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Empire: paradox of power

Hard and Negri continue to use Foucault's tool box. However, they make the turn to others who have gone before them. Those who have rifled through Foucualt's tool box, found some useful concepts and worked them up.

One of these concepts is the paradox of power. Hardt and Negri say:

"What Foucault constructed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made explicit) is therefore the paradox of a power that, while it unifies and envelops within itself every element of social life (thus losing its capacity effectively to mediate different social forces), at that very moment reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization-a milieu of the event....These conceptions of the society of control and biopower both describe central aspects of the concept of Empire."

In Discipline and Punish Foucault employed the concepts of contrast and contradiction. The idea that prison contains its own failure is a good example. In the History of Sexuality Vol. 1 Foucault addresses the modern paradox of our discourse on sexuality: we proclaim loudly that we are repressed, yet we talk so much about how we can't talk about sex.

A muted form of dialectics rather than a paradox?

Well, we all know that French poststructuralism is hostile to Hegelian dialectics. So a way is needed to think the paradox of power unifying and envelops within itself in every element of social life and simultaneously disclosing a new milieu of plurality and singularization. Hence the turn to Deleuze and Guattari.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 20, 2004 11:51 PM | TrackBack