More+on+Power

More on Power/ Knowledge

“By "critical" I mean a philosophy that is aware of the limits of knowing. By "dogmatic" I mean a philosophy that advances coherent general principles without sufficient interest in empirical details” (25).

“To speak of that impossible double name-Derrida/Foucault-is not to be able to speak //for// it, to give you anything //in// that name. But perhaps one might yet be able to give in //to// both, however asymmetrically” (26).

“These traces of naturalized or merely systemic notions of power, present also in Irene Diamond's good interactive take on Foucault, are what I am calling the consequences of paleonymy. The word "power" points toward what we call the empirical in the history of the language. Poststructuralist nominalism cannot afford to ignore the empirical implications of a particular name” (27).

“As is Derrida's habit, he does not develop a systematic description of this mode of operation. (There is, after all, no useful definition of deconstruction anywhere in Derrida's work )” (28).

“Indeed, this double gesture in Derrida is the affirmative duplicity (opening up toward plurality) that allows him to claim, most noticeably in Limited Inc but in fact in every text, that practice norms theory-that deconstruction, strictly speaking , is impossible though obligatory and so on. I have myself argued this as the originary "mistake"-not to be derived from some potential correctness-that inaugurates deconstruction. Foucault is not in Derrida, but Foucault slashed with Derrida prevents him from being turned into a merely pragmatic nominalist, or a folk hero for American feminism. "Power" in the general sense is therefore not only a name, but a catachresis. Like all names it is a misfit. To use this name to describe a generality inaccessible to intended description, is necessarily to work with the risk that the word "is wrested from its proper meaning," that it is being applied "to a thing which it does not properly denote" (OED). We cannot find a proper place-it must be effaced as it is disclosed” (29).

“What does this peculiar moving base of a differentiated force field look like? And how does the field polarize? Let us turn the page of //The Will to Knowledge//, where Foucault finds it possible "to advance a few propositions." Here the distinction between the force field on the one hand and its coming into play as power relations on the other is unmistakable if you are on that track: "It is to be supposed that the multiple relations of force that form themselves and play in the apparatuses of production .... serve as support to the broad effects of cleavage running through the social body as a whole."’

“Derrida's chief critique is the insistence that "madness is within thought"’ (38).

“Within these frames, both Derrida and Foucault are interested in the production of "truth." Deconstruction is not exposure of error. Logocentrism is not a pathology. Deconstruction is "justice," says Derrida. And Foucault: "My objective ... has been to create a history of the different modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects." Derrida, too, always rusing on the track of the ruses of the subject centering itself in the act, in decision, in thought, in affirmation, with no hope of closure” (38-9)

“ And yet the slash must be honored ” (39).

“In order to answer the question "do his writings, beneath all the fireworks and attendant billows of smoke, in fact express a position of sufficient clarity, plausibility, and interest to merit sustained attention?" every challenging thought must be made blunt by Gutting so that influences can be charted, continuities established, exam questions answered” (43).

“Especially in cultural critique, the event of political independence can be automatically assumed to stand in-between colony and decolonization as an unexamined good that operates a reversal. As I am insisting, the new nation is run by a regulative logic derived from a reversal of the old colony from within the cited episteme of the postcolonial subject: secularism, democracy, socialism, national identity, capitalist development” (48).

“If you are actually involved in changing state policy on the one hand, and earning the right to be heard and trusted by the subaltern on the other, on behalf of a change that is both medicine and poison, you cannot choose to choose the cut-off trail, declaring it as a hope when for some it has been turned into despair. And, if, like Derrida and Foucault, you are a scrupulous academic who is largely an academic, you stage the crisis relationship between theory and practice in the practice of your theoretical production in various ways instead of legitimizing the polarization between the academy and the real world by disavowing it, and then producing elegant solutions that will never be seriously tested either in large-scale decision-making or among the disenfranchised ” (51).

Interviews, Strategies and Dialogues

1 Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution

“I want to ask the question-the rhetorical question, really -does the intellectual, the intellectual, have the some role in social production in Australia as in France? It seems to me that one of the problems here is that even as the intellectual is being defined as specific, there is at work there the figure of an intellectual who seems not to be production specific at all” (3).

“I don't think there is a non-institutional environment. I think the institution, whichever institution you are isolating for the moment, does not exist in isolation, so that what you actually are obliged to look at is more and more framing” (5).

“I think I avoided in some ways becoming someone who takes on a master discourse, and I am always amused to see that I am, as you say, perhaps best known as a translator and commentator of Derrida, because the deconstructive establishment I think finds me an uncomfortable person. So I will say to begin with that I am not particularly interested in defending Derrida as a master figure and from that point of view I find it just by accident interesting that it is not possible for me to follow Derrida in his substantive projects. Within the enthusiastic Foucauldianism in the United States there is a lot of that sort of following through on substantive projects” (6).

