>for Foucault...there is no means of
>resistance.
baloney. there can be all sorts of resistance and even changes in the rules. it's a mistake to think that the rules will ever go away and it's a grave mistake to think we make progress.
All there is only perversion. You subvert or
>trangress the rules, which simply emphasizes the rules -
>there is a fetishization of content here (both of which Freud
>and Marx were critical of). Foucault forgets what
>psychoanalysis remembers: that it is only in neuroses that
>rules themselves are questioned.
sure.... neuroses? why must you frame it in those terms? is it ever possible to explicate what neuroses means? where does it come from? how does it work? why does it exist? what produces neuroses?
i liked this:
"Genealogy is overtaken by a fate similar to that which Foucault had seen in the human sciences to the extent that it retreats into the reflectionless objectivity of a nonparticipatory, ascetic description of kaleidoscopically changing practices of power, genealogical historiography emerges from its cocoon as precisely the presentistic, relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science that it does not want to be" [habermas]
presentistic: "the cool facade of a radical historicism" which requires withholding or bracketing any evaluative judgment of the changing practices of history. such pure "ascetic description" leads to the relativism in the sense that there is no basis or position from which one can evaluate or judge this passing array of power/knowledge regimes. it is like adopting a panoptical gaze. but foucault does not consistently adopt this position nor is it even possible. he exhibits 'the passions of aesthetic modernism'
he assumes a position of 'arbitrary partisanship of a criticism that cannot account for its normative foundations' foucault..is 'incorruptible enough to admit these incoherences' but he doesn't escape them' [bernstein 152]