Rob Shaap on Foucault; Foucault on Rob Schaap

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

Justin is quite correct, in my view, that Foucault's genealogical analyses 
of specific apparatuses and institutions of power [prisons and punishment, 
asylums and psychology, sexuality] are not at all inconsistent with a 
certain type of heterodox Marxian analysis. The classic study in this 
regard is Poulantzas' _State, Power, Socialism_, where Poulantzas does 
precisely that in his most successful text. I had always thought that if 
Marxism was to have a continued life as a rich, fecund school of the 
analysis of power relations, it would be along the lines of Poulantzas' 
analysis, which incorporates Foucault in some very insightful ways.

This is the Foucault, however, of _Discipline and Punish_ and _The History 
of Sexuality_, not _The Order of Things_. One might call the earlier work 
more philosophical, as Justin appears to do, but however you want to 
classify it, it is of an order of abstraction many times higher than the 
work on punishment, and it is not focused on the operations of power. 
Insofar as one wants to impute the sin of 'structuralism' to Foucault, the 
earlier work clearly had a much more 'structuralist' ring to it.

This is not to say that there are not problematic elements in Foucault's 
work.  IMHO, he is unable to construct a successful conception of 
subjectivity, and this leaves him with an ungrounded resistance to 
relations of power.

But if you conceive of Marxism exclusively along the lines of Habermas' 
reconstruction, as I read Rob doing at times, then there does seem a pretty 
fundamental incompatibility between it and Foucault's work. But this 
incompatibility goes, in my view, straight to some of the most problematic 
elements in Habermas -- the insistence upon a teleology constructed around 
the 'ideal speech' moment, upon an essentialist notion of human nature 
rooted in communication, and so on. This leads to a theoretical need to 
elide the conflictual, agonistic nature of politics and social life 
generally. Simply and somewhat crudely put, Habermas thinks it is possible 
to have a world without power. Thus, although there are elements of 
Habermas' work which are useful, such as his analysis of the public sphere, 
it needs  to be assimilated in a critical way -- not unlike the way in 
which one might assimilate Foucault's corpus.

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272
212-98-6869

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

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