>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.
Power never preexists relationships. Like all concepts, it can only describe something after it happens, but in no way does it, as Foucault uses it, refer back to a master signifier. It only exists in certain time at certain places with certain actors.