Miles, as I have said here many times before, and no doubt will many times again, I do not mean by human nature a disposition that is independednt of all environmental constraintsw, but a disposition of human to behave certain ways in certain envirinmenonts. Thus to say that resistance is a correlary, effect, result, consequence, or tendency that human have to manifest in relations of power is ipso facto to talk about human nature. In this respect it is no different from the nature of anything else, e.g., soluability, the disposition of certain solids to dissolve when exposed to water. If Foucault attacked the ideea of human nature, he attacked the silly notion, also rejected by Chomsky, that there are behaviors or dispositions to behave that are manifested independently of any environmental circumtsnces. But to say that people tend to resist power is to make a claim about human nature. Kells, there's the argument yuou wanted, but you knew it was there and what it was, so why make me say this stuff all over again if you can say it just as well?
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 7 Dec 2006, bitch wrote:
>
> >> OK, a quick internet search turned up this
> totally
> >> typical quote,
> >>
> >> "There are no relations of power without
> resistance."
> >> Michel Foucault, in Colin Gordeon (ed.).
> >> Power/Knowledge - Selected Interviews and Other
> >> Wiritings 1972-1977, Brighton: Harvester Press
> (1980),
> >> p. 142
> >
> >
> > what would this have to do with human nature? and
> what does it have to do
> > with the vid. you didn't have to hunt down quotes,
> though I muchly appreciate
> > it. what about the vid. where does he say there's
> a human nature? (the first
> > is a rhetorical question. Iknow what it has to do
> with it. The internet makes
> > me blonder than I appear. Failure to heed such
> warning could cause accidents
> > and crambe repetita!)
>
> I'll jump in; I think I know what J. is assuming
> here. "Resistance
> is the result of free-willed individuals rebelling
> against the
> existing social order; thus Foucault is making an
> implicit claim about
> human nature". Apologies if this is a misconstrual,
> but this
> brings up one of my favorite aspects of Foucault's
> work: Resistance
> is an inevitable product of power relations, not
> human nature per se.
> It is not that humans "want to be free"; it is that
> every formation
> of power inevitably generates interstices that
> create resistance.
> For instance, the creation of "homosexuality" as a
> type of
> medical disorder in the 1800s made possible
> self-identity
> and political action that undermine existing
> heterosexist social
> relations. (To me, this is just an extension of
> Marx's argument
> that the rise of capitalism generates the basis of
> its own downfall.)
>
> Miles
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Music Unlimited Access over 1 million songs. http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited