>
> 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?
Absolutely not. In History of Sexuality, he argues that the creation of stable sexual categories is a product of power relations. For Foucault, that's not intrinsically bad; in fact, he used those sexual categories to define himself as a gay man. The point here is that power relations produce things: types of people, social institutions, discourse. Making a moral judgement about the things produced by power relations isn't really interesting to Foucault.
Miles