Hi dick,

Thanks again for the hifgh praise. Apologies for taking a moment to respond (I also have other things to say in response to earlier article).

In my mind, your comments distill into a kind of "why do this" question. I'll answer with a few nods toward Foucault. MF argued that you couldn't always tell who holds power but you could always see its effects.

In a soon to be published paper I wrote the following paragraph. Maybe you can follow without all the longer preface:

Foucault’s perspective represents a significant divergence from the Hobbesian/Schmittian view of power. For Foucault, power is not expressly top-down and monotonic but diffuse and pervasive, “[p]ower must… be analyzed as something that circulates… [it] is never localized here or there” (Foucault, 2003, p. 29). This places the sovereign and the whole apparatus of government in a very different frame. Foucault contends power emanates from many different dispositifs (apparatuses) in society. Dispositifs are all the various institutional, administrative, and physical mechanisms or knowledge structures, which facilitate the exercise of power. [i] As Rose (1996) describes them, dispositifs are “machines for government” (p. 38).

[i] For a full elaboration of the concept see: Callewaert, S. (2017). Foucault’s concept of dispositif. in Praktiske Grunde: Social and Professional Practices in Praxeological Perspective. Nordisk tidsskrift for kultur-og samfundsvidenskab. 1(2). pp. 29-51.

Soooo, what I guess I'm saying is that the kjey to controlling people is to deeply know them. Western society (Americans in particular) have been aculturated to "confess" on social media and "reveal" in their purchasing.

Thank you, again for the encouragement and prompts to think more about a subject.

-Matty