Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:55:45 -0500 (EST)
Subject: M-TH: Foucault 


Perhaps some others will be interested in this highly informative account 
of Foucault's political activism and influence. It was originally posted 
on PEN-L (the progressive economists network) in response to a comment 
>from Doug H./Jerry

------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Tavis Barr <tavis-AT-mahler.econ.columbia.edu>


Okay, to used a mixed metaphor, I'll bite this thread.  I have a 
love/hate relationship with Foucault's work that includes both a lot of 
respect and a lot of problems.  I think Foucault deserves our respect if 
for nothing else because he was a political activist who was out on the 
streets confronting cops, helping prisoners organize themselves and speak 
out, and fully immersed in gay and lesbian grassroots activism.  This 
is more than one can say of most other Pomo authors and, unfortunately, 
of most people on Pen-L for that matter.  I think it's grossly unfair to 
just dsimiss him with a comment of "rubbish."

Foucault's main influence on today's lesbian and gay movement is probably 
his conception of power.  For Foucault, power is mainly exercised 
through control over discourse: People in power control how our lives are 
spoken about and what options we are allowed to declare for ourselves.  
The objective of people whose power is taken from them is to find ways to 
speak up and to point to the contradictions in the dominant discourse as 
a way of exploding it.

This type of thinking has had a temendous influence on the AIDS activist 
movement.  At the beginning of the epidemic, people with AIDS were talked 
about through the discourse of public health, and policies that were most 
widely thrown out were those of control (quarantine, contact tracing, 
etc.).  Through the process of self-organization and speaking out in various 
ways, people with AIDS (fka, "AIDS victims") began to be seen as faces 
and human beings.  They began to appear in unexpected places demanding 
things on their behalf. Tactics in AIDS activism have often centered 
around finding ways to poke holes in public discussion, whether through 
embarrassing people in high places, getting arrested for doing 
"reasonable" things, or simply rasing spectacles where bourgeois 
propriety (and the law) would not have them.  The discouse now focuses on 
treatments for PWAs and support for people in high-risk groups.

Thinking about activism this way is not a substitute for a materialist 
analysis of AIDS or anything else.  ACT UP has always made some clear 
materialist points: Our main enemies are drug companies who do research 
on a for-profit basis, ignoring promising but unprofitable therapies and 
charging tens of thousands of dollars a year for the drugs they do 
develop (I and 72 other people were arrested yesterday for blocking 
access to the New York Stock Exchange in protest of drug prices).  Our 
other big enemy is the for-profit health care system and we are very 
clear on why the US has no universal health coverage.  People in ACT UP 
also have a very clear understanding of how corporations control public 
research funding and the state in general.

It is problematic that Foucault saw his analysis in contradiction to 
materialism in many ways.  Primarily, his analysis of the "repressive 
hypothesis" in the first volume of _The History of Sexuality_ describes the 
repression of homosexuality as waning throughout the century because the 
discourse around homosexuality was expoloding, and he offers this piece 
in response to materialist critics.  This is a very different history 
from, say, John D'Emilio's _Capitalism and Gay Identity_, which 
describes material repression of homosexuality in response to the growth 
of gay and lesbian households in the early twentieth century. I side 
unambiguously with D'Emilio, but I also think that Foucault's points 
about exploding discourse are worth tackling because understanding 
consciousness is a big part of understanding the subjective element of 
making history.

It is possible that the right stew of Marx, Gramsci and Chomsky could 
come up with a basis of understanding discourse that is firmly grounded 
in materialism.  But it hasn't happened yet, at least not in a way that 
incorporates the many innovative ideas about seizing language that Foucault 
held.  Foucault wrote at a time when the relationship between Marxism and 
feminism was still being redefined, and when Marxist discourse about 
homosexuality was barely existent.  Many marxists still have bad sexual 
politics.  Meanwhile, Foucault has influenced many lesbian and gay 
academics and political activists.  It is partly due to his influence, I 
think, that the Marxian discourse about homosexuality has changed.  He 
does not deserve to be spat on.


Comradely,
Tavis





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