My objective is to analyze certain forms of knowledge, not in termsof repression or law, but in t…

My objective is to analyze certain forms of knowledge, not in termsof repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to leadto misunderstandings about the nature, form, and unity of power. By power, I donot mean a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience ofthe citizenry. I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation that, in contrastto violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a generalsystem of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects,through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The sovereigntyof the state, the form of law, or the overall unity of a domination are onlythe terminal forms power takes.

It seems to me that power must be understood as the multiplicity offorce relations that are immanent in the social sphere; as the process that,through ceaseless struggle and confrontation, transforms, strengthens, orreverses them; as the support that these force relations find in one another,or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions that isolate them fromone another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whosegeneral design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the stateapparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.

Thus, the viewpoint that permits one to understand the exercise ofpower, even in its more “peripheral” effects, and that also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as astructural framework for analyzing the social order, must not be sought in aunique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms of poweremanate but in the moving substrate of force relations that, by virtue of theirinequality, constantly engender local and unstable states of power. If powerseems omnipresent, it is not because it has the privilege of consolidatingeverything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from onemoment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one pointto another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, butbecause it comes from everywhere. And if power at times seems to be permanent,repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, it is simply because the overalleffect that emerges from all these mobilities is a concatenation that rests oneach of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to benominalistc, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure;neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that oneattributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.

1. The author’s primary purpose in defining power is to

(A) counteract self-serving and confusing uses of the term

(B) establish a compromise among those who have defined the term indifferent ways

(C) increase comprehension of the term by providing concreteexamples

(D) demonstrate how the meaning of the term has evolved

(E) avoid possible misinterpretations resulting from the more commonuses of the term

2. According to the passage, which of the following best describesthe relationship between law and power?

(A) Law is the protector of power.

(B) Law is the source of power.

(C) Law sets bounds to power.

(D) Law is a product of power.

(E) Law is a stabilizer of power.

3. Which of the following methods is NOT used extensively by theauthor in describing his own conception of power?

(A) Restatement of central ideas

(B) Provision of concrete examples

(C) Analysis and classification

(D) Comparison and contrast

(E) Statement of cause and effect

4. With which of the following statement would the author be mostlikely to agree?

(A) Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

(B) The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless powerwithout abusing it.

(C) To love knowledge is to love power.

(D) It is from the people and their deeds that power springs.

(E) The health of the people as a state is the foundation on which alltheir power depends.

5. The author’s attitude toward the various kinds of compulsionemployed by social institutions is best described as

(A) concerned and sympathetic

(B) scientific and detached

(C) suspicious and cautious

(D) reproachful and disturbed

(E) meditative and wistful

6. According to the passage, states of power are transient becauseof the

(A) differing natures and directions of the forces that create them

(B) rigid structural framework in which they operate

(C) unique source from which they emanate

(D) pervasive nature and complexity of the mechanisms by which theyoperate

(E) concatenation that seeks to arrest their movement

7. It can be inferred from the passage that the author believes theconflict among social forces to be

(A) essentially the same from one society to another even though itsoutward manifestation may seem different

(B) usually the result of misunderstandings that impede socialprogress

(C) an inevitable feature of the social order of any state

(D) wrongly blamed for disrupting the stability of society

(E) best moderated in states that possess a strong centralgovernment

参考答案：E D B D B A C