[lbo-talk] Power (Waiting for Foucault)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Jun 28 13:01:54 PDT 2008


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



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list