i think foucault's take on power is more complex than what's described here, Andy.
for foucault, power is:
everywhere, power runs in and through all relationships and interactions.
people do not 'have' power basically; rather, power is a technique or action which individuals can engage in. (mechanism for life)
power is not possessed; it is exercised.
and where there is power, there is always also resistance.
the exercise of power, as well as resistance, is always part and parcel of the discourse of all participants of this list serve and the ways with words (s. b. heath). surely you've recognized this.
phillip
Phillip White, PhD
Urban Community Teacher Education Program
School of Education & Human Development
University of Colorado Denver
phillip.white@ucdenver.edu
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden [ablunden@mira.net]
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 6:18 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Mediation and Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel
Thank you Larry.
For Hegel, Freedom is in the very nature of a human being. A person may
at a given moment be denied freedom, but such a person remains, in their
essential nature, free, even whilst lanaguishing in the deepest and
darkest dungeon. On the other hand, theorists of our time, as you say,
following Foucault, take the opposite stance: that power is the master
signifier which constitutes all other categories and experiences,
including the human subject itself, and freedom recedes beyond the
horizon of possibility. I prefer Hegel.
The material world is, if you want to see it that way, a constraint upon
our freedom, but freedom is after all expressed in the world our
predecessors have fashioned for us and which we constantly refashion.
That's why what Hegel calls spirit does not spring anew from each
individual ego who wants to bounce intersubjectively of someone else,
but is constituted and reconstituted by human activity.
Andy