Really in a rush now ...
>It's really difficult for me to see what Foucault you're reading to
>support this Foucault vs materialism thesis. Or, rather, I don't see
>why you've chosen to read him this way, which you would have to admit
>to be highly selective.
I honestly think we're underestimating how politically dangerous that Nietzchean stuff about overthrowing the category of truth itself can be - indeed has been. Truth is and does different things inside warranted quotes than inside unwarranted ones - but Foucault calls Marxian materialism just so much more metaphysics because it must posit a nature for us to apprehend and with which to integrate. For F. Marxism is just an unsuccessful attempt to take on current knowledge on its own terms, within its own 'episteme'. It aspires to be scientific because it does not question 'science', because it fails to see that 'science' is just the word with which current knowledge affords itself its power. All science is is shorthand for discourse-in-power-under-modernity. All science is is a contending discourse which has to posit nature if its claim to access to that nature is to give it the power that it definitively wills (and Foucault's 'will to power' stuff is stated as a metaphysical truth, too, for mine ... ).
Call science's bluff, reject the whole idea, come up with whatever bloody discourse, resistance, performativity you want, sez Foucault to us (well, me, anyway). For mine, that approximates 'bugger the environment', 'bugger exploitation', and 'bugger class'. Ya gotta come up with something pretty good to make those calls, I reckon ...
And his attack on humanism in *Order of Things* constitutes an attack on the idea of emancipation (for with no 'man' to emancipate, no truth to approach, no emancipation possible in light of truth's inevitable dominion, well, what have we left?). Habermas taxed Foucault (rightly, for mine) with simply totalising his 'critique' such that the contradiction between norms and realities - the tensions that drive our real lived lives - are effaced (pfft! There goes Marx ...). For Foucault's target is to do away with baby and bathwater - draining the pursuit of truth, the respect for reason and the commitment to freedom - the constitutive norms of modernity that allowed you the woman and me the wog into the university, for instance - in the process. So Habermas (now an old conservative, for mine) called Foucault a 'young conservative' ...
>In the post via Doug you appear to concede this isn't really about
>Foucault but about some ways in which Foucault has been used. I just
>don't know why you don't criticise the people responsible for this
>*use* then. Surely this manouevre is both sloppy scholarship and
>politically pointless.
I'll get into names if you want me to (I have done before). But for now I'll just try to clarify what I see as THE PROBLEM.
As to Doug's note on violence/religion - well that nexus occurs throughout history, but right now I'd see it as a manifestation of the logic of the first dozen pages of the Manifesto and chapters 26 and 27 of Capital. Capitalism manifests as a creeping imperialism and creeping exchange relations - which displace old identities and securities but don't afford new ones - cut old ties, but don't make clear the new ones. Make many people poor and others rich. Everyone feels a bit lonely and lost. Religion affords, inter alia, identity, location, (fundamentally qualified, for mine) self-respect and what Hegel meant by recognition. Its hierarchy won't get far without offering material sufficiency as the newly perceived (and often real) lack of it is a salient drive in society. So it has to approximate the role of a state. But there's already one of those. And it has to come up with a new definition for authority. But there's already one of those. So globalisation fragments (through tendentiously invented if not quite rejuvenated traditions) as it standardises. Voila, theocratic belligerence along the lines of who benefits from the new and who does not.
Waddyareckon?
Cheers, Rob.