This is a reply to the message from "caliskakboun.edu.tr" -
I'm sorry, but I don't remember whcih name to give you.
I'll start with the claim cocnerning Foucault's own
totalizing conception of his own authorship...
In teh "Introduction" to Dreyfus and Rabinow's work, they
divide Foucualt's work into four "stages" (or moments),
which are ostensibly held together by common cocnerns and
methods: hermeneutics (and I disagree already with them,
becasue the "Mental Illness and Psychology was more of a
Soiet Marxist / semi-behaviorist critique of
psychoanalysis), archeology, genaology, and ethics. They
present Foucault's authorship as though it presented a
coherent whole, with four ascending stages leading to the
History of Sexuality. Foucault himself claims, in the
"Afterword," that "My objective...has been to create a
history of hte different modes by which, in our culture,
human beings are made into subjects...." and he runs through
the different ways he done this in the various staeges of
his work.
I don't think you can trust Foucault's comments here very
much - they are written from the Owl of Minerva's
perspective; his opus is viewed as having this coherent plan
which until 'now' was not fully articulable, as though each
stage represented a moment culminated in the present. I
trust Dreyfus and Rabinow even less, because their comments
in the introduction seem to be informed by Foucault's
"Afterword," as though the three of them were collaborating
on the discovery of a new (social) scientific methodology,
which they call an "interpretive analytics" - which htey see
as being compatible with the Winch's (ostensibly
Wittgensteinian) "The Idea of Social Science". You have to
note of course that the "Interpretive" spect comes from
Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar (who vastly overemphasizes the
hermeneutical angle, as far as I'm cocnerned), and the
"analytic" aspect comes from Rabinow, who is an
anthropologist coming from a Levi-Straussian position.
"Interpretive Analytics" is theor science, not Foucault's,
and I suppose I'm being a bit cynical here, but it's a sad
attempt to bridge the "conintental divide" or to "close the
channel" and create a happy union between coninental and
analytic philosphy. I guess that's what I mean by
"totalizing" Foucault's work. The reason I think uit can't
be done is that each of histories really are unique - in
many cases, they share very little in common except for some
common sources, and soem common stylistic devices perhaps -
but the basic questions they address are quite different.
I've been trying to link together two works of his which
have often been thrown together as his "political" works -
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexulaity v. 1, and
I've come to the conlusion that there are two very differnt
things going on in htose works, and that it is absurd to
speak of them in the same breath in many instances. I see
almost no theoretical connection between HS v.1, and volume
2 and 3 (whcih do have a theroetical coherence).
Comments? --I'd especially be interested in soemone's
comments on teh D&P, H&S disparity/connection.
The second issue you raised concernes Foucault's influences;
I htink you are absolutely correct that it could be the case
that Hyppolite is the "influence" to look at. I have just
been reading his "Marx and Hegel," and I was struck first of
all by how much clearer it is than Althusser's work, and I
also noticed that Hyppolite seems to have a cocneption of
Marx's work in which the "epistemic break" is a reality.
Let's go to the Marxian problem: what is the fundamental
distinction between the "scientific" and the "humanist"
Marx? ( By the way, the more I think about this, the more
brilliant I think your question is - because in many ways it
gets to soem basic issues in some of F's work).
Because this question can really get hairy, I'll simplify
htings a little bit and just look at the concept of value.
In the early work (especially the Paris Manuscripts, but alo
in The Jewish Question and elsewhere - let's say, as
Althusser does, up until Marx left Paris for Brussels in
1845), value is "subject" centered - similar to teh
existentialist views about meaning. If value is contrated
in the subject, the project of history is ultiamtely a
hermeneutical one ( I can hear some people squaking out
there, but htis in one reason I think the "interpretive"
readings of history, including Dreyfus's, is out of line in
terms of the later Marx's contribution). Teh central
concern is alienation - which was also Feuerbach's -- the
individual is aleinated form his/her social essence (through
competiton i hte workplace, through family disfunction, etc,
etc), and this alienation manifest itself in montheism - or
an all unifying god who brings us to the big party in
heaven; alienation form one's dymanci essence - humans "by
nature" are productive animals - they not only produce the
means of their subsistence, but they do it consciously (and
historically), btu their activity is sytematically divided
from their essence; alienation form their produce -- hence
the fetishism of commodities, the appropriation relations
whcih strip the object from the productiove subject;
alienation from "species" essence, or full organic
development ( whci is only available to "communist man");
etc. etc.
