[lbo-talk] a poe moe and da poe moes

Seth Ackerman sethackerman1 at verizon.net
Sun Jul 27 15:21:43 PDT 2008


shag wrote:
> At 04:06 PM 7/27/2008, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> >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.
>
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=M9r&q=foucault+power+is+generative+productive&btnG=Search
>

Well, maybe I've let the Foucaultians in my discipline color my reading of Foucault too much.... But first of all, I feel like there's a confusion of words here. When I say power is bad for Foucault, you say no, he denied that it's solely a repressive force. But "bad" and "repressive" aren't the same thing. In his critique of the repressive hypothesis, he shows how power is productive. But aren't practically all his examples of the productivity of power examples of things that are "bad"? Things that we, the reader and the author, are or should be opposed to?

How is this....


> power is the setting up of shared truths in order to avoid war

...not the definition of culture?

Seth



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list