File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1998/foucault.9807, message 51


Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 00:23:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: "M.A. King" <kingma-AT-mcmail.CIS.McMaster.CA>
Subject: Re: Foucault, commodities & power


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On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> By eschewing an explanation that takes capital into account, in fact,
> Foucault ends up reproducing the abstract separation of different spheres
> he might have sought to overcome through his concept of power. What gives
> rise to discourse, apparatus, episteme, etc. that Foucault analyzes? How do
> they reproduce themselves? Why do they change? What purposes do they serve?

I think this begs the question against Foucault:  for him, any causal
explanation is going to be the product of a particular episteme (I'll use
that term, because I get the feeling (I could be wrong) it's the Foucault
of The Order of Things who is foremost in your mind here).  Sure, you can
try to explain every historical change in economic terms ... but you can
also try to explain everything in terms of Christian eschatology, or the
moments of Spirit collecting themselves, or the self-propagation of
"selfish genes", or whatever.  You can argue that the Marxist scheme has
the most "explanatory power"--but it all depends what you want to explain,
doesn't it?

I don't think that a Marxist account of the shifts between epistemes is
really "incompatible" with Foucault ... what would be incompatible would
be the idea that a Marxist account is absolutely true, that it provides
the *real* causes for those shifts, rather than just a way of
understanding them which is useful for certain political purposes.

> To whose benefit? Who gets controled in the 'Society of Control'? How do we
> transform society in such a manner that 'discipline and punish' shall cease
> to be its modus operandi? These are legitimate questions that Foucault
> merely suspends

I don't think he suspends the latter question--but rather gives the answer
that if you think you've got a solution, then you're part of the problem.
Cf. "the whole of society is something that should not be considered
except as something to be destroyed" and all that.  You can't have a
society without disciplinary apparatuses; in transforming society, you
simply substitute one set of apparatuses for another (at best).  Which is
not to say that this might not sometimes be a good thing, of course.  The
terms in which it could be described as a good thing could not be
specifically Foucauldian terms, though they might be terms that Foucault
would not have found uncongenial--he certainly found congenial the
ethical vocabularies of both Marxism and liberalism when they suited
his purposes.

Matthew

----Matthew A. King------Department of Philosophy------McMaster University----
     "The border is often narrow between a permanent temptation to commit
     suicide and the birth of a certain form of political consciousness."
-----------------------------(Michel Foucault)--------------------------------



   

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