Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 12:50:18 -0600 (MDT)
From: Flannon <flannon-AT-odin.cair.du.edu>
Subject: Re: Causing poverty/how not to read MF




On Sat, 25 May 1996, Stephen D'Arcy wrote:


 
> 2. that Foucault claims that we live in capitalist societies with a
> capitalist ruling class, which exploits a working class (on purpose).
> 
> In order to defend the first assertion, it is necessary to do some
> terminological translation from Foucault's idiom into Marx's, and vice
> versa.  I have tried to do that already on this list, so I have
> forwarded again what I previously wrote (see below).  Technically
> Foucault does not quite have "relations of production" in mind
> exclusively; he has in mind the more inclusive notion of "relations of
> power."  The former, he holds, is a special case of the latter. 
> 
> > Steve D'Arcy
> 

By putting such an interpretive mechanism in place, by forcing foucault's 
'idiom' to dance to the tune of a marxist 'idiom' can we now say that we 
are still talking about the same thing?  Please don't get me wrong, I'm 
not trying to suggest that foucault can only be spoken of in the tone in 
which Foucault wrote.  Rather what I would suggest is that once you run 
the words through this type of translation mechanism you can no longer 
take the results and parse them back to the original concept because the 
original concept is no longer that which the results speaks of.

Or more emphatically, to put it in foucault's own words:  "A hermeneutic 
that winds itself around a semiology, believing in the absolute existence 
of signs, gives up the violence, the incompleteness, the infinity of 
interpretations, so as to create a reign of terror whre the mark rules 
and suspects language -- we recognize here Marxism after Marx." (from: 
"Nietzsche, Freud, Marx")

Flannon