Rob Schaap on Foucault

[Brad DeLong]

>G'day Catherine and Doug,
>
>Really in a rush now ...
>
>>It's really difficult for me to see what Foucault you're reading to
>>support this Foucault vs materialism thesis. Or, rather, I don't see
>>why you've chosen to read him this way, which you would have to admit
>>to be highly selective.
>
>I honestly think we're underestimating how politically dangerous that
>Nietzchean stuff about overthrowing the category of truth itself can be -
>indeed has been.  Truth is and does different things inside warranted
>quotes than inside unwarranted ones - but Foucault calls Marxian
>materialism just so much more metaphysics because it must posit a nature
>for us to apprehend and with which to integrate.  For F. Marxism is just an
>unsuccessful attempt to take on current knowledge on its own terms, within
>its own 'episteme'.  It aspires to be scientific because it does not
>question 'science', because it fails to see that 'science' is just the word
>with which current knowledge affords itself its power.  All science is is
>shorthand for discourse-in-power-under-modernity.  All science is is a
>contending discourse which has to posit nature if its claim to access to
>that nature is to give it the power that it definitively wills (and
>Foucault's 'will to power' stuff is stated as a metaphysical truth, too,
>for mine ... ).
>
>Call science's bluff, reject the whole idea, come up with whatever bloody
>discourse, resistance, performativity you want, sez Foucault to us (well,
>me, anyway).  For mine, that approximates 'bugger the environment', 'bugger
>exploitation', and 'bugger class'.  Ya gotta come up with something pretty
>good to make those calls, I reckon ...

There is an alternative reading of Foucault: that you need to be 
aware of and compensate for the the fundamental assumptions of the 
particular episteme that you are using--and that a good way to do 
that is to look at the histories of discourse


>And his attack on humanism in *Order of Things* constitutes an attack on
>the idea of emancipation (for with no 'man' to emancipate, no truth to
>approach, no emancipation possible in light of truth's inevitable dominion,
>well, what have we left?).

The problem, of course, is that he may be right. Whatever we are, we 
are not autonomous liberal individuals a la Habermas who are to be 
"emancipated." We are something different, and historically 
contingent...

The problem is that all non-liberal visions of utopia leave me... 
profoundly uneasy. Of course, I wouldn't think that after my tour in 
the re-education camp...

Brad DeLong