On Thu, 28 Oct 1999 09:14:08 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
>James Farmelant wrote:
>
>>Foucault seemed capable of mixing deep insights with a lot of
>nonsense.
>
>Could you give examples of each?
Very briefly, Foucault in his work attempted to blend together Nietzschean and Marxian insights. This worked wll in such books as *Discipline and Punishment* where he provided a brilliant analysis of the social meanings of punishment. His Nietzschean based discourses on how notions of truth constitute power plays consitute potentially valuable contributions to our understanding of ideology. Likewise, I think there is much to be said for his studies on the relations between the exercize of power within a society and the ways that people for instance relate to their own bodies. His studies of the history of sexuality seem to be very suggestive even if many specialists find fault with the detail of his research. On the other hand his pretty whole hearted adoption of Nietzsche's perspectivism led him to embrace a radically relativistic epistemology. Such forms of radical relativism are in the end self-refuting. His book *The Order of Things* where he advanced his thesis that the evolution of science and culture in Europe could be understood in terms of changes in the prevailing epistemes from the 16th century to the 19th centuries, replicates IMO some of the strengths and weaknesses that can be found in Thomas Kuhn's *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*. Just as Kuhn saw science as evolving by means of paradigmatic revolutions, Foucault posited that human knowledge similarly evolves by revolutions in the prevailing epistemes involving transitions from the Classical episteme of the 17the century when the human sciences were dominated by general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth. By the 19th century according to Foucault these disciplines had been replaced by philology, biology, and political economy, representing a radical shift in the prevailing episteme. Certainly there is much to be said for Foucault's thesis, on the other hand he pushes the idea that there was such a radical difference between the Classical episteme and the modern episteme that recalls Kuhn's contention that different paradigms are incommensurable. Foucault seems to be saying something similar when he argued that general grammar was quite a distinct discipline from philology or natural history from biology. But this like Kuhn's thesis of the incommensurability of different paradigms seems to call into question our notions that human knowledge as it develops over time comes to give us a more and more accurate representation of the world.
As I recall Justin Schwartz commented (perhaps either
on this list or on Proyect's) that he thought Foucault to have been a brilliant scholar but that his epistemology was a tissue of nonsense. That is pretty much my view of him too.
Jim F.
>
>Doug
>
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