open to divergent opinions.

Cheers,
Dan S.
"I dream of the intellectual destroyer
of evidence and universalities, the one
who, in the inertias and constraints of
the present, locates and marks the weak
points, the openings, the lines of force,
who incessantly displaces himself, doesn't
know exactly where he is heading nor what
he'll think tomorrow..."

Michel Foucault


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