Food, actor-networks and “the transatlantic destiny of Michel Foucault”
Presenters: Eric Sarmiento and Nate Gabriel
Presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, 2011
Extracts
theorists employing actor-network theory (ANT) have frequently come under attack by critical scholars for failing to adequately address or critique asymmetrical power relations, and thus acquiescing or even supporting the status quo. Critics of Michel Calloni, for example, contend that his investigations of economic assemblages, ‘[turn] out…to be an overture to a prospective alliance to be struck with neoclassical economists.’ Responding to similar criticisms, Bruno Latour asserts that many critical analyses of unequal power relations justify themselves and explain the relations they scrutinize by saying in effect, ‘Power relations are unequal because powerful actors exert their power over weaker actors.’ […]
By contrast, Michel Foucault’s work is celebrated for its ability to stir and mobilize the ethical and emotional energies of those who engage with it, enabling researchers (among others) to critique social arrangements, and thus to attempt to modify them. We find this particularly interesting in light of Latour’s desire to rescue Foucault from what he calls his transatlantic destiny. Latour reminds us that: ‘No one was more precise in their analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations [than Foucault].’ Latour goes on to say, however, that ‘as soon as Foucault was translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had ”revealed” power relations behind every innocuous activity and that ‘even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.’
Foucault News 