>G'day Angela,
>
>'Truth is, I allow myself dips in PEN-L's healing waters only when
I've
>knackered meself on the wheel of telecommunications policy - so I
sometimes
>write even worse crap than is my usual standard.
>
>What I meant (as opposed to what I might have said) was that
historians have
>more options available to them than 'the patient construction of
discourses
>about discourses', which was Foucault's rather limiting, depressing
and
>ungenerous take on their craft. Just as Freud might have gone a
little
>overboard in recounting his own brave battle against inert
complacency (he
>was actually more generally feted than ostracised), so do I think
Foucault
>goes out of his way to oppose his stuff to what other historians were
doing
>- and this he does by making a monolithic strawman of an institution
that
>had EP Thompsons, AJP Taylors and Hugh Trevor Ropers in it (that
actually
>representing some considerable spectrum).
>
>His attack on reason in *History of Madness* is actually not
sufficient if
>intended as a rebuttal of reason as such. All he does is attack the
reason
>of the reasoners who reason others into asylums. He says elsewhere
that
>Marxism resides within the same epistemic field ('episteme') as this
lot.
>But Marx *historicises* reasoning - making the very point that a
reasonable
>act is reasonable only in the context of the act's perpetration. And
Marx
>is precisely interested in social contexts within which reason does
not
>infringe human freedom.
>
>When I read EP Thompson (whom I love), I read one who goes to the
artefacts
>and understands the reasoning of the mill owner as much as the
artisan.
>Both make all the sense in the world, but the former's reasoning
points the
>artisan at the gallows, and the latter's points the mill owner at
>bankruptcy. Taken together, their reasoning inhibits forces of
production -
>the former embracing a nascent but doomed factory capitalism, and the
latter
>just as doomed an attempt to reverse time's arrow. Thompson sees an
answer
>to this: socialism. Foucault does not. In a grand extrapolation (as
befits
>a French theorist du jour), he concludes *all* reason is ultimately
folly.
>
>Foucault has *no* faith in history really. Not really. Caught in a
sudden
>need to be consistent, he once called his whole corpus 'little
fictions'.
>Foucault takes us nowhere, imho.
>
>This is what I thought had so got to Doug a couple of weeks ago, when
he
>morosely told us he had little faith left in reason. I told him then
what I
>still think is importantly true: 'Tis all we have ... although I do
>sympathise with his suspicion that not a few Marxists (elsewhere)
seem to
>be trying to get by without it.
>
>Cheers,
>Rob.
>
>You'd written:
>>rob wrote:
>>
>>(we need not follow
>>>Foucault, who seemed to think history is nought but an accumulation
>>of
>>>documents written by victors with the future in mind - history has
>>left
>>>plenty that wasn't particularly meant to tell stories years or
>>centuries
>>>later
>>
>>well, i think foucault agrees. as would walter benjamin. i think
>>maybe you are confusing what foucault (and benjamin) see as official
>>history and the possibility of a history which breaks with such
>>'stories from the point of view of the victors'.
>>
>>angela
>>
>>
>