I'm not really all that familiar with Foucault, but have always considered him a better writer of intellectual gothic horror S&M fetish novels than a sociologist or historian. ;)
I don't think it's particularly Marxist (though Marxist frameworks can be used to talk about it). I don't recollect Marx talking about reinscriptions of systems of impression or about anything being absolutely liberating or not (demanding absolute liberation is a Christian thing). I don't think that would have occured to him. It's a French poststructuralist thing derived ultimately from, er, Heidegger (and targeted at certain interpretations of Marx, among other things).
Miles makes it sound like society has some kind of internal, perfectly functioning, feedback mechanism, that operates on all levels, that preserves power relations automatically. It's not true.
--- On Tue, 3/31/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> "I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing
> is of the order of "liberation" and another is of the order
> of "oppression" . . . No matter how terrifying a given
> system may be, there always remain the possibilities of
> resistance,disobedience, and oppositional groupings. On the
> other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is
> functionally ... absolutely liberating. Liberty is a
> **practice** ... The liberty of men is never assured by the
> institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them...
> Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because "liberty"
> is what must be exercised ... The guarantee of freedom is
> freedom. (that is, the practice of freedom - shag)" (From
> 'Two Lectures' in _Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
> Other Writings, 1972 - 1977_, edited by Colin Gordon.
>
> In that, Foucault is espousing some pretty standard stuff
> within sociological theory. See for example, Michael
> Burawoy's _Manufacturing Consent_ and John Gaventa's _Power
> and Powerlessness: quiescence and rebellion in an
> Appalachian valley_.
>
> p.s. as for your concerns about Christian ideals in the
> civil rights struggle portrayed as -- gasp! -- reinscribing
> oppression, you only have to look as far as the criticisms
> of blacks who broke away from the civil rights model for
> radical critiques of the assimilationism and the "i want a
> piece of the pie, too" nature of that movement. In turn,
> there's a slew of critiques about the assimilationism and
> nationalism inherent in the Black Power movement. The ideas
> Miles presents didn't come out of his ass. Rather, you can
> get such a critique straight out of the standard historical
> accounts of the anti-slavery, anti-Jim Crow, Civil Rights,
> and Black Power movements spoken about and written by
> participants of those movements themselves.
>
> I learned of those critiques -- in a very obvious way --
> not from reading Foucault, but from reading _Eyes on the
> Prize_ and watching the PBS documentary in the early 1990s.
> But I also encountered them long before, reading Gloria
> Anzaldua, bell hooks, Angela Davis, etc. In other words,
> from reading feminist critics of identity political
> struggles.
>
>
> http://cleandraws.com
>
> Wear Clean Draws
>
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