\n"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe\nidea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of\ntruth to circulate freely, without any constraints or coercive effects, seems\nutopian to me. This is precisely a failure to see that power relations are not\nsomething that is bad in itself, that we have to break free of. I do not think\nthat a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means the\nstrategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of\nothers. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of\ncompletely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the\nmanagement techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these\ngames of power with as little domination as possible [\u2026] Power is not evil. Power\nis games of strategy.\u201d
\nMichel Foucault, Vol. 1 Ethics, \u2018The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom\u2019, 298
\n\u201cThe contrast between Kingsley Hall and a contemporary\nmental hospital did not lie simply in the fact that the \u2018staff\u2019 of the former\nthought that hierarchy was bad in the\nabstract, or that it would be nice in\nprincipal not to exercise control over the \u201cpatients.\u201d Something more\nsubstantial was at stake, which can be caught up in the Heideggerian contrast\nbetween enframing and revealing. Conventional psychiatry, one could say,\nalready knows what people should be like, and it is the telos of this sort of\npsychiatry to reengineer \u2013 to enframe \u2013 mental patients back into that image.\nThat is why a hierarchical system of\nsocial relations is appropriate. Power relations and understandings of the self\ngo together. The Bateson-Laing line, of course, was that selves are endlessly\ncomplex and endlessly explorable, and the antihierarchical approach of Kingsley\nHall was deliberately intended to facilitate such exploration in both the mad\nand the sane. This is the mode of revealing, of finding out what the world has\nto offer us. We can, then, name this contrast in social relations in terms of\npower and hierarchy, but that is not enough. The sociological contrast echoed\nand elaborated a contrast in ontological stances \u2013 enframing versus revealing \u2013\nwhich is, I think, very hard to grasp from the standpoint of modernity.\u201d\u00a0
\nAndrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, \u2018Ontology, Power, and Revealing\u2019, 211\u00a0
\nThe first quote is an idea that has been turning over in my head since I first read it a few months ago (and it\u2019s really worth reading), while the second is the conclusion of the current chapter in the book I\u2019m reading currently, which I think reflects productively on the first. As well as reflecting, at least in part, the Foucauldian ethics of power relations it also places it in a somewhat practical setting, of (anti)psychiatry (the quote from Foucault continues by discussing sexual relations and pedagogy.)
\nI recently started taking a class on Buddhist ethics, out of a desire to transfer my reading into a more collective (and social) setting, and one of the specific teaching of the group I\u2019m having a problem with is the idea that we can operate in two distinct states of the \u2018power mode\u2019 and\u00a0\u2018love mode\u2019. Which, aside from the superficial tweeness, conflicts with my adoption of the idea above that power relations are an integral and inevitable part of human relationships: that ethics is the\u00a0\u201cconscious [r\u00e9fl\u00e9chie] practice of freedom\u201d on the basis of acknowleding power, not substituting it with another category; ethics is above power, not in place of it. Though the latter approach does allow for limited uses of the \u2018power mode\u2019, in a sort of firm but fair way - the whole thing being a case-by-case application of deontological/Kantian-type intentionality and karmic consequentialism, but that\u2019s another issue. I\u2019m more interested in trying to reconcile Foucault\u2019s idea of ever-present power relations in any\u00a0\u201crelationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of another\u201d (and that basically being his definition of a relationship) with the quite enticing idea that trying to control others\u2019 behaviour is manipulative and de facto unethical.
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