Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Since it (power) appears to govern everything, there's no way he could say
> it was evil, since it has to explain good as well. It's the standard problem
> for monotheists. ;)
>
> The theme of the victim who winds up a happy participant in "evil" is, by
> the way, also a common horror genre trope. I believe that happened in Hostel
> II and Catacombs and Shadow Over Innsmouth. ;) It's also a favorite theme of
> Clive Barker -- who, by wild coincidence or not, is also heavily into S&M.
> :)
>
Alan writes: It seems to me there's two things conflated here. Power may be an element of or embedded within all(?) relationships but that does not mean that power governs all relationships.
The structurally paranoid view, as I read it, sees power as linear and determinate... where power is bad and (individual or collective) freedom good. But that is not Foucault's view... it was Bookchin's (at least once upon a time) but never Foucault's.
The idea of a linear relationship between power, evil, horror and S&M necessarily comes from reading Foucault - as Shag suggested - in structurally paranoid terms. I just had my social theory students read Halperin on queer politics (a terrain generated in significant part through critical engagement with Foucault) where the argument made about the difference between S&M, compulsory heterosexuality and naturalizing homosexuality - one that completely flipped my students out - is that the nature and particulars of erotic power relations in S&M is one actively and intentionally negotiated between partners. Of course there's power in S&M but it is qualitatively different than the unthinking, essentialist and necessarily sexualized erotics of conventional eroticism and the kinds of horrific "deviance" you seem to relate it to.
When I wrote on Bookchin one of the things I pointed out is that he generally conflated domination, hierarchy and power and opposed them to freedom, mutualism and cooperation. Here, and I think this is Marx's view - if not the view generally presented as his - of the realm of freedom: the freedom Marx is describing is a democratically negotiated set of intentional and socially self-reflexive relationships... a terrain where people make there own lives under conditions more and more of their own choosing, conditions never determined individually but negotiated collectively and materially in the name of mutually and sustainably enabled and constrained fulfillment. (Though I 'm developing this particular statement off the cuff here so, again, I'm looking for folks to find holes, suggest revisions, etc.)