>>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 out of 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).
Firstly, I don't say what you say I say - I don't disagree with the above (to the extent I ever understood the confusing and inconsistent ways in which Foucault used words, anyway). Secondly, none of the above amounts to a hill of beans unless you ground it; give its dynamism a material engine, and history a shape. We can only understand ourselves, our constraints and potentials in terms of history. For discourse to explain us, discourse must be explained. Economists look at surface phenomena and Marx looked underneath. Genealogists look at discourse, and Marx looked underneath. And it was Marx who came up with the quote I used about ruling classes and ruling ideas. Why? So the motions to which Foucault refers (with his 'autonomous discursive blocs' and 'technologies of power' lingo) make useful sense. That's why.
What's wrong with the following quote? Is it clearer than anything Foucault EVER wrote on the matter? Does it explain more? Is it more convincing?
Nothing, much, yes, and bloody oath!
If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole Imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. [2] It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule.
>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.
More complicated and less useful than it need be, for mine.
>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 too have a lot of time for Weber, Catherine. But as the above quote shows, I'm still with Marx on the big picture - mainly because his is the only big picture in town - indeed, the only one which actually addresses 'the way things work'.
>Categories are part of knowledge systems which ascribe, proscribe and
>fix meanings to an object they constiture.
Quite right - within a material setting, without grasp of which you can't go beyond this sort of assertion.
Cheers, Rob.