Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 11:12:43 -0400
Subject: Re[2]: Structural Marxism 


Your responses are great - I hope we can keep up a productive dialogure on this
issue.  Some have asked what 'structural Marxism' is -- and the canonical text
of Dreyfus and Rabinow already turns us 'beyond structuralism and hermaneutics'
-- but I would say  that structuralism itself is  vague and variable, that
Foucault's self-distancing from structuralism per se is largely a distancing
from some Eastern European writeres from the 20s and 30s, and that he
nevertheless admits some affinities with F. de Saussure.  structural Marxism, as
I see, is a unique scientific and philsophical appraoch to the study of history.
 It is neither a "traditional' form of structuralism nor a twist in Marxist
theory per se.  What it offers is a way of reading teh relationship between
economy (both as an entity and as discursive practices) and what Althusser
allused to as the second aand third tiers of the house -- the police and
military (second tier) and teh Ideological State apparatuses (ISAs).  According
to Althusser, the production of individuals as subjects primarily occurs in the
third tier, through the ISAs (what are also referred to as institutions by
sociologists.)  
Long before he wrote about ISAs, Althusser concerned himself with a critique of
humanism in all its various forms - especially Marxist humanism - because
humanisms as he saw them alwayds begin with the individual as a metaphysical
subject, the philosophical framework tehy start out from always retiurns to the
Kantian-Hegelian "essence/phenomena' distinction, which leads to their treatment
of histpory itself as a subject evolving and incorporating change as it
progresses in its development.  
Althusser, before Foucault, inverted teh subject/object relation in his claims
for founding a scientific approacxh to history.  it is not individuals who
produce power, but rather power (occuring at a structural level) that produces
individuals.  The humanist model preserves the capitalist ideology of
individualism in all comes into contact with.  Althusser claims that Marx "went
beyond" the Hegeleian humanist model, not simply by turning Hegel on his head
and inserting economy insterad of spirit at the economic base, but in radically
breaking with the humanist model of history, and reconceptualizing the manner in
which the "superstructure" interacts with economy to produce specififc kinds of
subjects useful to the centalization and production of of power (as series of
effects) in capitalist (ie Western) societies.  Althusser claims that Marx's
"break" (the influence of Bachelard-Cang. is obvious) with humanism led to an
entirely new science of history which, philosophically speaking, sets out from a
type of 'theoretical antihumanism'.  I argue that, in all of Foucault's writings
from MC on, he always begins with a critique of what the humanist historians
(sometimes spoken of as historians of ideas) have to say about a specific
discourse (discursive proactice after AK), and that throughout his writings his
primary methodologies, though they transform from OT to AK to DP to HS,
nevertheless display a pattern of conern with obverting the humanist approach to
history largely on teh terms that Althusser had postulated as early as the late
50s.

Perhaps if we chose a particular text to analyze I could demonstrate what I see
as Foucault's theoretical antihumanism in greater detail.  I admit that my
reading of F's work has its shortcomings, and though I do have an explanation of
how Nietzsche fits into this picture, it is not a view that is widely shared.

It sounds, anyway, like there is some interest in pursuing this line.
--Joe Cronin