Asked in an interview collected in the Sheridan's Foucault Reader, I believe (I am away from my library) Why, if what he says about the inescapability of power is true, we should resist, he replies typically, The question is not Why but How.
Substantively, talk of human nature or the nature of anything else implies talk of surrounding context. There is no such thing as the nature of humans or anything else apart from a context. The nature of X is its disposition or propensity to behave so-and-so in a given set or environmental circumstances. There, ipso facto, to talk of human nature is to talk of the conditions in which dispositions or propensities are manifested.
I have no idea why this point is so hard to grasp, especially because the alternative is wholly incoherent. I guess it is a testimonial to the power of ideology that when even smart, philosophically sophisticated, scientifically educated people hear the words "human nature" they find it difficult to get past a notion of a nature which unlike the nature of anything else in being independent of circumstances, despite the fact that the idea of such a nature is self-evidently nonsensical once it is stated.
Arrggh.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Sure, if we resist power in certain contexts, that
> supports the claim
> that we have the capacity to resist power. However,
> we need to talk
> about more than "human nature" here: if we want to
> figure out why that
> behavior emerges, we'll need to analyze the
> surrounding context too.
>
> This is distracting us from Foucault's point,
> though. He's not saying
> "There is no such thing as human nature"; he's
> saying "Let's study the
> ways in which people construct knowledge about human
> nature and see what
> roles those forms of knowledge play in sustaining
> power relations".
> Note that Foucault's point is completely orthogonal
> to any claims about
> "real" human nature. --It's like sociology of
> religion: we can study
> the role of Catholicism in a society, but whatever
> we find out is
> irrevelant to the question, "Are Catholic beliefs
> true?"
>
> So studying human nature and studying the ideology
> of human nature are
> both important endeavors. The latter fascinates me,
> but I won't
> begrudge people who want to tackle the former.
>
> Miles
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