Yes, but Marx believed in false consciousness. He thought you could tell objectively which aspects of a subject are the product of power and which are genuine expressions of species-being or whatever. Foucault, as far as I can tell, dispenses with that. It's no longer a question of "false" or "genuine" aspects of the subject. All of it is constituted by power. And power is all bad. Hence, you get this almost puritanical paranoia about "power" from the Foucaultians (or at least the American ones) -- it's everywhere! all around us! right here in river city! sapping our precious fluids! good god, it's *inside* of us! oh god, how do we get it out?!
In the end, it seems to me that Foucault's implicit utopia is (like the right-wing libertarian's implicit utopia) the guy alone on a desert island. Free of power at last! Or maybe in Foucault's case, ten million people, deaf, dumb and blind, groping each other in some vast bathhouse: No culture, no norms, no discourse -- hence, no power. Liberation! This is what Perry Anderson means when he says Foucault confuses power with culture.
I'm not saying Foucault is a waste of time or that his insights aren't really important. Intellectual life is much better off because of him. But there are problems.
Let's say you have a guy who grows up in a patriotic factory town somewhere in the heartland. One day, a union organizer comes to town spouting radical ideas. The guy listens, and right away decides that all this stuff about class and capitalism is obviously commie un-Americanism, just like management says. The normal Foucaultian analysis is to say: Here is a subject formed by power. He didn't react as he did because of the coercion of the police. Or because he didn't own the means of production. Or because the media is controlled by capitalists. Talking about that stuff is just futilely trying to cut off the head of the king again. The real problem is subject formation. Power is bad.
But now let's say you have the opposite situation. A guy grows up in a fiercely militant union town. (We'll set this in the UK thirty years ago to retain plausibility.) All his life he's been brought up to hate scabs. One day there's a strike and the boss comes to him and says: Hey, you have to wake up and realize that those union guys have been feeding you with lies. It's not us who's oppressing you, it's them. They're keeping you from doing the best you can for you and your family, etc. etc. etc. But the guy right away decides that this is just more management double-talk, just like the union guys warned him about, and he walks away. The Foucault-reading Thatcherite would look at this and say: Power! Subject-formation! And wouldn't the Thatcherite be right by Foucault's lights?
And if so, doesn't that mean that wresting cultural hegemony from the ruling class is just replacing one Tsar with another? Or, alternatively, are there good and bad kinds of power? Is it good when "we" form subjects but it's bad when "they" do it? Is "power" the enemy? Or is it the boss, just like all those deluded Marxists used to think?
> As long as we cling to the pernicious myth that power is always and
> simply the domination of pre-existing autonomous agents, effective
> political action will be difficult.
How does abandoning this myth help us? I'm not saying we shouldn't, but how does it help?
Seth