Can't give all of this the response it deserves, but a couple of points ...
>Do you think society's ideas are those of the ruling class, and that's it?
In case some didn't recognise 'em, I pinched the words from *The German Ideology* (it does occur that some of my interlocutors have been taken through Foucault's rubbishing of Marx but may not actually have read too much Marx themselves) and did that because I had in mind the sort of stuff I just addressed to Catherine. If I stand condemned for underestimating the world-historic crystal clarity and integrated consistency of Foucault's work (which perhaps I must, as I don't rate it much at all), I think this is at least as true of others with respect to Marx.
>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.
Again, have a peek at what Marx meant by his provocative ruling ideas/ruling class comment - an essential bit is in my previous post.
>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.
My point was that, per Habermas, the project of modernity is yet incomplete. There are good futures in science and liberalism - for Afro-Americans and for women - jeez, one of said futures might even be socialism ... that discourse jive gets us nowhere in itself - which is why Weber was such a miserable baggage (and probably explains Horkheimer and Adorno's malaise, too).
>Really? People don't like sexual constraint? What about the whole Sullivan
>mess? Or the new "virginity" movements among Christian teen women?
One beauty of claiming a bit of essence is that one gets to frame this sorta stuff as alienation therefrom - and I do. They're welcome to their barebacking and abstinence, of course. Whatever's constraining 'em, it'll never be me.
>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?
I'm with Habermas on this. As old relations of authority are dispelled, so is reason brought to the fore to legitimate authority. Habermas makes a big thing of the two-sidedness of reason. It can produce those authorities, but it can undo 'em, too. A population steeped in reason is a hard one to control in the long run. I don't replace the proletariat (which I think definitively continues to exist and definitively maintains the potential Marx argues it must have) with communicative rationality, but I don't feel the need to throw the latter out for that. Promising stuff, I reckon.
>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?
Well, maybe I am the dupe of the enunciating power, and maybe Afro-Americans are more free (positively as well as negatively) and maybe women are sexually freer (positively and negatively) than they were (some of which serves to liberate men, I dare say). I don't deny new contradictions, just the idea that real progress ain't thinkable within them.
>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?
Could certainly do so. I don't think I'm doing that, though. I think contradictions shall ever be with and in us. And I think there is progress.
>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.
Yep.
>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?
It's politically important alright. But, as my tory swasbuckler frigate captain hero Jack Aubrey is wont to say, it don't answer within the privileged discourse du jour: science. The past weighs on the brains of the living, sure, but to adhere to scientifically untenable categories (eg those 'my sexuality is my identity' strategies) may serve the past more than it does the future. I think I agree with Foucault on this. Science's demand for evidence (to perpetuate its categories as much as anything else) and liberalism's formal insistence on a universal subject are still useful, if we choose to use 'em to their potential. Modernism is quite capable of dissolving untenable categories.
>> 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?
The 'enlightenment leftover' bit refers to the subject, not the object - ie. the leftover is me, not the categories.
And, yes, the enlightenment produced categories (I don't go along with Foucault's proposition that population-as-object-categories don't predate the enlightenment, and certainly not that racial categories did - although it was much transformed to suit prevailing conditions - mebbe 'sexuality' categories are enlightenment categories, I dunno) that don't stand up to even the simplest of its own requirements for categories (eg mutually exclusive, exhaustive, not prone to intercoder unreliability, meaningfully differentiable etc etc). We theorise through practice, and we have to fix stuff that doesn't cut it along the way. That's Marx's praxis. That's science. That's modernism.
Cheers, Rob.