The idea is that the human subject is the creator of
meaning and value (sound Sartrean? - I think it is). For
soem reason, this reading came into vogue in the fifties -
Fromm, Arendt, Sartre, etc. - and it facilitated the
appropriation of Marx by humanist existentialists, some of
whom began to read Lukacs as well, and saw trend developing,
which is now spoken of as "western" Marxism. Unfortunately,
this view of Marx's work still persists. Just listen to a
few lines from Paul wapner ("What's Left: Marx, Focualt, and
Contemporary Problems of Socail Change," PI 9 1/2):
For Marx...human beings have not realized their true nature.
the reason for this is that the mode of produciton or the
conditions under which humans work have never been conducive
to doing so...According to Marx, capitalism denied workers
the chance to engage in self-reflective, autonomous and
creative labour..."(94)
If all of this were true, then MArx should be read as the
last of the great politcal theorists in the line of Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson, all of who justify their
claims about rights, the nature and legitimacy of teh state,
etc. by an abstract appeal to human nature. In Marx's case,
if we take this line, the notion of human nature is slightly
diffferent - it's a Aristotelian/hegelian one ( see Scott
Meikle, "Marx & essentialism " (somethign like that) for a
full account of htis line), where the human essence is seen
as a dynamic, socail one which require the poroper
enviroenmetnasl consitions for its full and proper
development.
Althusser call essentialism "bourgeois philosophy" for good
reasons; the ultimate concernis with the full development of
the individual (this sounds sadly Rousseauan); it is
precisely this cocnpetion which Marx criticizes beginning
with "the Holy Family," and is especially present in The
Gernan Ideology.
Now for the "scienitic" Marx on teh question of value.
Somehwere in the 1845s Marx introduced the dictinction
between use value and exchange value, and in Wage, Labour
and Capital (1847, originally written) he also adds the term
"real value" - which actually was teh term used by political
economists to repesent the "equilibrium" point on the
supply/demand curve, the point where the costs of production
was equivalent to the market price (also called the "natural
price"). Proudhon's work on the systems of contradiction,
which Marx heavily criticizes in the Poverty of Philosophy,
is fundamentaslly about the unfairness in the marletplace,
because the natural price was usually not truly reflected in
the marketplace. Proudhon advocated reforms to erase the
flucutation in supply and demand to bring things to their
natural price (whcih equals the value of labour). The
injustice, or "the contradiction" had aprtilaly to do with
the "unnaturallness" of the marketplace (in soem ways, an
assumption shared by all the politcal economists, who
claimed that hte Feudal order, for instance, was "unnatural"
because of trade restricitons, guilds, etc. which
"artifically" kept prices at unnatural levels). Marx laughs
this whole attempt off; he claims that introducint such
reforms would be tantamount to having teh cotton industry
thrive without slave labour----for Marx, it's
incomprehensible that the cotton and textile industries
could have developed wiothout slave labour.
What emerges around 1845 and after is a different cocnern
with value than the humanist one; value is a socail
function--out of this new concern grows the centerpiece of
Marx's sciecne, the labour theory of value. Hence the
conern, htorughout Marx's later writings, to dispel the
bourgeois notion that value was a function of exchange -
instead, it is a function of production. To dispel the
myhto of bourgeois value, Marx increasingly found himself
analysing capital, and ITS dymanic.
Actually, as I said at the beginning, this is a long story.
Here's how I will briefly and srticially relate this to
Foucault: the strucutral Marxist reading places Marx's whole
ater enterprise, Marxian science, as an analysis of the
rules of transformation, and so on whcih are central to the
fucntion ing of capital. Insofar as Foucault is an
"analyst"(in the levi-Straussian sense), he is an
anti-humanist, strucutralist, and all of that, and the
coonection between Focualt and Marx has to be made through
strucutral Marxism. This probably isn't right either, but
do we go along with Dreyfus and Rabinow, and view him as an
eclectic conglomerate of hermeneutics (all the same as
humanism for these purposes) and analytics (strucutalism)?
This coonjunction is "unthinkable" as far as I'm concerned -
make your choice, talk about the liberation of hte subject
or talk about the socail fucntions of power knowledge (but
don't mix the two).
