On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 18:02:26 +0000
> From: Rob Schaap <bantam at dingoblue.net.au>
>
> 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.
[major snippage]
> 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.
>
To portray Foucault as a fuzzy-headed idealist completely misses the point of his work. In a number of interviews, Foucault insists he is in fact a marxist, and that you cannot do any meaningful historical analysis without the conceptual tools Marx developed. In fact, if you actually read F's books on prisons, medicine, sexuality, technologies of the self, you discover that F is in fact a materialist who tries to analyze real individuals in their material conditions.
As Doug said, I think you're confusing F with late Baudrillard or Derrida.
Miles