At 02:48 AM 8/20/98 PDT, you wrote:
..... BUT this does not mean that Althusser is
>not committed to the idea that ideology at a certain level is false.
>Althusser?s epistemology is a complete nightmare, if only because he?s
>managed to amalgamate Lacan, Saussure and Spinoza - in order to get at
>what he thinks the "post-Hegel" Marx was really on about. Althusser
>distinguishes between ideological thought and critical, scientific, or
>Marxist thought.
Jon,
Thanks for the thoughtful response, it raises important issues indeed.
LA's distinction between "science"-cognition-Theory vs
ideology-subjectivity, is in fact quite a problem. I more or less agreee
with all youve said, with the quibble in re LA that there are at least
three notions of ideology : the political/functional, the
Imaginary/affective, and the rational/practical. While its true that, for
better or worse, LA does posit "scientific knowledge" or "Theory" as
ideology's antithesis, I still find useful the distinction b/w ideology and
knowledge, as well as the one b/w processes with- and without a "subject."
So, sometimes ideology is "false" but, on the other hand, for LA ideology
is not a pejorative term. Given that it is an "imaginary map...." it is
not even knowledge, per se, and so true/false need not apply.
In re Foucault, it is true there is no pre-discursive reality, but --
contra the Derridean readings of F. (I think of Judith Butler here) --
there is indeed a *non-discursive* "reality" or milieux which subtends the
discursive. (I think we ultimately agree here, but it depends on how we
understand the "outside of thought"?) In short, and for lack of a better
term, both LA and F are materialists. One of them is even something of a
historicist. But while I agree that LA's epistemology is something of a
mess (not necessarily a problem, for me), I think there are interesting
problems in re Foucault's epistemology, if he can be said to have one. One
way of reading the *Archeology* is, I think, as a whole-scale critique of
epistemology as such. Epistemology is, in the last analysis, just another
form of the stratifcation of knowledge-power. This is a brilliant move,
and yet it of course poses knotty problems, as *any* resolution or
"rejection" of the subject/object split does. In other words, from the
perspective of the author-critic, are we not back to apprehending processes
without a subject? More generally, how is it that the Foucauldian is able
to see?
I have in mind some of the feminist and postcolonial critiques of Foucault,
such as Ann Stoler's (sp?) *Race, Education and Desire*.....
Regardless, I think your account of the "words and things" approach, the
non-linguistic notion of "statements" (enonces) is salutary. The notion of
a "discursive formation" is for me the best thing in Foucault and it is
indeed quite different from "ideology" as such; it can also be used as a
"new" way of performing ideological- or marxian critique.
Sincerely,
Daniel
Daniel Vukovich
English; The Unit for Criticism
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
..... BUT this does not mean that Althusser is
>not committed to the idea that ideology at a certain level is false.
>Althusser?s epistemology is a complete nightmare, if only because he?s
>managed to amalgamate Lacan, Saussure and Spinoza - in order to get at
>what he thinks the "post-Hegel" Marx was really on about. Althusser
>distinguishes between ideological thought and critical, scientific, or
>Marxist thought.
Jon,
Thanks for the thoughtful response, it raises important issues indeed.
LA's distinction between "science"-cognition-Theory vs
ideology-subjectivity, is in fact quite a problem. I more or less agreee
with all youve said, with the quibble in re LA that there are at least
three notions of ideology : the political/functional, the
Imaginary/affective, and the rational/practical. While its true that, for
better or worse, LA does posit "scientific knowledge" or "Theory" as
ideology's antithesis, I still find useful the distinction b/w ideology and
knowledge, as well as the one b/w processes with- and without a "subject."
So, sometimes ideology is "false" but, on the other hand, for LA ideology
is not a pejorative term. Given that it is an "imaginary map...." it is
not even knowledge, per se, and so true/false need not apply.
In re Foucault, it is true there is no pre-discursive reality, but --
contra the Derridean readings of F. (I think of Judith Butler here) --
there is indeed a *non-discursive* "reality" or milieux which subtends the
discursive. (I think we ultimately agree here, but it depends on how we
understand the "outside of thought"?) In short, and for lack of a better
term, both LA and F are materialists. One of them is even something of a
historicist. But while I agree that LA's epistemology is something of a
mess (not necessarily a problem, for me), I think there are interesting
problems in re Foucault's epistemology, if he can be said to have one. One
way of reading the *Archeology* is, I think, as a whole-scale critique of
epistemology as such. Epistemology is, in the last analysis, just another
form of the stratifcation of knowledge-power. This is a brilliant move,
and yet it of course poses knotty problems, as *any* resolution or
"rejection" of the subject/object split does. In other words, from the
perspective of the author-critic, are we not back to apprehending processes
without a subject? More generally, how is it that the Foucauldian is able
to see?
I have in mind some of the feminist and postcolonial critiques of Foucault,
such as Ann Stoler's (sp?) *Race, Education and Desire*.....
Regardless, I think your account of the "words and things" approach, the
non-linguistic notion of "statements" (enonces) is salutary. The notion of
a "discursive formation" is for me the best thing in Foucault and it is
indeed quite different from "ideology" as such; it can also be used as a
"new" way of performing ideological- or marxian critique.
Sincerely,
Daniel
Daniel Vukovich
English; The Unit for Criticism
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign