> My point was
> not that we should adopt Foucault of D&P in the
> place of historical
> materialism, but that we should use
> Foucauldian-style institutional analyses
> to fill in the gap in historical materialist
> explanation between the
> abstract truth that class relations determine ideas
> in some way, and the
> particular determinations that emerge in concrete
> contexts.
This is the point I'm making. Foucault for the analytics and descriptions, so that one can see, if not possibilities for changing these determinations via Foucault, at least the determinations in a practical way.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
So, Foucault's
> theory has a
> >pessimistic cast especially in his Weberian strain,
> for he
> >practically argues that modernity represents no
> progress whatsoever
> >over the pre-modern state of affairs & that there
> is no way out of
> >the iron cage that he describes, only an
> ever-present dialectic of
> >power & resistance to it.
So how, as a politically engaged philosopher, was Foucault "active" in a laudable way? If his pessimism presents a snag to notions of recontesting, how did he, or how could one justify his political activism, such as it was? He couldn't have been that pessimistic if he was that engaged.
If the theory or episteme in question, exemplified by _Discipline and Punish_, didn't inform his political work, what did?
Alec
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