On Wed, Aug 21, 1996 4:31:26 PM, mbayiha cyuma wrote:
>Alright Benjamin,
>
>i have failed. [smile]
>
>But it's all good anyhow.
>
>Have yourself a beautiful summer holiday.
>
>cyuma
>
>enjoyed the Xchge.
>
Hey! wait: I just got back from my vacation, and while sunning myself on
the beaches of Mexico's Yucatan province (Foucault's history of madness and
Remarks on Marx on my knee) I cooked up some comments that might be useful
here.
Seriously, does anyone really care whether Foucault was a Marxist in a
strict sense, a lose sense, or what have you? The question becomes largely
semantic, and though the task of isolating those elements which in Marx
consititute the bottom threshold for "ism" is doubtless an interesting
challenge in itself, I don't think it really brings us very close to
Foucault's work. Strong arguments can be made on either side for a guy who
wrote a sort of materialist history but detested metanarrative and overall
despised the politics of the French CP. This seems to me a purely academic
question.
What is interesting to me is the points at which Foucault's ontological
questions (i.e. what are the constitutive processes and relations lying at
the root of what we so often except as 'human') invoke a productivist
element. Put another way, to what extent does disciplinary subjection
presume a certain ontological foundation in the rationalization of human
productive capacity. This problem can be posed on either a micro or macro
historical level: to what extent do the specific procedures of disciplinary
subjection, the normative regulation of the body, imply an optimization of
the body's productive capacity, and to what extent is the development of
disciplinary institutions guided by the same principle of rational
optimizing of resources and productive processes? Foucault seems to work
constantly at the threshold of such a economistic explanation, even in
Madness and Civ where he concedes that the great confinement consituted an
operation serving an economic function in absorbing and integrating a
largely inoperative segment of the population.
ON the level of a materialist human ontology, a careful reading of
discipline and punish makes it difficult to dismiss the possibility of this
connection between discipline and productive rationality.
And if affirming this connection means that we have to call F a marxist,
fine.
sb
>Alright Benjamin,
>
>i have failed. [smile]
>
>But it's all good anyhow.
>
>Have yourself a beautiful summer holiday.
>
>cyuma
>
>enjoyed the Xchge.
>
Hey! wait: I just got back from my vacation, and while sunning myself on
the beaches of Mexico's Yucatan province (Foucault's history of madness and
Remarks on Marx on my knee) I cooked up some comments that might be useful
here.
Seriously, does anyone really care whether Foucault was a Marxist in a
strict sense, a lose sense, or what have you? The question becomes largely
semantic, and though the task of isolating those elements which in Marx
consititute the bottom threshold for "ism" is doubtless an interesting
challenge in itself, I don't think it really brings us very close to
Foucault's work. Strong arguments can be made on either side for a guy who
wrote a sort of materialist history but detested metanarrative and overall
despised the politics of the French CP. This seems to me a purely academic
question.
What is interesting to me is the points at which Foucault's ontological
questions (i.e. what are the constitutive processes and relations lying at
the root of what we so often except as 'human') invoke a productivist
element. Put another way, to what extent does disciplinary subjection
presume a certain ontological foundation in the rationalization of human
productive capacity. This problem can be posed on either a micro or macro
historical level: to what extent do the specific procedures of disciplinary
subjection, the normative regulation of the body, imply an optimization of
the body's productive capacity, and to what extent is the development of
disciplinary institutions guided by the same principle of rational
optimizing of resources and productive processes? Foucault seems to work
constantly at the threshold of such a economistic explanation, even in
Madness and Civ where he concedes that the great confinement consituted an
operation serving an economic function in absorbing and integrating a
largely inoperative segment of the population.
ON the level of a materialist human ontology, a careful reading of
discipline and punish makes it difficult to dismiss the possibility of this
connection between discipline and productive rationality.
And if affirming this connection means that we have to call F a marxist,
fine.
sb