> Justin says:
>
> >But the idea that F has a poor or no account of class is different
> >from the idea that his discussion of prison reform is outmoded
> >because it attacks a humanitarianism that is passe in this
> >retributive age.
>
> Had Foucault not set out to create a Weberian theory of modernity,
> rejecting Marxism, he (with his towering intellect) would have been
> able to chart the vicissitudes of prison reforms (rehabilitation
> under social democracy, retribution under neoliberalism) better.
> After all, such reforms are determined in the last instance by
> changing requirements of capital accumulation while mediated by
> concrete social formations (which explains the vast gap in the rate
> of incarceration, etc. between the USA and the other rich nations),
> but Foucault couldn't bring himself to employing what he would have
> thought of as Marxist "reductionism" & "determinism" (not even
> Althusserian versions of them).
=======
How dare any social theorist think they could ever surpass Marx.
>
> Foucault's theory, in short, is too abstract & idealist. Here,
> Foucault the philosopher drags down Foucault the sociologist of
> knowledge.
=============
"A spider constructs operations which resemble those of a weaver, and
a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of
honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before
he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result
emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the
beginning, hence already existed ideally." [C vol. I, 284]
"what Marx opposes is not simply simply 'idealism': it is the validity of the very distinction between the material and the ideal." [Marsden, 23]
>
> >I am not prepared to ditch class analysis, as you well know. 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.
>
> I'm in favor of the above, but doing so demands that we leave out
> Foucault's theoretical premises & conclusions, while learning from
> him "in medias res" as it were.
>
> Yoshie
=========
No. It demands no such inference. The rapidity with which you cast M&F
in zero-sum terms is frightening. And the ire with which Marxists
attacked F reminds me of Northern Ireland. A total waste of time and
'energy'. Such is the folly of attempting to achieve finality and
unsurpassability in the study of societies.
Ian