Foucault (was Re: litcritter bashing...)

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Mon Nov 1 04:11:31 PST 1999


A long time between observations,

Michel Foucault said:


>> >"There is an illusion that consists of the supposition that
>> >science is grounded in the plenitude of a concrete and lived
>> >experience; that geometry elaborates a perceived space, that
>> >biology gives form to the intimate experience of life, or that
>> >political economy translates the processes of industrialization
>> >at the level of theoretical discourse; therefore, that the ref-
>> >erent itself contains the law of the scientific object." --MF

So we make sense of our world. We cannot help but do this. We test our hypotheses against our observations (both being a function of the spaces, forms and processes our inquiry presupposes - but, whilst theoretically these might be otherwise, that there will be constructs is inevitable), and we test 'em (and formulate them within) the complex of truths contemporarily accepted within the relevant status-holding community.

That's constructivism and pragmatism (hell, I've even popped in a bit of MF's 'surfaces of emergence' and 'enunciation of the statement'), I s'pose. Whatever - it has allowed us to build pyramids and the Seers building; influence, but not control, our health and fertility; and disagree eruditely and compellingly on society. In other words, it works very well when iron filings on a sheet of A4 are our object, slightly less well when the universe of variables is not sensuously apparent, and hardly at all if we're not only talking a grey set of variables, but also a reasoning object.

As Yoshie reminds us, perhaps we SHOULD be making distinctions between science and scientism here - there are places science shouldn't go - not dressed in the garb of scientific knowledge, anyway (as science's basic scepticism itself demands, btw). And Marx was not only heard to talk about the sociohistorical nature of objectivity (is this what you mean by 'true ideology', Ange?), but also about being scientific in the right regard - where our reasoning is not complicit, such as within a system that self-organises by way of a relation (exchange) operating behind our backs.

And there are places where it's the very thing. The truest truth we can do at any time and place.

Should I be going further in my scepticism than this - and why would I want to do that? I REALLY TRULY-RULY don't get it.


>> Also, to dismiss, as Foucault does, as an illusion the idea that "the
>> referent itself contains the law of the scientific object" without
>> explaining what he thinks of as the true relationships between scientific
>> laws and referents won't do, unless you want to ditch causality (and ideas
>> of it) altogether, which noone is capable of doing.
>
>this is just silly, a sort of duded-up version of the old
>'well, mr. smartypants, if you're so clever why don't *you*
>explain it' chestnut.

And here I reckon Yoshie is not being silly at all. Questioning stuff is all very well (has to be done all the time - as Hume did it all the time), and, if the questions are new, well, that's a contribution. But here the questions are easy, logically disallow answers, and, just as they are not generated in practice, do not inform practice. What was that bit about Hume consigning his doubts to the flames?


>one definite advantage the hard sciences have over the human
>sciences is that it isn't customary for the peanut gallery
>to demand that, when one debunks a hypothesis, one therefore
>has to offer an alternative hypothesis 'because it's implicit
>in the critique anyway so just spit it out.' the main purpose
>of that addendum is, afaict, to shut critics up by hook or by
>crook.

Well, I don't reckon it's crooked at all. What Habermas called the 'emancipatory interest' is nothing without both the 'practical' (communicative) and the 'instrumental/strategic' (the technical - in its place, of course). If Habermas is right (and I think he got the idea from the much-maligned Kant), our interests constitute our knowledge, that constitutes a bit of a problem, dunnit?

Isn't this why Foucault had to shrug and call his histories and critiques 'little fictions'?

I got my Biggles collection for that.

Cheers, Rob.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list