[PEN-L:1496] Re: Re: Re: Re: Enlightenment insight

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Rob Schaap wrote:

> they can not be synonymous.  There is discourse that is not power and/or
> there is power that is not discourse.  Power, we are regularly told, is
> what constructs/legitimises discourse.  Obviously, power must be
> communicated.  Communication is what discourse is, no?  So discourse, I
> conclude, constructs/legitimises power.  Which means the subject is agentic
> in the construction of power relations!  Allow me to go another step, power
> does not 'mean' to me but that it relates to interests - INTERESTS is the
> category outside power that power needs if it is to mean.

Foucault already takes that step, though: it's the *institution* which is
the true subject in repressive societies. The prison-cell is the monad, as
it were, in the totally administered society. This is where all his stuff
about prisons comes in, he's very insistent that this power is a power
over real people: the power to discipline, punish, and ultimately to
produce subjects who enjoy (or at least don't rebel against) their
confinement. He doesn't lack a theory of class interests in that sense,
rather, it's just that he died before he could make the thing explicit,
i.e. read enough of the Frankfurt School to figure out that Adorno was
talking about the totally administered society back in the 1940s and start
talking, as Bourdieu does, about symbolic capital instead of capitalist
power. Foucault and Bourdieu would've been one hell of a tag team
in the Europe of the euro, but it was not to be, alas...

-- Dennis