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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