Sam,
Thanks for clearing that up. It's been five or six years since I've read it. You're right that I
misstated any conscious involvement of the bourgeois class in their self-interest, and calling it an
ideology makes it sound like they were out to deceive, rather than the deployment occurring
autochthonously. I had forgotten that this is geneaology, not psychoanalysis, and structualism, not
critical theory. On the other hand, this form of consciousness did arise with the bourgeois class (see
the second to last section). And ideology can also mean one ideology among others, with none of them
being the true consciousness shared by the privilaged few. Terry Eagleton, who is out here at Notre
Dame, criticises post-structualists notions of ideology for just being that second kind.
Wynship
sam binkley wrote:
> 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
Thanks for clearing that up. It's been five or six years since I've read it. You're right that I
misstated any conscious involvement of the bourgeois class in their self-interest, and calling it an
ideology makes it sound like they were out to deceive, rather than the deployment occurring
autochthonously. I had forgotten that this is geneaology, not psychoanalysis, and structualism, not
critical theory. On the other hand, this form of consciousness did arise with the bourgeois class (see
the second to last section). And ideology can also mean one ideology among others, with none of them
being the true consciousness shared by the privilaged few. Terry Eagleton, who is out here at Notre
Dame, criticises post-structualists notions of ideology for just being that second kind.
Wynship
sam binkley wrote:
> 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