P.S. Where's Erik Lindberg?
Joe
I'm sorry, but I don't remember whcih name to give you.
I'll start with the claim cocnerning Foucault's own
totalizing conception of his own authorship...
In teh "Introduction" to Dreyfus and Rabinow's work, they
divide Foucualt's work into four "stages" (or moments),
which are ostensibly held together by common cocnerns and
methods: hermeneutics (and I disagree already with them,
becasue the "Mental Illness and Psychology was more of a
Soiet Marxist / semi-behaviorist critique of
psychoanalysis), archeology, genaology, and ethics. They
present Foucault's authorship as though it presented a
coherent whole, with four ascending stages leading to the
History of Sexuality. Foucault himself claims, in the
"Afterword," that "My objective...has been to create a
history of hte different modes by which, in our culture,
human beings are made into subjects...." and he runs through
the different ways he done this in the various staeges of
his work.
I don't think you can trust Foucault's comments here very
much - they are written from the Owl of Minerva's
perspective; his opus is viewed as having this coherent plan
which until 'now' was not fully articulable, as though each
stage represented a moment culminated in the present. I
trust Dreyfus and Rabinow even less, because their comments
in the introduction seem to be informed by Foucault's
"Afterword," as though the three of them were collaborating
on the discovery of a new (social) scientific methodology,
which they call an "interpretive analytics" - which htey see
as being compatible with the Winch's (ostensibly
Wittgensteinian) "The Idea of Social Science". You have to
note of course that the "Interpretive" spect comes from
Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar (who vastly overemphasizes the
hermeneutical angle, as far as I'm cocnerned), and the
"analytic" aspect comes from Rabinow, who is an
anthropologist coming from a Levi-Straussian position.
"Interpretive Analytics" is theor science, not Foucault's,
and I suppose I'm being a bit cynical here, but it's a sad
attempt to bridge the "conintental divide" or to "close the
channel" and create a happy union between coninental and
analytic philosphy. I guess that's what I mean by
"totalizing" Foucault's work. The reason I think uit can't
be done is that each of histories really are unique - in
many cases, they share very little in common except for some
common sources, and soem common stylistic devices perhaps -
but the basic questions they address are quite different.
I've been trying to link together two works of his which
have often been thrown together as his "political" works -
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexulaity v. 1, and
I've come to the conlusion that there are two very differnt
things going on in htose works, and that it is absurd to
speak of them in the same breath in many instances. I see
almost no theoretical connection between HS v.1, and volume
2 and 3 (whcih do have a theroetical coherence).
Comments? --I'd especially be interested in soemone's
comments on teh D&P, H&S disparity/connection.
The second issue you raised concernes Foucault's influences;
I htink you are absolutely correct that it could be the case
that Hyppolite is the "influence" to look at. I have just
been reading his "Marx and Hegel," and I was struck first of
all by how much clearer it is than Althusser's work, and I
also noticed that Hyppolite seems to have a cocneption of
Marx's work in which the "epistemic break" is a reality.
Let's go to the Marxian problem: what is the fundamental
distinction between the "scientific" and the "humanist"
Marx? ( By the way, the more I think about this, the more
brilliant I think your question is - because in many ways it
gets to soem basic issues in some of F's work).
Because this question can really get hairy, I'll simplify
htings a little bit and just look at the concept of value.
In the early work (especially the Paris Manuscripts, but alo
in The Jewish Question and elsewhere - let's say, as
Althusser does, up until Marx left Paris for Brussels in
1845), value is "subject" centered - similar to teh
existentialist views about meaning. If value is contrated
in the subject, the project of history is ultiamtely a
hermeneutical one ( I can hear some people squaking out
there, but htis in one reason I think the "interpretive"
readings of history, including Dreyfus's, is out of line in
terms of the later Marx's contribution). Teh central
concern is alienation - which was also Feuerbach's -- the
individual is aleinated form his/her social essence (through
competiton i hte workplace, through family disfunction, etc,
etc), and this alienation manifest itself in montheism - or
an all unifying god who brings us to the big party in
heaven; alienation form one's dymanci essence - humans "by
nature" are productive animals - they not only produce the
means of their subsistence, but they do it consciously (and
historically), btu their activity is sytematically divided
from their essence; alienation form their produce -- hence
the fetishism of commodities, the appropriation relations
whcih strip the object from the productiove subject;
alienation from "species" essence, or full organic
development ( whci is only available to "communist man");
etc. etc.
