File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1995/f_Nov15.95, message 13


Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 12:27:52 -0500 (EST)
From: James McFarland <mcfarlnd-AT-phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: fish out of water




On Fri, 17 Nov 1995, Philip Goldstein wrote:

> 	I could go on to argue that Althusser's notion of ideology and 
> Foucault's notion of discursive practices have important similarities, 
> but my wife wants to use the computer. 

This would no doubt be a very interesting comparison to make, and one 
well beyond my competence. In my own defense, I was attempting no 
exhaustive characterization of the relation between Foucault and 
Althusser, which was, as you suggest, more complicated than any single 
citation or description can do justice to. I wanted to acknowledge at a 
pretty general level the fact that the Order of Things is also engaging 
in polemics with its contemporary political environment, as well as 
with such "historical" entities as nineteenth-century Marxism, that may 
help to explain the choice of certain targets, and the way these targets 
are positioned. In fact, many of the criticisms of Foucault I have here 
been reiterating (that his analyses are conducted at the level of general 
epistemology, "beneath" or "beyond" where meaningful political analysis 
is done; that his formalistic aparatus provides no helpful orientation for 
material practice -- I'm not concerned to defend them here) these same 
criticisms have often been leveled at Althusser. (see Sebastiano 
Timpanaro, "Structuralism and its Successors" in On Materialism, Verso 
1975, for instance, or Ernst Mandel's Late Capitalism: "Althusser thus 
sanctions only a relationship between economic theory and historical 
theory; the relationship between economic theory and concrete history is 
by contrast declared a 'false problem', 'non-existent' and 'imaginary'. 
What he does not seem to realize is that this is not only in 
contradiction to Marx's own explanation of his method, but that the 
attempt to escape the spectre of empiricism and its theory of knowledge 
-- a spectre of his own making -- by establishing a basic dualism between 
'objects of knowledge' and 'real objects', inevitably runs the danger of 
idealism." p19. I leave unspecified the extent to which I agree with 
either of these analyses.) Polemically for my part, I think there is 
reason for great caution in following the road of Marxist exegesis that 
magnifies alienation and reification (the price capitalism extracts also 
from the bourgeoisie, so to speak) and diminishes economic exploitation and 
imperialism, a trend uniting such widely disparate thinkers as early Lukacs, 
Althusser, Adorno. As an alienated member of the bourgeoisie myself, 
these discussions have a wonderful plausibility and resonance, but I find 
myself having to insist that capitalism is corrupt not in the first 
instance because it alienates me from myself, but because it shoots a 
lot of poor people in the head.

But this is Marxism. On this list we should, I agree, return to Foucault.

Jim

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