> >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.
It is an insight with significance and usefulness to a materialist; Foucault offers some durable cognitive tools. Although I haven't read all of his works, he seems to suffer unfairly sometimes from a kind of reactionary reductivism, where his thought is flattened out to such categorical insights as "the soul is the prison of the body." But it's hard to ignore the flexibility of the "episteme" at work in such insights. In the case of prisons, hospitals and poverty the notion of the subject as "distillate of discourse" can be quite politically profound.
For instance, "a brutish state of superstition" moves to an instrumentally operative, scientifically justified poverty industry. Someone dependent on social services, or living in a poor, police-infested neighboorhood, can embody, in a Foucauldian light, the precipitate of discourse much more glaringly than someone whose day to day life is not so bound up with the institutional powers and discourses invested in poverty (the welfare state, hospitals, jails). In this case, Foucault's work can help with the recognition of how and to what extent so many discursive regimes determine their subjects' opportunities and sense of possibility of living outside these regimes.
To wit, we hear "the soul is the prison of the body" in something like this from Yoshie's "Stigma" post:
In the focus groups, working poor and welfare-dependent individuals reinforced the stigma by citing examples of welfare system abusers, but they considered their own situation as distinctive and separate from undeserving people.
"There are mothers who get aid and change the stamps for cash because they like to drink...I've heard about it, I've seen it. I've been offered...And I don't. What they give for the benefit of the children, I spend it very well on my children," says one participant of a focus group....
end quote.
In the famous last instance, maybe a class analysis is what it takes. In this way could one amend Foucault and say "capital is the prison of the soul, which is the prison of the body"? But on the messy road to that last instance, Foucault does offer a way of ordering those classifications political oppression and the knowledge-power matrix make manifest, and the subjectivities they produce and throttle on the way.
Alec
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