FOUCAULT: Isn't this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a
result of the fact that we continue to ignore the problem of power?
After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began
to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet
to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud
cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which
we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and
hidden, ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses
of their mechanisms certainly don't exhaust the field where power is
exercised and where it functions. The question of power re- mains a
total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with
reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits,
which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested.
But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who
govern. But, of course, the idea of the "ruling class" has never
received an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as
"to dominate ... .. to rule ... .. to govern," etc. These notions are
far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the
limits imposed on the exercise of power-the relays through which it
operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant
aspects of the hierarchy and the forms of control, surveillance,
prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere that power exists, it is being
exercised. No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power;
and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people
on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who
holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power.
If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in
Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is
because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem: under the
ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you
have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and
their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of
power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the
manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a union representative,
the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these
sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it
is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to
speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of
information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of
accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power
and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if
the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of
struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power
to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of
prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The discourse
of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It
may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we
expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are
"bidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap
"psychoanalysis" of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more
difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes
frequently encountered in the recent past, that "writing gives rise to
repressed elements" and that "writing is necessarily a subversive
activity," seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be
severely denounced.
from http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
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