>I also wanted to respond quickly to Jeff by saying that we may be talking past
>each other to some extent.
>First, I evidently have not read enough Marcuse, because I am not completely
>clear about the productive functioning of repression--Foucault certinly takes
>the "repressive hypothesis" to directly entail a negative conception of
>power.
>So either Foucault is wrong, Marcuse is wrong, or they are speaking about
>drastically different variants of "repression." Could you point me to any
>particular passages that might catch me up on this issue?
Consider the following citations:
Where the high standard of living does not suffice for reconciling the
people with their life and their rulers, the "social engineering" of the
soul and the "science of human relations" provide the necessary libidinal
cathexis.
Scientific management of instinctual needs has long since become a vital
factor in the reproduction of the system....
The reproduction, bigger and better, of the same ways of life came to mean,
ever more clearly and consciously, the closing of those other ways of life
which could do away with the serfs and the masters, with the productivity
of repression.
Their class structure, and the perfected controls required to sustain it,
generate needs, satisfactions, and values which reproduce the servitude of
human existence. (Eros and Civilization: xi, xii, xiv, and Essay on
Liberation, 6)
When taking a close look , particularly at the emphasized phrases,
one recognizes a certain "Foucauldian" stance. The first citation, if one
did not know better, sounds like it might have originated in DP, for DP was
to be an investigation into the modern soul. The third citation might have
occurred in "The Subject and Power" in which Foucault talks about how being
subjects limits our ways of life. And the final citation might be placed
in any of Foucault's works on power which discuss its productive aspect.
Power produces who we are, our actions, our behaviors. But all of these
citations derive from Herbert Marcuse. Yet, Foucault thinks that Marcuse
misses the point:
"I would also distinguish myself from para-Marxists like Marcuse who give
the notion of repression an exaggerated role -- because power would be a
fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only
through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage, repression, in the
manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way." (PK
59)
I do not know whether Foucault was aware of these passages or not, or if he
was, why he did not think Marcuse thought there was a productive aspect to
repression. What is very interesting, I think, is that both of them look
to the May 68 student uprisings as support for their individual work
towards liberation. Anyway...
>Second, I do think that Butler's argument in the first fifty pages of "Gender
>Trouble" reveals the inadequacy of the claim that "sexuality is discursively
>produced, but...we have sexed bodies also."
I suppose I will have to read this somtime...
Jeff