The Micro-structure of Power
Extracted from Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, Edited by Colin Gordon, Random House Inc, 1980. Foucault: Power in the substantive sense, ‘le pouvoir’, doesn’t exist. What I mean in this. The idea that there is either located at -- or emanating from -- a given point something which is ‘power’ seems to me to be based on a misguided analysis, one which at all events fails to account for a considerable numbers of phenomena. In reality power means relations, a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of of relations . So the problem is not that of constituting a theory of power which would be a remake of Boulainvilliers on the one hand and Rousseau on the other. Both the authors start off from an original state in which all men are equal, and then what happens? With one of them, a historical invasion, with the other a mythico-juridical event, but either way it turns out that from a given moment people no longer ...