If power is omnipresent, genealogy’s critical standpoint becomes problematically internal to power

Evidence

But if this is so, if power is omnipresent, how is it possible, as Foucault did, to write the genealogy of modern disciplinary society? Foucault’s answer, in the 1970s at least, seems to involve relating genealogy to the forms of resistance which he argues are intrinsic to powerrelations. Thus he talks of ‘a reactivation of local knowledges - of minor knowledges as Deleuze might call them — in opposition to the scientific hierarchization of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power’. But are these ‘local knowledges’ any more than the oppositional other of the prevailing apparatus of power-knowledge? — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 339

Categorization

• QUESTION: Direct resonance with strategic essentialism: can the oppressed claim a standpoint (local knowledge) against power without that claim being constituted by power itself?
• XREF: The stuck-inside-the-system problem mirrors the central bind of the reader’s strategic essentialism research — whether an ironic/fixed identity can be sustained or collapses back into what it contests. — connects to: Genealogy refuses to take sovereignty, the state, and civil society as givens — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 128