Some things I've been trying to work through after reading a lot of Foucault...what do you guys think? cc doesn't think I have it right...

1) Ultimately, power should not be defined merely as the ability or capacity to act, nor even as the ability or capacity to act in relation to others in a social system. The definition of power as capacity to act assumes a self-contained, pre-existing actor whose needs and desires to act are self-originated. We might better understand power to be the social relations which constitute not only the needs and desires but the very identities of the actors. Just as gender is totally socially constructed, so are other aspects of identity; just as sexual desire acquires meaning only through culture, so it is with all our needs; and an understanding of power is more than an understanding of the capacity to act, it is an understanding of the unequal relations of social and cultural construction.

2) As historians, our work tends to be organized around the concept of empowerment, a concept that entangles the liberal conceptions of power and of freedom. Empowerment defines power as a substance to be distributed among pre-existing, autonomous individuals and groups, not a social relation that constitutes those individuals and groups---and it promises freedom as the reward for the proper distribution of power. As historians, the questions that drive our work tend to be those suggested by the conception of empowerment: Who wielded power over whom? How did members of a subjugated group demonstrate their resistance? How was the struggle for freedom fought? Important as these questions are, they do not cover the breadth or the depth of power relations in any given time and place. We need to expand our question set to better understand power as a constitutive force. As it stands, our commitment to empowerment as the end of history puts blinders on our view of social violence.

3) This is not to absolve those who reap the benefits of power effects, nor to advocate for the primacy of structure over agency, but to suggest the need to reframe questions about social violence and domination in our intellectual culture. The stakes are high. Our liberal assumptions about the nature of power made the current war in the Middle East seem justified, as Americans backed the project of "empowering" Iraqis by giving them the vote---and our commitment to an universalist emancipatory gender narrative made it seem natural that rationalizations for invading Afghanistan should shift from talk of retaliation for 9/11 to talk of the degradation of Muslim women under the Taliban.

4) Emphases on agency and on resistance are meant to work toward social change, empowering people in the present by highlighting the empowerment of people in the past, creating a proud heritage for subordinated people today. However, there are possible problems with this approach. To begin with, we must be careful about the connection between agency and liberal individualism. The emancipatory narratives celebrated by a focus on resistance to subordination resemble the bootstrap narratives of the classical liberal self-made man, not only in that both are essentially narratives of self-empowerment, but that both tend toward essentially liberal notions of social progress based in individual human agency. These liberal conceptions of individual agency and self-empowerment have long been mobilized as tactics to over-freight the individual with responsibility for his or her own social circumstances, and to mask systems of inequality. Celebrating the power of the subordinated individual or group does not necessarily make them more powerful; in fact, it can evade the necessity of addressing ongoing social violence.

5) Further, by reifying resistance as a basic human impulse and a moral act, we mark those in whom we don't recognize resistance as less-than-fully-realized humans. Groups who do not resist as we think they should are relegated to what has been described as the waiting room of progressive teleology, where they will stay until their consciousness is raised and they begin their struggle for freedom. This set of assumptions about the course of history and the nature of humanity does violence to the meaningfulness of those groups' existence. Progressive teleology notwithstanding, it is possible to find fulfillment without reference to the liberal notion of freedom. Thinking of power as relational and constitutive goes quite a ways toward understanding the complexities of these situations.