Wynship Hillier wrote:
>
> > It still seems to me that your quote is far from classifying
> > Reich as "bourgeois ideology" in a way which would make it ironic to
> > mention him on a Foucault list.
>
may I suggest that, while describing Foucault's analysis of the "deployment of sexuality" as a
critique of "bourgeois ideology" is not strictly speaking, wrong, it is at least misleading.
True, the deployment of sexuality mostly took part through a state apparatus that was established by
a bourgeois class, it was certainly not this class that undertook this deployment as an expression
of its implicit "interest". and while the deployment of sexuality defined a set of statements and
practices linked by a principle of rationality and inner cohesion, they did not constitute an
ideology, if by ideology we mean an "inversion" or obfuscation of some other social reality.
In short, terms like "bourgeois" and "ideology" carry with them certain assumptions: to identify a
shift or strategy so closely with a class is to assume that this strategy is the expression of an
intrinsic class interest. Just as to use the term ideology is to imply a distortion of a reality of
some sort. Foucault in History of sexuality would have dismissed both of these.
sb
>
> > It still seems to me that your quote is far from classifying
> > Reich as "bourgeois ideology" in a way which would make it ironic to
> > mention him on a Foucault list.
>
may I suggest that, while describing Foucault's analysis of the "deployment of sexuality" as a
critique of "bourgeois ideology" is not strictly speaking, wrong, it is at least misleading.
True, the deployment of sexuality mostly took part through a state apparatus that was established by
a bourgeois class, it was certainly not this class that undertook this deployment as an expression
of its implicit "interest". and while the deployment of sexuality defined a set of statements and
practices linked by a principle of rationality and inner cohesion, they did not constitute an
ideology, if by ideology we mean an "inversion" or obfuscation of some other social reality.
In short, terms like "bourgeois" and "ideology" carry with them certain assumptions: to identify a
shift or strategy so closely with a class is to assume that this strategy is the expression of an
intrinsic class interest. Just as to use the term ideology is to imply a distortion of a reality of
some sort. Foucault in History of sexuality would have dismissed both of these.
sb