That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van Rossum's knowledge of language design is dubious at best." It's hard to base a serious discussion on that type of argument.
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).
Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).
Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.