>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.
But, Rob ... Foucault's really important point here is that ideas are not just 'the ideas of the ruling class', nor do changes (changed ideas) simply emerge because some random someone decides to think 'differently'. All change, whether it's change you want or not, emerges in relation to a whole range of ways of speaking about and knowing the world -- more or less in tension with some, in accord with others but slightly adjusting them, and so on.
It's just naive at best to say that the changes you go on to use as examples in these posts did not emerge outof relations with dominant ideas -- rhetorics of justice, freedom and enlightenment, for example --
as well as in opposition to dominant ideas -- racial superiority, natural heterosexuality, for example. The technologies/knowledges by which changes emerge are part of the field into which they emerge (thus theories about natural heterosexuality made spaces in which theories which questioned that emerged).
Foucault is right not to look for cause and effect chains which explain change, but his 'surfaces of emergence' says more than it's more complicated than that. It talks about the complex exchanges between knowledges and institutions that enable change. It's not simple, it is complicated. It may be neater, more convenient, and at times useful to say otherwise -- to want staightforward causes and structures of dominance and oppression and historical change. But it's not the way things work. It's not the big-T truth you want.
I'm pushed for time too. But I think this matters.
Catherine
PS. Rob also writes: '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'. Sorry, no. Categories don't get pregnant. People do (some do, some don't -- we don't determine 'women' as a group by capacity for pregnancy either). Categories are part of knowledge systems which ascribe, proscribe and fix meanings to an object they constiture.