On Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:58:36 -0700 (PDT) Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu>
writes:
>
>
> 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.
Well, Foucault at different times had different things to say about his relationship with Marxism. Early in his career he was a Communist, but after breaking with the Party back in the '50s, he declared that he was no longer a Marxist but a Nietzschean. In the early '60s he appears to have been identified politically with the Gaullists who at one point even appointed him to a commission on the reform of French higher education. However, starting around the mid-60s he shifted politically to the far left, allying himself at least for a while with the Maoists. In 1979, he was a vociferous supporter of the Iranian Revolution. In his last years, Foucault began to take an interest in liberal thought, and he wrote on such people as Hayek.
Despite his many political zigzags, there is not much question that he drew rather heavily upon Marxist analysis in his books. But there is at the same time a strong Nietzschean strand in his thinking which seems to me to be incompatible with a classical Marxism. Foucault seems to have bought heavily into Nietzsche's perspectivism with its relativation of the notion of truth. He regarded the assertion of truth claims as just another power play. Taking this notion literally will of course destroy any basis for the distinction between science and ideology which seems to be an essential presupposition of Marxism. In this seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. He was willing to use Marxist analysis to undermine taken-for-granted assumptions concerning prisons, sex, medicine, madness, etc. then he would use something like Nietzsche's perspectivism to undermine Marxism's pretentions to being a science. This of course makes him most appealing to pomos.
>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
>
>
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