G'day Doug,
I'm stuck at home, and wonder whether you wouldn't mind passing this on to LBO-Talk for me.
Hope all's well, Rob. ___________________________________________________________
I see I've upset Kel, Miles and Doug a little. So I'll try to put that to rights here.
Actually, my loathing is not so much of Foucault himself, who could be provocatively interesting at times, but of how he was conscripted to the cause of destroying materialist political theory. Maybe it was to do with the harsh realisations occasioned by the Prague Spring - but always the attack was on Marxian theory, never explicitly and directly on that which was in fact in the ascendance at the time: stuff like neoliberalism and its demon-spawn, public choice theory - which were really much better targets for his ire.
Foucault himself was at least ambivalent - saying on the one hand that Marx was the way to go if one were to do history (although his 'genealogies' combines a tendentious reading of the empirical with an ahistorical postulation of autonomous discursive regimes) and on the other that Marx was ensnared in the same 'episteme' as mainstream economists. That's crap, but at least its ambivalent crap, and the more ambivalent crap is, the better.
I actually had Foucault's conclusion in History of Sexuality in mind when I had a go at Kelley's Sullivanising. 'Sexuality' is ever the lens through which we see 'sex' - and to obsess with it is to give pride of place to something that can only discipline and punish. I say, let it happen where and as it may. Freud gets a serve for contributing to this nonsense from Foucault, and rightly so. Freud may be right in identifying a spot of thanatos in eros, but I reckon he helped put it there. Anyway, I don't care how you wipe your arse in exactly the same way I don't care how you get off. Hurt someone against their will and it's a different story; then we have an antisocial kink on our hands that society must address. We can't proscribe consensual barebacking without taking away agency, so we have to let it ride, else we're in the same body-disciplining territory (and the same fix) inhabited by the immensely uninteresting Sullivan.
I remind Miles that, in *History of Sexuality*, F. makes a big point - indeed his usual big point - that sexual mores are at once about disciplining the body and regulating the population; 'sex' (inevitably mediated by 'sexuality') is "a crucial target of a power organised around the management of life rather than the menace of death".
Place that perfectly tenable point in the context of the very early eighties, when AIDS didn't have a name yet, when 'knowledge' of it was more rumour than generally lived (and died) experience, when its 99.9% mortality rate was not yet known, and when it was framed exclusively as a danger to those who practised anal sex - well, I wouldn't blame someone of Foucault's predisposition for suspecting a disciplinary move was afoot, by which the "symbolics of blood" were promoted within the "analytics of sexuality". After all, to resist power is to identify and resist disciplinary conventions: "Against the machinery of sexuality the strong point of the counter-attack should not be sex-desire, but the body and its pleasures".
All good stuff, I'm sure, but no reason at all to do away with the idea that we should found our investigations into ourselves on "real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity". Power is everywhere, enabling here and constraining there, but it ain't all there is, it ain't the only category that does the enabling and it ain't the only category that does the constraining. I reckon Foucault's 'sexuality-determines-sex' manouvre, whilst a useful (if not new) contribution, is deployed so as effectively to tear us from our nature altogether, giving epistemology complete mastery of ontology, and not allowing the parameters of our logically prior physical being any bearing in the matter. Just because power is wherever knowledge is, doesn't mean essential big-T (transcendental, ahistorical, essential, universal) truths (a) don't apply and (b) can't be apprehended in some form or other. Marx's sarcastic allusion to gravity-defying idealists at the beginning of *The German Ideology* comes to mind.
Vulgarly materialistically yours, Rob.