[lbo-talk] Power (Waiting for Foucault)

[Miles Jackson]

Ted Winslow wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> There are other approaches to understanding the psychopathology of  
> institutions.
> 
> Kleinian psychoanalysis, for instance, has been made the basis for  
> studies attempting to understand institutions as "containers of  
> anxiety, " studies exemplified by Isabel Menzies Lyth's two volume  
> collection of essays: "Containing Anxiety in Institutions" and "The  
> Dynamics of the Social."

How can psychological characteristics explain social facts?  Even if 
people have anxiety, there must be social processes that transform those 
individual anxieties into some set of social organizations, 
institutions, statuses, roles, and norms.  The psychological 
characteristics cannot by themselves do any of these things, and you 
cannot understand the social facts by psychoanalyzing individuals.

Again, the pernicious individualist ideology of capitalism: the argument 
above is exactly analogous to the claim that poverty exists in our 
society because of the "psychopathology" of the poor.

Miles