> 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.
>
Do you think society's ideas are those of the ruling class, and that's it? I mean, it's one thing to reject "surfaces of emergence" and what not, another thing to think that a single social class, however defined, invents, constitutes, reproduces, and polices "society's ideas." I don't really have an interest in defending Foucault--- but to an undefined ether of enunciation you offer a despotically governed (and effectively maintained) knowledge-regime, which seems hardly more plausible.
Besides, I thought the last election and Clinton's tenure clearly showed how important it was for the ruling class to selectively adopt the ideas of lower middle class white men, rather than the other way around.
> 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.
Do you think that humanism and existential anxiety (I am nought but . . .) are really exclusive? It seems to me that Sartre dealt with this a long time ago, and answered no. Despite all of Foucault's attempts to extricate himself from Sartre, "Welcome to your freedom"--though that freedom is redefined--is the bottom line of "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" and volume 1 of the History of Sexuality.
> 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.
How do you get this from Foucault? Just because a regime of discourse has some consistency or continuity, that doesn't mean it's identical at the every moment. Foucault would be the first to suggest that the tiny--or large--differences in discourses make a big difference in their micropolitical effects.
> 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.
Really? People don't like sexual constraint? What about the whole Sullivan mess? Or the new "virginity" movements among Christian teen women? Besides, you're ignoring what makes things like "education" meaningful. As the popularity of W currently shows, while being "uneducated" is not held to be a good thing, being "educated" is by no means an unalloyed good either. Besides, from your point of view, wouldn't the very idea that education might be a good thing be an idea of the ruling class? Wasn't Frederick Douglass just duped by his masters into thinking that literacy would empower him? Or sexual liberation--wouldn't that be just another ruling class fiction?
As for people not liking being lynched, okay. But is that what defines our humanity? Like animals are indifferent to their own suffering?
> 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.
Don't you think this overlooks that little thing (to which you are usually so attuned) called the contradictions of capital? Sure, you can say that women and African Americans are better off now. But, just as when liberals suggest that capital is in part responsible for social, cultural, and economic progress, don't you think that acknowledging progress in this way quite overlooks its costs and limits? Marx said that capital was far better and more progressive than feudal modes of organization and production--obviously that didn't make them unproblematically so. So sure women and African Americans are better off in general now than 20 or 50 years ago: but better off in the world of the double freedom of labor.
> 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.
I don't understand this at all. Not that gay marriage would be a good thing, but how could sexuality *not* be an important category when it's so obviously used to divide legitimate kinds of property and social relations from others? Marriage--and hence, heterosexuality, at least for most of the world--is *always* about privilege. How is this not politically important?
> 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.
So het and homo, black and white are enlightenment "leftovers," but progress isn't? Could you explain this?
All best Christian