Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 12:25:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Pragmatism


On Mon, 5 Jan 1998, Rob Schaap wrote:

> I think you're far too soft on Foucault here, Justin!  Foucault repeatedly
> stresses the importance of rejecting any universally applicable principles;
> indeed, there is  'no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature,
> that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life'.

Look, I wasn't buying into Foucaildianism wholesale, just saying that his
alleged antihumanism is pretty innocuous. Now you drop his antihumanism
and bring up his relativism, which of course I reject.
> 
> Where on earth would such a position leave critical theory?

In a poor position. Once when asked, Why should we reesist power? F
answered, Don't ask Why but How. Btw te same objectiona pplies to Marx's
official antimoralism.

> And what about that 'power' nonsense?  F reckoned he was always on about
> it, but I never found out what he meant by it - other than there was no
> particular benefit in owning the means of production anyway.

Actually he's onto something very important. We don't need the thesis taht
power has no center to recognize the F-ian point that relations of control
structure huamn actions in institutions in very minute ways, down to the
level of the control of physical motions. You want to understand F on
power, read, e.g., Braverman on Taylorism (Labor and Monopoly Capital).
F's great merit here is in pointing out (a) taht power operates at a
microlevel below that of state coercion or class power, in the operation
of institutions, and (b) in reconceptualizing the parctices of
institutions atht present themselves as neutral or directed at other ends
as functions of power. How a teacher cannot find wonder and revelation in
Foucault's discussion of "the examination" (D&P) astounds me.

  Oh, and where
> is there hope in 'Discipline and Punish'?  If power needs resistance to be
> power, then the panopticon has no power in it - because I'm fucked if I can
> see resistance in the model.  Ooops!  I appear to have got carried away ...
> 
Well, there isn't any. F sees an endless process of resistance that's
necessarily futile beacuse if it succeeds it reconstitutes itself
institutionally as a new set of power relations. But F has to answered,and
saying that you find his worldview depressing won't do.


Snip.Change of subject to positivist epistemology.

> 
> In GI, do we not have a world in which there are humans and the rest of the
> world? 

Yes, and so?

> Where all is 'relations in process'

Huh?

 - a salient,importantly
> dynamic, and constantly world-conditioning relationship (or unity) being
> that between what Kant called noumenal (unknowable 'in-itselfness' of the
> world) and phenomenal (human consciousness defining, variably through
> history, perceived objects/relationships/changes that make up that world)?

Huh? I certainly do not see Kant's transcendential idealsim in the GI.  

> I see ontology there.  It's realist.  I see epistemology there too - a soft
> constructivism, if you like - conditioned but not determined by the
> noumenal.  Am I being naive - in the more traditional (derogatory) sense?
> 

Yes.

> Geez, I wish I'd taken Philosophy 101 ...

Well, you still can sit on on some classes. 

--jks 




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