Doug writes:
>You are misreading me. "Absolute moral standards" are very difficult to
>come by. I'm wondering two things, at least. First, how a Foucaultian
>judges these acts of transgression - by what standard it is one finds
>Foucault's account of, say, Bentham, enlightening, but the Protocols of the
>Elders of Zion not.
Why do you insist that a Foucaultian should judge acts of transgression?
Isn't it characteristic of Foucault's work to have suspended (or to have at
least attempted to suspend) moral judgements in his analyses? It's not that
his work is immoral or amoral, but more precisely that traditionally,
whenever moral judgements have entered an analysis of practices, they have
had distorting effects. Foucault was trying to suspend that. Certainly
one can say that infant sacrifice is immoral, but such a judgement says
nothing about the practice itself, the context in which it exists, its
ritual function, etc. To read Foucault from a moral perspective is to
misunderstand what he's doing. About Bentham: I don't think Foucault's
ideas on the panopticon are as enlightening as they are sobering, since
what he's talking about in D&P is far more subtle than the specific
institutions (i.e., prison, school, family, military barricks) he examines.
He just uses them as obvious models. So, on my reading, to look at
Foucault from a moreal perspective would be to distort and misunderstand
what's going on there.
I'm assuming
>most Foucaultians are *not* slaughterers of newborns. A presumption of
>innocence rather than guilt.
So what does that have to do with Foucault? What seems to be more
interesting (at least to me) and perhaps more Foucaultian, would be to
examine why some people are compelled to look at the world through
morality, and the practical effects of such perspectives.
>But I think most of us would frown
>upon taking these practices out of art and into social life. Where does
>that frown come from? Do we not take the content of these transgressions
>seriously? Are they "just" figurative? Or do we harbor some secret and
>unanalyzed humanism, some set of moral principles, despite it all?
Once again I think you are trying to force a morality into Foucault when
instead he's trying, for the sake of analysis, to suspend moral judgements
in his examination of these practices. Where soes the frown come from?
Foucault would probably say (though not specifically in the Bataille essay)
that its an effect of power relations, how subjects treat others as
objects; how the objectified person is deemed "moral" or "immoral"
according to codes and practices the moral agent is largely unaware of.