Foucault

In response to what some people have posted about Foucault, I just want to say that I think his general point argues against the idea that the technology of power and its techniques are dehumanizing forces that subjugate humans through a kind of sovereign, institutional, top to bottom control. He is rather arguing that the technology of power since the 19th century is deeply human, it is neither good nor bad, it is more of a generative matrix that exists in every kind of social relation, and which thereby is deeply implicated in the production of knowledge and practice (discourses) that position our subjective understanding of ourselves. (through, for example, the techniques of power deployed at the locus of sexuality). For Foucault, the technology of power is pervasive and historically contingent, which means that we can resist it, we can struggle against its techniques and continually change the relationships of power that define and generate us as desiring human subjects. In other words, we do not escape power (or the modality of it that we think of as repression) by doing whatever we want but rather are only able to do what we want (and desire what we do) because the social context is produced by a general matrix of power that is far from being the symbolic enactment of the authority of the sovereign over life that it was in old times. Struggle changes the configurations of power, and is therefore socially meaningful, so to wish for or think about an egalitarian utopia where we can escape the confines of power relationships is completely useless.