> I don't see how abandoning science and
>> liberalism for Foucault's radical relativism and
>> free-floating-discourse-determinism is going to help. What dominates us,
>> and makes it so hard for disparate 'knowledges' to enter mainstream
>> consciousness is the way we organise social production and ever more frame
>> human intercourse as exchange.
>
>Where do you get this "radical relativism" stuff?
>From his archelogy stuff. And from the fact he explicitly uses Nietzche:
truth as crap and history as accident. What else would I get from it?
Truth claims are significant only in terms of their host discourse, aren't they? Else how does Foucault make sense? What would his 'genealogy' method be contributing but for this? What would it mean that we're ever doomed to some truth-dominion or other? Is there anywhere from which succeeding power/knoledge blocs may be evaluated?
Discourse approximates, unseats, and replaces discourse - none with any cognitive privilege, for there is no such thing (which is probably why Foucault felt obliged to call his corpus 'little fictions') - just a will to power, the one transcendental constant, the one entity outside discourse.
And what do you think Foucault meant when he said 'All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence' (Truth, Power, Self)? As a humanist, I think there are such universals. Else there is nothing for us to be alienated from, or at least it wouldn't really matter. And no 'discourse' would be better than another, because there is no measure (and no meaning whatsoever in the 11th thesis that adorns Marx's headstone). 'Man is the measure' poses philosophical problems, sure, but it's at least a stance that takes us beyond a pre-doomed 'will to power' cycle to nowhere. I'm with Marx that lots that seems natural is historical, but I think he never stopped implying the essence he talked about in EPM; history is about finding out which is which, I s'pose - I certainly contend that science is.
Anyway, even if the existence of universals is hard formally to establish (and I don't think this a priority - it's not a quandary that strikes us in our daily practice, whereas run-away global warming, for instance, might be), the contrary can not be established at all! For to do so would be to establish a universal (with the 'will to power', that'd make two, no?)
>Been reading too much Camille Paglia?
I'm no fan, but this wouldn't be the only good point she's staggered across in her countless columns.
>You won't find any dramatic philosophical claims a la
>Derrida's "there's nothing outside the text" in MF's work. It's ironic
>to me that you don't realize that Foucault agrees with you about
>the importance of analyzing material, social practices.
If that's right, what's so new about Foucault? Why did he make such a splash? What in him was it that so excited the likes of Deleuze and Lyotard? Why not just go along with Marx that the impersonal, abstract and objective modes of social compulsion that so interest him are a function of the sway of abstract labour? Then we'd have an explanation and something to build our politics on. Why not explain the subject/object split he discerns in the modern individual (like in HoS) in terms of an agentic self constrained by compulsionsb generated by the commodity form? I mean, why leave explanation out?
Coz Nietzche wouldn't let him?
>Again, I
>find it hard to believe that you've spent much time studying Foucault
>if you really think he advocated "free floating discourse determinism".
Well, hard to believe I've got it so wrong, but it's possible, I suppose. I think that'd mean Deleuze got him wrong, too. He certainly thought Foucault a relativist, and thought that was beaut. Anyway, whoever opened the relativist door, scores of young would-be theorists and avowedly anti-theory theorists have walked through it since. Stuffing the left up in the process, because it is now they who inhabit the surfaces of emergence, enunciating their nonsensical statements with whatever status the academy still enjoys.
Whatever.
>Can you actually point to any of MF's work that supports your "relativist-
>material-practices-don't-matter" interpretation?
Practices are part of what Foucault means by discourse, are they not? - they are indeed linked to the point of mutual constituency. Discourse itself is defined as practice in *Archeology*, I believe. Making up some kind of internally coherent whole. In *Archeology* Foucault calls what exteriorities he does allow for 'accidents'. Whatever passes for knowledge is knowledge, and knowledge is the source of power, because that's the knowledge that circulates. No beginning, no end, no explanation, no point.
And how do we deploy 'power' such as it is useful in differentiate between Rupert Murdoch and myself? And if there isn't progress, nothing to progress and nowhere to progress towards, then where's the politics?
Anyway, it's the wankers who walked through the door he left open - like Lyotard - who drive me to despair. Foucault was, thinks Norris for one, on the way to slamming the door shut again when he died (he recanted up a storm to Rabinow just before he died - indeed came over all Kantian), but when he threw accusations at the pomos that they were 'blackmailing the enlightenment', he must have known those idiots only got a hearing because they used him as the enunciator in a setting ruled by those all too happy to hear the institutional left was over Marx.
Cheers, Rob.