Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 08:28:53 +0100
From: ccw94-AT-aber.ac.uk (COLIN WIGHT)
Subject: Re: more on nasty cyber-nazis


Miles,

If only things were that simple. One does not purge oneself of ontological
commitments simply by not concerning oneself with them. 

Perhaps, if the claim that such questions are irrelevant is indeed true of a
Foucaultian approach then it is tha which I find so troubling. To argue that:

>he is primarily a historian noting how discourse is
>>embedded in various social contexts, its uses, its effects.  All
>>this has nothing to do with asking about the role of "the real"
>>on our use of language and discourse.

Is clearly to invite ontological questions. 'Are the discourses real and how
the weave their effects?' is a question that cannot logically be divorced
from 'are the objects of discourses real?' on pain of naive solipism.
Foucault's unthematised commitment to an empiricist ontology precludes him
from ever breaking the boundaries of its grip. To use your own example. 

The move from discourses of deities to discourses of anything else is
clearly to commit a category error (which I admit a Foucaultian analysis
does allow). the reality of AIDS is clearly of a different form than the
reality of deities. One has to belief in deities in order for the discourses
to work their magic. The "magic" of AIDS is completely independent of belief
or not in it. To tell me that a Foucautian analysis is not concerned with
ontological questions points only to seroius aporia in any Foucaultian
analysis. Discourses are of things and why some discourses predominate over
others is itself tied, in part, to those things. To threaten someone one
does not always need the STICK, but if one really has the STICK the threats,
in the form of dicourses work so much better. And it is for precisely this
reason that we spend vast sums of money on stockpiling weapons.


 Again, this is a historical
>or sociological question, and it has nothing to do with
>philosophical arguments about the relation between language
>and reality.

Thus, my argument is one cannot do one without taking congnisance of the
other. It is simply an illusion to think you are thinking unphilosophically. 

Thanks,


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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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