I’ve had this intuition lately that “power” in the Foucaultian sense, is only a partial explanation of a larger, general methodology of magic; an eclipse before a larger truth that, in its incompleteness, ends up creating results that disproportionately rely on it as a full explanation.  
  
I think this is important because Foucault is essentially the *default* critical framework; I think that most “well-educated people” never go beyond Foucault, if they go to him at all; and I think Foucaultian ideas of power and a broader, more conflict-driven forms of thinking and organisation has contributed to the general, loud incoherence of our era. [1]  

=> https://slatestarcodex.com/conflict-vs-mistake

How do you explain “magic”? Well, how do you explain “power”? What I found from *Meditations on the Tarot* is this:  

> Now, there are three kinds of magic: magic where the magician is the instrument of divine power—this is sacred magic; magic where the magician himself is the source of the magical operation—this is personal magic; lastly, magic where the magician is the instrument of elemental forces or other unconscious forces—this is sorcery. \[…\] All magic, including sorcery, is the putting into practice of this: that the subtle rules the dense—force, matter; consciousness, force; and the superconscious, or divine, consciousness.
  
Therefore magic is the ability to compel and command through non-empirical means; magic is coordination; magic is aesthetics; magic is charisma. There are “magnetic forces” around someone; there is a “reality distortion field” around them; you can believe anything. They used to call that a glamour; but it’s just a personal glow, a specific form of the same tendency that occurs when a song makes you sad, or when you weave a work of art to try to convey something extremely specific — and when it finds its reception on the other side of the world, thirty years from now.  
  
Likewise, what is power supposed to be, then? A sort of anticipated punishment, one’s role in a broader domination? The gaze between the master and the servant? Foucault calls it some sort of pervasive layer in society; something that is not deployed so much as deploys itself in others; a para-agentic force that compels, organises and punishes.  
  
I have to admit my own ignorance on a number of areas here; I’m still working my way through occult literature and I’m not exactly a Foucault scholar, so I welcome contributions…  
  
Truthfully, it’s hard to make these kinds of assertions based on nothing more than one’s intuition, but it’s always been my strongest cognitive function — things _feel_ this or that, and tend to organise themselves into place far more quickly than when I sit and deliberate.  
 
[1]: Sometimes I think this is what is gestured at in the phrase “cultural Marxism” — the idea that dialectical materialism and a historiography of struggle has all but demolished the ideals of Enlightenment — but perhaps I’m thinking too hard about it. I think of this section from Alasdair Macintyre’s *After Virtue*: 
 
> …protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s _rights_ in the name of someone else’s _utility_. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an _argument_; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. \[…\] The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say it cannot be _rationally_ effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.