The idea is that the human subject is the creator of
meaning and value (sound Sartrean? - I think it is). For
soem reason, this reading came into vogue in the fifties -
Fromm, Arendt, Sartre, etc. - and it facilitated the
appropriation of Marx by humanist existentialists, some of
whom began to read Lukacs as well, and saw trend developing,
which is now spoken of as "western" Marxism. Unfortunately,
this view of Marx's work still persists. Just listen to a
few lines from Paul wapner ("What's Left: Marx, Focualt, and
Contemporary Problems of Socail Change," PI 9 1/2):
For Marx...human beings have not realized their true nature.
the reason for this is that the mode of produciton or the
conditions under which humans work have never been conducive
to doing so...According to Marx, capitalism denied workers
the chance to engage in self-reflective, autonomous and
creative labour..."(94)
If all of this were true, then MArx should be read as the
last of the great politcal theorists in the line of Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson, all of who justify their
claims about rights, the nature and legitimacy of teh state,
etc. by an abstract appeal to human nature. In Marx's case,
if we take this line, the notion of human nature is slightly
diffferent - it's a Aristotelian/hegelian one ( see Scott
Meikle, "Marx & essentialism " (somethign like that) for a
full account of htis line), where the human essence is seen
as a dynamic, socail one which require the poroper
enviroenmetnasl consitions for its full and proper
development.
Althusser call essentialism "bourgeois philosophy" for good
reasons; the ultimate concernis with the full development of
the individual (this sounds sadly Rousseauan); it is
precisely this cocnpetion which Marx criticizes beginning
with "the Holy Family," and is especially present in The
Gernan Ideology.
Now for the "scienitic" Marx on teh question of value.
Somehwere in the 1845s Marx introduced the dictinction
between use value and exchange value, and in Wage, Labour
and Capital (1847, originally written) he also adds the term
"real value" - which actually was teh term used by political
economists to repesent the "equilibrium" point on the
supply/demand curve, the point where the costs of production
was equivalent to the market price (also called the "natural
price"). Proudhon's work on the systems of contradiction,
which Marx heavily criticizes in the Poverty of Philosophy,
is fundamentaslly about the unfairness in the marletplace,
because the natural price was usually not truly reflected in
the marketplace. Proudhon advocated reforms to erase the
flucutation in supply and demand to bring things to their
natural price (whcih equals the value of labour). The
injustice, or "the contradiction" had aprtilaly to do with
the "unnaturallness" of the marketplace (in soem ways, an
assumption shared by all the politcal economists, who
claimed that hte Feudal order, for instance, was "unnatural"
because of trade restricitons, guilds, etc. which
"artifically" kept prices at unnatural levels). Marx laughs
this whole attempt off; he claims that introducint such
reforms would be tantamount to having teh cotton industry
thrive without slave labour----for Marx, it's
incomprehensible that the cotton and textile industries
could have developed wiothout slave labour.
What emerges around 1845 and after is a different cocnern
with value than the humanist one; value is a socail
function--out of this new concern grows the centerpiece of
Marx's sciecne, the labour theory of value. Hence the
conern, htorughout Marx's later writings, to dispel the
bourgeois notion that value was a function of exchange -
instead, it is a function of production. To dispel the
myhto of bourgeois value, Marx increasingly found himself
analysing capital, and ITS dymanic.
Actually, as I said at the beginning, this is a long story.
Here's how I will briefly and srticially relate this to
Foucault: the strucutral Marxist reading places Marx's whole
ater enterprise, Marxian science, as an analysis of the
rules of transformation, and so on whcih are central to the
fucntion ing of capital. Insofar as Foucault is an
"analyst"(in the levi-Straussian sense), he is an
anti-humanist, strucutralist, and all of that, and the
coonection between Focualt and Marx has to be made through
strucutral Marxism. This probably isn't right either, but
do we go along with Dreyfus and Rabinow, and view him as an
eclectic conglomerate of hermeneutics (all the same as
humanism for these purposes) and analytics (strucutalism)?
This coonjunction is "unthinkable" as far as I'm concerned -
make your choice, talk about the liberation of hte subject
or talk about the socail fucntions of power knowledge (but
don't mix the two).
P.S. Where's Erik Lindberg?
Joe