Text and Power
I was excited to read Foucault’s assertion that power is an exchange, because that was a point I made in our first class discussion. Of course it’s an exchange – you can’t influence something without something to influence. I think it’s a satisfyingly balanced worldview, and in a way, it reminds me of the way we can define concepts by what they are not, as well as what they are. For example, cold as “not hot”, up as “not down”, friend as “not enemy”. Without the opposing concept, we would not have the other, or rather, we wouldn’t need a word for it. I’ve actually heard this used as a rather lame argument for the existence of God: that since we “know” that evil exists, it must have a counterpart, which must be a force of pure good, therefore, GOD. I know, I don’t follow it either.
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Tags: Foucault
February 13th, 2013 at 3:01 pm
Hi Anonymous,
For this post, at least, it is appropriate for you to not sign your name!
You might be interested to know that Foucault also had an influential essay on the question of the author, “What is an Author?” that was published (I think) 2 years after Barthes. Together they challenged ideas about authorial intentionality as what a text means. One thing that will consider these ideas further is to use the term discourse where you say language. A discourse is a disciplined form of language–so if think about literature or history or medicine you will be able to see that each one has a certain set of questions that it asks, principles that it values, rules of addressing its domain, etc. When we think of it in this light, we can see how discourse constructs authors, historians, and physicians. It goes further when we see how institutions of religion, education and professional training provide credentials to establish who can “speak” officially within a given profession.
February 14th, 2013 at 3:25 pm
Ack, sorry, totally forgot my name! I had never heard of that essay – I will check it out!
February 14th, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Something you mentioned in terms of Foucault’s definitions resonated with me. Perhaps it’s due to a will- to- knowledge on my part (or a less positive trait, impatience), but Foucault’s sense of literary evasiveness rendered the reading of his text less pleasurable for me than I might have hoped. I found that whenever he introduced a concept or a term that he coined, he found the need to explain first what it was not, rather than what it was, thereby teaching through the use of tautologies. Although I do find Foucault’s insights interesting, I personally prefer a more straight- forward text which clearly delineates the author’s philosophy, rather than introducing ideas only to dismiss them in quick succession.