Date: Fri, 19 Jan 96 13:26:52 EST
From: "Joe Cronin" <croninj-AT-thomasmore.edu>
Subject: Re[4]: ethics and poststructuralism


          To Antoine and Diane,

          The larger connection between Marx and Focuault, I suppose,
          goes through Althusser and structural Marxism.  Althusser
          claims that any reading of Marx which holds that Marx has
          merely inverted the terms of the hegelian dialectic is a
          bourgeois reading; Marx transforms the hegelian dialectic in
          his 'scientific' work, in such a way that the social
          structure is not seen as an isomorphic reflection of an
          underlying base (whether that would be material or
          'spiritual'), but as a complex, decentred whole.  A lot of
          this is jargon, but the point is fairly profound.  The
          social structure itself consists in a set of material
          relaionships, with each element having its own "relative
          autonomy."  However, these autonomous elements unite around
          economic relations "in the last instance." The basic point
          is that in Marx's later "scientific" writings, in which he
          analyzed capital from the critical persepctive of the
          universal class, the proletariat, he looked at all social
          relationships as complex ones.  He "abstracts" terms such as
          labor and value from hteir complex setting to understand
          their logic.  But Althusser makes it fairly apparent that
          Marx was neither an essentialist, nor a humanist, nor a
          Hegelian.
          Foucault's foundational (yes, I said it) concept in hte
          genelogies is the truth/power relation.  This is not a
          Nietzschean concept, so far as Focuault is cocnerned, but a
          Marxian one - and therefore a critical one (Zarathustra has
          no critical universal persepctive; the "masses" as Foucualt
          sometimes refers to the working class do).  The truth/power
          relation in the classical age was representational.  The
          body of the king lied under all power relations.  Thue
          reform era, however, is characterized by an "economistic
          rationality."  In modern bourgeois society, the truth/power
          relation is carried out in aneconomy of power relations, in
          which the objective qualities of subjects, gaines through
          "semio-techniques," form the currency of htis economy.

          This may sound a bit sketchy, but the basic point is htat
          Foucault's genelogies do operate off an axis - a Marxian
          one.  Marx also analyzed the complex nature of social
          relations in capitalist societies by examining the economic
          relations htat characterize all apsects od the social
          structure.  That does not mean that Marx was an "economic
          determinist" in the sense in which Engles interpreted him.
          Instead, he analyzed the economy of socail relations.
          There's a major difference: in Marx's case, rights, laws,
          morality, etc. are produced, appropriated, and distributed
          just as money is.  There's no essential gap between economy
          and hte superstructure.
          I shall end with a quote from DP:
          But the body is also directly involved in a political
          field;power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they
          invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry
          out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.  this
          political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance
          with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use;
          it is largely as a force of production that hte body is
          invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the
          other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible
          only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which
          need is also a political instrumnet meticulously prepared,
          calculated and used).


     ------------------