>I'll jump in; I think I know what J. is assuming here. "Resistance
>is the result of free-willed individuals rebelling against the
>existing social order; thus Foucault is making an implicit claim about
>human nature". Apologies if this is a misconstrual, but this
>brings up one of my favorite aspects of Foucault's work: Resistance
>is an inevitable product of power relations, not human nature per se.
>It is not that humans "want to be free"; it is that every formation
>of power inevitably generates interstices that create resistance.
>For instance, the creation of "homosexuality" as a type of
>medical disorder in the 1800s made possible self-identity
>and political action that undermine existing heterosexist social
>relations. (To me, this is just an extension of Marx's argument
>that the rise of capitalism generates the basis of its own downfall.)
hmmm. since bitchlab is dead, dead, dead, I can't pull up a post where I explained how a similar dynamic accounts for same: why we can be unique snowflakes just like everybody else precisely because of a complex social system. it's your fave, too, I know.:) the old term for it was individuation. but yah, that is foucault's defense against the charge of hypocrisy. ;p and i agree with you on the analogy with Marx and the generations of internal contradictions. However, I've been chomping at the bit to pull a quote from The German Ideology -- the 'radical chains' one which I just wrote a bit about the other day. There, I think Marx makes it spectacularly obvious that he is a humanist in a way Foucault is not.
In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
</quote>
Why I kept thinking of that quote was how it seems obvious that Chomsky has that kind of within the acorn is the tree mentality which is driving Marx and Engels in this quote. Aristotle went around studying the various polities around him to ask how the particular acorn of one polis was realized well -- or not realized particularly well. But to truly understand Aristotle, and I have always wanted argue, you need to understand Aristotle's Physus because his notion of causality is not quite as we have it here in our Enlightenment/Post-Enlightenment 'new constellation'. Which is why, I think, Marx has all those parallelisms in there -- or seemingly so -- until you get to the end to the "complete loss of man" must precipitate a 'complete re-winning of man.' But, no time for that and I'm over limit, over limit, over limit. Not only will Doug bitch but our new member is going to bitch at a Bitch for wasting her time yakking at stop signs when I could be out there convincing my neighbor that he must throw more rocks and read less Lacan!
Oh.... there he goes now driving his convertible Mustang and sporting his Santa hat. Ho ho ho!
A bitch must run now to chase him down and head him off before he goes to choir practice with his wife, stopping for sundaes at Denny's afterward.
Bitchaliciously your'n,
Bitch -- the overposting pissing off Doug -- Lab!
btw, Miles, Have you read _Care of the Self_? I've meant to because I have read Foucault takes a different tack in that book, revisiting these questions. Aufhebung!, baybay, Aufhebung!
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org