>And power is all bad.
NO. that is exactly what foucault was on about, especially in his critique of the Freudo Marxists like Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm. He didn't like the idea that power is only ever thought of as "all bad", as a repressive force.
etc. Dennis Claxton provided a great quote not too long ago; it's at the heart of what Foucault means. The link above, here's an excerpt, a summary of various thinkers on power:
"Foucault argues that power has no essence; it is not situated in any particular place; and thus power is not reducible to institutions. Instead, power is always power exercised. According to Foucault, power is located at the level of struggle and is located at the level of truth production and knowledge. The common view of power is as something inherently negative and noxious: power prohibits and says no. Foucault calls this "negative power" and distinguishes it from "positive power", which is the power to say yes and to produce new realities. For Foucault, power is not violenceviolence takes place when where the limits of power are reached. War presupposes an absence of a shared truth, while power is the setting up of shared truths in order to avoid war. While Foucault does not articulate a comprehensive, coherent theory on power, his views of the social construction of power are an important addition to the power debate. Foucault's writings highlight the idea that the relationships between power and knowledge is not oppositionalit is mutually constitutive."
oh. here, I found Dennis's quote:
Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are "bidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap "psychoanalysis" of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious.