Agency

When I first read the last sentence, immediately I think of the first part of Nietzsche’s book, On The Genealogy Of Morals, in which he explains how he believes some of our most fundamental morals were created. Nietzsche believes that in a society there is a ruling class that controls the other classes, and in many cases without the people who are being controlled ever knowing they are being controlled. And since the ruling class is just that, the ruling class, they have the agency to say, “do this, or you will be killed”, to the lower classes. It is merely the fact that the lower classes do not have the ability to fight back the powerful ruling class, Nietzsche stats, is the reason people had the ability to believe that humility, patience, and “Weakness is being lied (by themselves) into something meritorious…” (47)

So had the lower class of people not been oppressed, these morals would not have come to be. On the other side of power, if the ruling class, (class A) had it not been such, and was equal to the class it had controlled, (class B), class A would not have the agency to produce, lets say the pyramids by the Egyptians, without there ability to use slave labor, class B.

Michel Foucault takes the idea of agency and power a little farther relating them to discourse, stating “...in a society such as ours...there are manifold relations of power that permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse." (Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge)

Foucault is saying that, for example, if the discourse of law did not hold that murder was a punishable crime, then when someone commits murder, there is no power to, under the law, put someone to death for murder. Of course that means that everyone would have the power kill the murderer without fear of legal reproductions. But I believe people would also fear another power if they kill, the power of basically lawful revenge.