no. see the example below.
>How is this....
>
>>power is the setting up of shared truths in order to avoid war
>
>...not the definition of culture?
right. but, perhaps for you, already steeped in Marx, it's not a shocker. to others -- consider a whole slew of structural-functionalist sociologists in the U.S. -- culture, why, it was doing what it was supposed to do and so how could it be anything but good, this culture, especially if it was upholding the good, true, and beautiful. all the better to praise our wonderful high culture and eradicate all that's low and deviant, not because culture and power have anything to do with one another, but because culture is so precious and weak, we must keep it strong in the face of the lower orders and deviant hordes.
likewise, foucault also had to deal with the humanists (not sure what other word to call them) who were certain that prison reform or sex liberation etc (and he was directly involved in prison reform as Dennis pointed out some posts ago) on a more humane level was an advance over the grim old days. The mistake is to see him looking at how this "humane" approach isn't so benign and then conclude that it's all horrible. or, worse, all pointless. it's a cautionary tale, i guess: the mistake is to imagine that such advances are free of power, just because the people so involved are "outsiders" and "resisters" to the powers that be, people who want to help and make lives better.
and there was and remains a big tendency to do this. back then, at least in the states, the tendency was to claim that, of course, if it were the most oppressed of the oppressed leading the onslaught to create more humane prisons and liberated sexualities and so forth then, of course, whatever they could come up with must be pristine and beautiful, it would so not replicate power relations, for how could be who'd, say, been enslaved, the most oppressed of the oppressed, rise up to oppress others.... ? Of course they wouldn't, beautiful souls an' all.
am i making any sense here or is this too condensed? (what discipline, btw? maybe it'll help so i can translate better)
I don't know how to put it any better than to point at my experience in activist groups. and come to think of it most people i know who've been into foucault come to him from direct experiences in effort where they started out trying to "help". you see it up close and personal.
back to the yumMEEE quote. Consider MacKinnon, for whom power is super=structural but who, unable to hold on to that, turns it all aside to step forward and, nonetheless, in an extremely enlightenment humanist rationalist way say that, even though we are completely shaped by relations of power that serve men, we can know the truth. we do know the truth. we know the truth. we know truth. we are truth. we, truth. truth.
i wrote that series of sentences on purpose, pay attention to the slippage.
that's a scary thing, that attitude of utter certainty, of utter absolute ability to claim to speak for all women, everywhere, anywhere, always. and when you're dealing with it on the ground, in activist groups, it's, well, terrorizing.
and on the groud, my experience in blog wars is that kind of radical knowingness means that the hunt is always on for the traitors, the infiltrators, the male-identified hustlers, the men posing as women there to undermine women's collective, inevitable advance to truth.
when the only way to the truth is to constantly insist on naming it and speaking for the oppressed everywhere and when the only conception of social change is making sure that the oppressed, everywhere, have their consciousness raised (their minds changed by other minds) through a constant self-inspection of one's interiority its conformity to exterior principles, a constant policing of desire, eating, shitting, speaking, fucking, working, breathing, pissing, walking, talking -- you get some mighty fucked up stuff.
that's not born of an irrationalist mindset hellbent on constantly questioning and undermining your own work. and for that, i'll take foucault any day over the radical structuralists who claim to radical social constructionist but nonetheless harbor a certainty that they can know, will know, do know, simply know: the oppressed and its truth.
sure, you can get something similar out of other knowledge traditions -- pragmatism, for one -- but right now, we're talking about foucault. and i'd add that, just because some other thinker or tradition is a workable alternative, that's not a way to undermine foucault's positions and is, rather, a way to support them.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)