3 Strategy, Identity, Writing

“You want me to comment on this interview? Now, in this room? Well, in a situation like this one, the hegemony is rather clearly articulated. There is one person who is supposed to have some answers, and others who ask questions, and given that questioning and answering is placed in an orthodox way, the one who answers has the power. On the other hand, since this will get transcribed and published, and given over to people, that easy articulation of the hegemonic situation is no longer operative, because the person who gets judged is the person who answers the questions, so that there is a certain kind of nervousness on the part of the person answering. This is not the situation when you’re actually writing or teaching. So, paradoxically, I would say that I find my power very much less in an interview situation, than in the classroom or when I'm writing” (35).

“I think the extent of this embrace can often be overstated. To say, for example, that we are in a cleft stick, now that's not very phallic in itself. I seems to me-you said your questions were all entangled in each other, my answers are too-that since one is obliged to produce knowledge, one should perhaps clean up the metaphorical situation moment by momen t, that is to say, in a certain persistent way. There's a lot of stuff about gripping and grasping in description of appropriation through knowledge. In fact, if people would simply think upon it, it is a feminine metaphor. In the missionary position, she gets a grip upon his thighs. I'm quoting from a play of Yeats', where the mad woman sings a song about her inability to grasp the human reality of political martyrs as not being able to 'get a grip upon his thighs'. What about just simply looking at the ways in which-in my case from a dominantly heterosexist, feminine point of view-one could re-inscribe these very same metaphors ... infiltrate them?” (41).

8

Practical Politics of The Open End

“This afternoon at a women's graduate student's conference where I was running the workshop on international students, there was present a small group of young white American women who clearly with a lot of benevolence, but completely unexamined benevolence, were suggesting that there was perhaps something wrong in our not acknowledging that we were getting all of these benefits of the U.S. education system, that we were only talking about our problems within the institution. I argued then, following this argument, although I tried to keep it as unpolitically vocabularized as possible, I argued then that if one looked at the documents of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, if one actually looked at the way in which budgets were established, etc., one would know that to an extent the position from where the U.S. educational system, the university system is able to make itself so technically and qualitatively well endowed, a lot of it is produced by the "Third World", and if you want to work it out, you have to work it out from the argument of value: that "slight and contentless" mediating differential between labor power and commodity. Now, the way in which it is produced, on the other hand, is not visible because most People do not read those kinds of economic documents. What they read is ideological stuff in journals and newspapers written by people who are not aware of this fully. On the other hand, the fact that all of these foreign students are at universities is eminently visible, and the fact that they will go back and themselves perhaps work to keep this crisis management intact is an added bonus. But, it is only through the argument that there is this contentless, mediating differential which allows labor power to valorize value that is, the possibility of exchange and surplus, that we can grasp that the manipulation of Third World labor sustaining the continued resources of the U.S. academy which produces the ideological supports for that very manipulation ” (97).

“But I, myself, had thought I was saying that __ since it is not possible not to be an essentialist, __ one can self-consciously use this irreducible moment of essentialism as part of one's strategy. This can be used as part of a "good" strategy as well as a "bad" strategy and this can be used self-consciously as well as unselfconsciously, and neither self-consciousness nor unself-consciousness can be valorized in my book” (109).

11

Negotiating the Structures of Violence

“ What I mean by crisis is the moment at which you feel that your presuppositions of an enterprise are disproved by the enterprise itse lf. These are not necessarily moments of weakness. It seems to me that this is the only serious way in which crisis can become productive, when one feels, for example, that the women's movement challenges the project of feminism. On the other hand, one is not about to give up on feminism, but the relevant outcome, either from the women's movement point of view, or from the feminism point of view, is a problem and a moment when you must think about negotiating. I'm not saying that we live constantly in a state of crisis-crisis management is another name for life, right?-but it seems that if you look at even an old-fashioned revolution, there is a transitional moment; in the post-revolutionary moment, it seems as if revolution is no longer necessary, and that's when things start going wrong” (139).

“I was not recentering the subject in Derrida. You see, deconstruction is not an exposure of error. As Derrida says, and now I am quoting, “Logocentrism is not a pathology," it is the thing that enables us-except, if because it enables us, we say that it is correct, it would be a mistake. That is all he is saying. So that, in fact, all that he looks at is the way in which the subject centers itself. He is not decentering the subject. The subject is-the subject must identify itself with its self-perceived intention. The fact that it must do so is not a description of what it is. That is the difference between decentered and centered. There is no way that a subject can be anything but centered. Logocentrism, phallocentrism, gynocentrism-all of these things enable. And deconstruction-the project starts with, as I say in the essay on "Breast-Giver",* with a misunderstanding of a rhetorical question. But the fact that the subject is centered begins with that kind of an un-endorsable error. That doesn't mean that the subject can be decentered. There is no such thing as the decentered subject. There is no such thing. If it is, it has already, that first "yes" is, the auto-position of the subject [ ... ] the subject is, because it must give itself the gift of procreation, it is proper to itself. So to see, to read Derrida as if he is decentering the subject is in fact, it is a very possible misreading, and its is not a misreading. For he is describing the necessary centering of a subject in terms of a para-centrality that cannot be yet makes the centering of being possible” (146-7).