Foucault’s ‘power’ is a catachrestic name for an unintelligible complex, not a description.

Evidence

Let us enter the task at hand by way of the “ism” of names—“nominalism”—and open up once again that famous sentence, written to be repeated: “One needs to be a nominalist, no doubt: power, it is not an institution, and it is not a structure; it is not a certain strength [puissance] that some are endowed with; it is the name that one lends \preter] to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.” This provisional “naming” by theorists is not simply to code within a given system. “This multiplicity of force relations can be coded…either in the form of ‘war’ or in the form of ‘politics.’” The field of possible codings can be, in principle, indefinitely enlarged. The nominalism is a methodological necessity. One needs a name for this thing whose “mechanism [can be used] as a grid of intelligibility of the social order.” It is called “power” because that is the closest one can get to it. This sort of proximate naming can be called catachrestic. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1153

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spivak pinpoints the mechanical definition of catachresis as applied to Foucault’s methodological nominalism — naming ‘power’ because it is ‘the closest one can get.’
• XREF: Connects directly to Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ project — both rest on the catachrestic/signifying-on-behalf model of what cannot be properly named, tying to the ‘Subaltern Studies’ essay and Foucault’s genealogy reading.