>Knowledge generates/creates/produces power -- though he does
>not claim that knowledge is power.
I persist in insisting that a materialist must ask whence the knowledge comes - I don't deny Foucault's claim here (it's ever part of the story), but I feel stuff like 'surfaces of emergence' and 'enunciation' just mystifies Foucault's break with the little matter of the ideas of society being the ideas of the ruling class.
>One of the reasons Foucault is concerned with history is that he wants to
>challenge the assumption that we have moved from a brutish state of
>superstition to an enlightened, humane form of social life based on
>sophisticated and more 'true' forms of knowledge (science). Instead,
>Foucault sees history as moving in a rather disjointed way from one regime
>or system of knowledge-based domination to another. We can never escape
>these regimes of knowledge for this is the only way in which we can live as
>humans.
There's an insight here, of course: we can't live without knowledge, and that knowledge has a role in constructing subjects (self-disciplining ones at that), but that's all it is, an insight. A daggy old humanist like me will not wear that I am nought but the distillate of discourse, definitively subjugated to the requirements of an historically autonomous discursive bloc. Nor would I like the job of telling a woman (especially a bisexual one who enjoys bags of cultural capital, describing her nonconformist sexual practices to the world and avowing the odd seditious political sentiment) that she might as well exist in 1901 or 1951 as 2001. I wouldn't tell Charles he's no better off than when blokes with skins the same colour as his couldn't hope to be lawyers and occasionally had to put up with being tortured and hung from Duluth trees, either. There is a human essence insofar as it does not take well to being uneducated, sexually constrained, without voice, unable to fulfill potential and lynched. That ain't discourse, that's big-T truth, Kel. In these vital respects, we are approaching big K-knowledge - women and Afro-Americans are better off, not only as far as they're concerned, but on a big-H human scale. Women and Afro-Americans fought these battles and, to no small extent, won them. Science and liberalism were ultimately their allies in this. They've a way to go, but I don't see how abandoning science and liberalism for Foucault's radical relativism and free-floating-discourse-determinism is going to help. What dominates us, and makes it so hard for disparate 'knowledges' to enter mainstream consciousness is the way we organise social production and ever more frame human intercourse as exchange.
>This is a disconcerting claim -- a bleak view of the world in contrast to
>those influenced by the Enlightenment faith in reason and freedom
>(idealized in science) as the source of human liberation from the
>constraints of the church and elitist state. Enlightenment liberals, in
>other words, believe that we can overcome superstition by using science to
>discover the truth and expose those who base social relations of domination
>on faulty and untrue claims.
Fair enough claim. Superstition is only superstition from the point of view of someone who holds that there is reason in us capable of testing validity claims, and coordinating our responses to our conclusions. I reckon this has happened in the past, is happening, and should always happen. This is why I call myself a modernist and why some call me a left-conservative.
>Yet, Foucault's followers maintain that his views are not as bleak as they
>may seem for to understand the inextricable connection between knowledge
>and power is to recognize that knowledge and power can always be
>contested. Hence, there is always the possibility of resistance to
>accepted regimes of knowledge and power.
But we may not appeal to reason and big-T truth! All we can do is proffer contending discourses. As to the chance of those discourses reaching the public ear, well, we'd need to resort to the 'episteme' of critical political economy usefully to discuss that.
As for the Kinsmen/Foucault passage on sex and sexuality (which I snip only for brevity's sake), I fail to see how I 'mucked' my reading of it. Let's just not categorise sexualities, I say. I think (nervously, as I may upset some here) the 'my sexuality is my identity' route to 'gay liberation' is problematic, for instance. I think that puts me in agreement with Foucault on this point.
Carrol's always getting cross at me because I think 'man' and 'woman' are politically important categories. I stand by that (that one category can get pregnant and the other can't seems important, for instance). But I don't think 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' are at all. As soon as state/society concerns itself with such categories, someone always seems to cop it in the neck. Same with 'black' and 'white'. As an enlightenment left-over, I just don't see scientifically tenable category differences of any moment in these cases.
Cheers, Rob.