On Jun 28, 2008, at 3:11 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Since others may be (like myself for the most part) deleting Tahir's
> posts without reading them,
It's always charming when you say this. I know a few people who have you on autotrash, too.
> I wanted to salvage what seems to me an
> important paragraph in his post on this subject.
>
>
> *****Tahir: This captures the problem nicely that I have with the
> notion
> of power that is under discussion. The trouble with it is it's such a
> dead end. So this is all power. So right, so what? What have we gained
> by subsuming all of this under one 'signifier'? Talking about
> 'forms of
> power' moreover reinforces the notion that all of these phenomena are
> just 'forms' of (essentially!) the same thing.
...
>
> I have reviewed a long thread on this list re "power" in December of
> 2002 -- and that thread leads me to about the same conclusion Tahir
> argues here: Power is not a very useful explanatory concept, but
> merely
> a sometimes useful label for relations which must be analyzed without
> prior recourse to the concept of power. As an analytic concept it is a
> bit of vular Platonism.
Is this about Foucault? I could swear he wrote about prisons, clinics, sexuality - actual institutions, actual people with authority acting on actual physical bodies and subordinate populations. It would be a bit of "vul[g]ar Platonism" if he'd just riffed about Power. But he didn't. You may not like what he had to say, but please give some sign of having read it.
Doug