At 01:44 PM 7/20/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Joanna L. Crosby wrote:
>
>>While I am intersted in Marxist influences in Foucault's work, the more
>>productive line of thought seems to me to ask how Foucault takes us beyond
>>Marx.
>
>Which is where?
>
>Doug
Touche! Quite a good and knotty question, actually, and one I wont, here,
attempt an answer to. But one of the things one learns from Derrida
(amongst others, and I think not least Foucault) is the fallacy of thinking
"the beyond" as such. Rhetorics of origins/progress/telos are not
"productive lines of thought." Rather than figure out how Foucault trumps
Marx (or vice versa), a better "game" would be to think about what
Foucault, or Marx, or Fanon et. alia., can allow us to see, or not see. And
in specific contexts, not simply in general (which is why I, for one, find
the notion of "surplus power" in Jan Muhammed or Deleuze kind of klunky, or
an unconvincing resolution of F vs. M). At the risk of sounding
defeatist, we might recall Goethe's words here:
Happy the man who still can hope
to swim to safety in this sea of error.
What we dont know is what we really need,
and what we know fulfills no need at all.
Best,
Daniel Vukovich
English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>Joanna L. Crosby wrote:
>
>>While I am intersted in Marxist influences in Foucault's work, the more
>>productive line of thought seems to me to ask how Foucault takes us beyond
>>Marx.
>
>Which is where?
>
>Doug
Touche! Quite a good and knotty question, actually, and one I wont, here,
attempt an answer to. But one of the things one learns from Derrida
(amongst others, and I think not least Foucault) is the fallacy of thinking
"the beyond" as such. Rhetorics of origins/progress/telos are not
"productive lines of thought." Rather than figure out how Foucault trumps
Marx (or vice versa), a better "game" would be to think about what
Foucault, or Marx, or Fanon et. alia., can allow us to see, or not see. And
in specific contexts, not simply in general (which is why I, for one, find
the notion of "surplus power" in Jan Muhammed or Deleuze kind of klunky, or
an unconvincing resolution of F vs. M). At the risk of sounding
defeatist, we might recall Goethe's words here:
Happy the man who still can hope
to swim to safety in this sea of error.
What we dont know is what we really need,
and what we know fulfills no need at all.
Best,
Daniel Vukovich
English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign