[lbo-talk] a poe moe and da poe moes

[Seth Ackerman]

wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> Seth Ackerman wrote:
>   
>> Yes, but Marx believed in false consciousness. He thought you could tell
>> objectively which aspects of a subject are the product of power and
>> which are genuine expressions of species-being or whatever. Foucault, as
>> far as I can tell, dispenses with that. It's no longer a question of
>> "false" or "genuine" aspects of the subject. All of it is constituted by
>> power. And power is all bad. Hence, you get this almost puritanical
>> paranoia about "power" from the Foucaultians (or at least the American
>> ones) -- it's everywhere! all around us! right here in river city!
>> sapping our precious fluids! good god, it's *inside* of us! oh god, how
>> do we get it out?!
>>     
>
> Folks have responded to these two points, but I am kinda curious if you
> believe in this binary construction of the subject that you seem to be
> setting up here between an 'authentic' real self and a 'false' constructed
> by power self?
>   

I'm not embracing this binary myself, I'm attributing it to Marx. That's 
what false consciousness means, no?

If you want my own rudimentary thoughts on this, I guess they start from 
Anderson's observation that Foucault's "power" is actually culture. (I 
tried to find the quote online but couldn't; but I'm almost positive I'm 
quoting him accurately.)  To use the word power invests the question of 
subject formation with a certain charge that would be partly defused if 
you simply said that subjects are constituted by the culture in which 
they're formed. To Foucault we may be indebted for the insight that 
culture is always on somebody's terms rather than somebody else's and 
that it therefore can be seen as a form of power. But I think some 
Foucaultians (maybe vulgar Foucaultians) end up getting carried away 
with this insight, transforming "power" into something inherently malign 
that should be fought. (Okay, maybe MF rejected that line of thinking, 
but it exists - I've seen it!)

That's a problem since, as Foucault quite astutely observes in shag's 
quote, power is the setting up of shared truths to avoid a war. A 
perfect definition of culture. And frankly, if the alternative is war, 
then three cheers for power/culture. The question then becomes: 
power/culture on whose terms? Actually, I'm curious what you think MF 
would say about this. If you asked him - why should the prisoners have 
the power and not the guards? on what grounds? - what would he say?

I'll indict myself as an archaic naive positivist by saying that my 
answer is (a) that all we have to go on is our faculties of reason and 
(b) that's not always a perfect answer. I know the next step is supposed 
to be to unmask the devastating fact that there is no autonomous 
reasoning subject, it's just an endlessly recursive loop of power (I 
mean, culture). But I'm just not very impressed by this cleverness. At a 
certain point, you have to (and do) use your reason as if you were an 
autonomous subject. In practice that's what everyone here does, no? Am I 
thinking about this in completely the wrong way?

By the way, as I said to shag offlist, I confess that I've probably put 
some words in MF's mouth that actually originate from some of his more 
simple-minded disciples I've been exposed to in the last few years....So 
I apologize to him, wherever he is...

Seth