Re: [Marxism] On language

["Ian Pace" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Louis,

From: "Louis Kontos" <lkontos@xxxxxxx>


Ian,
> I agree with the substance of your post but need to take issue with
some of the particulars. Foucault did not speak of dominant
discourses as a source of 'legitimation' (instead, he argued that
ideological legitimation of power was no longer needed precisely
because reactionary discourses, even some institutional discourses --
reactionary by definition -- that were once radical or subversive,
like psychoanalysis, now serve effectively to offset the question of
alternatives (unlike Habermas, who took issue with Foucault, in part,
around the question of ideological legitimation.) Foucault argues
that dominant discourses -- or, in his language 'regimes of
discourse' -- are an aspect of the phenomena 'of power' in question,
not external, e.g., that ordinary people now think Freudian thoughts,
even have Freudian dreams, not only that psychoanalysis justifies
capitalism, patriarchy, etc.


OK - it's over 10 years since I read Foucault in detail. Where I'm not
convinced, and was never convinced, about Foucault, was in the issue of
whether he believed or at least argued there was any other way of valorising
discourses (including his own) in terms of some remaining notion of 'truth',
rather than simply in terms of the ideologies and power structures they
serve. If not (and I'm more than willing to listen if you think this is not
true of his thought), then that certainly does put him in a camp with the
post-modernists. And post-modernists can attain power as well, and use their
own discursive strategies for the purposes of maintaining that power.
Post-modernism to me is as much the ideology of marketers and advertisers as
it is of liberal academics. The argument about Freudianism actually acting
in an a priori manner upon people's dreams I find unconvincing, unless one
believes that the unconscious (a concept in itself I'm a little sceptical
about, but that's from an anti-Freudian point of view) has succumbed to
total administration, a bleak prospect indeed.

> My own take on Foucault is that he's a
more provocative and interesting writer than Habermas and almost
everyone else in the anti-postmodernist crowd, i.e., the pseudo
Marxists whose careers have been built on endless attacks on the
fantom of post-modernism, rather than anything else -- including
people like Norman Geras (a permanent reactionary), Ellen Wood (whose
work on Latin America, as opposed to anything written by her in a
theoretical vein or about theory, deserves reading), David Harvey
(whom I like reading when he, a geographer, deals with geography),

I don't know Geras or Wood's work; Harvey's seems interesting if a bit
unnecessarily convoluted (need to return to his anti-postmodernism book
again, though, have sped-read it but not really interrogated it in so much
detail). What do you think of the anti-postmodernist writings of Callinicos,
Norris, Jameson or Eagleton? And could you tell me in some more detail about
your problems with Habermas?

Being an anti-postmodernist doesn't make one a Marxist, certainly, but being
a Marxist precludes one from being a postmodernist, IMHO.

> etc. etc. I think that if Foucault is to be labeled (who cares,
really?) he should be deemed a structuralist.

OK, I can accept that.

> Definitely not 'post'
structuralist (of which there are really few -- I say thanks God --

Deleuze is the most interesting and powerful of the post-structuralists to
me, whose radically anti-reductive and anti-ontology of being views are
extremely valuable for critical Marxism, I believe.

> though there are many anti-structuralists, beginning with Nietzsche,

Could you elaborate on how exactly you mean this in the case of Nietzsch?

> and even Marx in a certain vein -- the vein that Gramsci picks up,
for instance, in his take on Marxism as a 'theory of praxis', rather
than simply a practical theory, or objective knowledge, etc.

Indeed that is a powerful theory - but why is it necessarily antagonistic to
structuralism (and how precisely do you define the latter?).

Solidarity,
Ian




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