I haven't particapted much in this, but I'll put in my cryptic two cents. I think it is necessary to distinguish between Foucault the sociologist of knowledge and Foucault the French philosopher. As an analyst of how institutions and "discourses" interact, F is as good as they come, very materialist, if by that we mean someone who thinks that ideas are structured by social relations, defined in terms (for F) of bureaucratic institutional goals. F the SoK is Weberian of a high order. By me that is a compliment.
F the French philosopher like to say shocking things that get people's attention. In particular, he likes poking fun at the stodgy old reactionaries in the PFC who think they know everything, but are stupid and boring as well as stifling conservative. So he adopts Nietzschean poses, and pretends that his SoK has radical implications for semantics and metaphysics. Knowledge is interested, specifically, imbricated with the interests of institutions, so there is no truth, only power. Of course neither his nor any SoK has any such interesting implications, although the mistake is VERY common: it underlies a good of antirealist philosophy and radical SoK. But it is a mistake, as any number of people, including me, have explained in print over many years; but most notably one old German emigre whose writings are little studied these days.
I don't say this to diss antirealist philosophy. In fact, in able hands, antirealism is very hard to answer, and skepticism and relativism about truth and knowledge are very far from obviously wrong. They are wrong, but they are not obviously wrong. In years of wrestling with them, I concluded that the realist views can hold the antirealists to a tie. Because realism is the natural commonsense view, I think that realism wins the tie, but there are no knockdown arguments. However, F's antirealism is not a serious contender. It is an exercise in epater les Marxistes, not that they don't deserve it. F the Weberian is another matter.
I don't think that Catherine ansd Rob are right that there is an opposition between large scale causal analyses of ideoogy and discourse analysis in the Foucauldian mode. Marxian ideologiekritik is quite sound, but it lacks a lot of mid-level analysis by way of explaining how various ideologies arise in particular contexts. F shows us in a number of crucial cases how to put in the nuts and bolts, how particular sets of instututions and practices give rise to beliefs and values that partially constitute and sustain them. There is nothing in Discipline and Punish, for example, once we leave out the French philosophy, w hich isn't that much of it, that Marxists and historical materialists should not hestitate to adopt if it had adequate empirical support.
--jks
>
>Rob writes:
>
> >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.
>
>
>
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