Hobbes is known for his characterization of society as a "war of all against all" ( bellum omnia contra omnia , whatever the Latin endings are). This is the dog-eat-dog, rat race of capitalist society. I read Sahlins as saying in this aphorism ( his short book of aphorisms is like a book of email posts) that Foucault's finding micro power struggles everywhere is basically the same idea as Hobbes'.
In the aphorism "The Poetics of Culture III" Sahlins quips:
Power , power everywhere, And how the signs do shrink. Power, power everywhere, And nothing else to think.
The recent Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power is the latest incarnation of anthropology's incurable functionalism. Like its structural-functional and utilitarian predecessors, hegemonizing is homogenizing: the dissolution of specific cultural forms into generic instrumental effects..."
Charles
Charles Brown wrote:
>[Fifty-something intellectuals will recall Frenchie theatre of the
>absurdist Samuel Beckett's _Waiting for Godot_] _Waiting for Foucault :
>And Other Aphorisms_ by Marshall Sahlins Waiting for Foucault ( aphorism
>on page 37) " A man of a thousand masks" one of his biographers said of
>Michel Foucault, so how seriously can we take the guise he assumed to say
>that power arises in struggle , in war, and such a war as is of every man
>against every man. "Who fights whom ?" he asked. "We all fight each
>other." Critics and exegetes hardly notice Foucault's connections to
>Hobbes except to mention the apparently radical disclaimer that his own
>notion of power is "the exact opposite of Hobbes' project in _Leviathan_"
>We have to give up our fascination with sovereignty, "cut off the king's
>head, " free out attention from the repressive institutions of state.
>Power comes from below. It is invested in the structures and cleavages of
>everyday life, omnipresent in quotidian regimes of knowledge and truth. If
>in the Hobbesian contrast subjects constitute the power, the Commonwealth
>that keeps them all in awe, in the Foucaldian schema power constitutes the
>subjects. All the same, the structuralism the later Foucault abandoned for
>a sense of the poly-amorphous perverse, this structuralism taught that
>opposites are things alike in all significant respects but one. So when
>Foucault speaks of a war of each against all, and in the next breath even
>hints of a Christian divided self - "And there is always within each of us
>something that fights something else " — we are teempted to believe that
>he and Hobbes have more in common than the fact that, with the exception
>of Hobbes, both were bald.
*rolls eyes*
When he talks about power from below, he's talking about how, as a for instance, we manufacture our own consent. take an example from work. i'm supposed to be a big ol' radical, right? i should be questioning all kinds of things about the way management uses techniques to get more work out of us. and of course, I do, though i can't do a whole lot about it. i can do stuff at the individual level -- like look the other way when people screw off as a form of resistance or cover for people screwing off or, or, or.
This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com