Sugah skypes in to my last class as a first year graduate student
Maysam: your question was hawtjk
i'm trolling
but bodies and pleasure are not silent when they;re with you
The Real World - AUstin
domesticate his penis
kelzbelz: wut r u
queer theory with Kelie
Evie Cheeks: centipedesEvie Cheeks: eeeeeeeeeeee
Evie Cheeks: i hate them
rhizombie: OH THOSE ARE DISGUSTING
rhizombie: they gross me out more than anything
rhizombie: like all those legs
rhizombie: not normal
rhizombie: really fucking gross
Evie Cheeks: HETEROFASCIST
rhizombie: dude if there was a gay centipede i'd be totally down with the gay part
rhizombie: but i would still be grossed out by the legs
rhizombie: what am i even saying
Anonymous asked: TOTALLY (also btw thx for the response!), and realizing that this amount of space is no place to explain which parts of marxism appeal to me/us. largely it's the same parts that foucault doesn't discard. (except i'll still say that the micropolitical "bodies and pleasures" is a cop out.) i think marx and foucault actually share a relational understanding of power/the production of subjects (the proletarian is very much made by capital and not outside it), which for us makes sense re: patriarchy.
Sure dude—I appreciate the dialogue cause I think it’s definitely something worth thinking about. And I totally agree that (traditional) Marxism is still helpful and necessary to engage with—and the aspects that appeal to me are largely the ones that the “post-structuralists” didn’t discard (Marx’s analysis of capital, his spirit of radical critique).
I’d be interested in hearing where/in what text you see Marx espousing a relational understanding of power and “foucauldian” production of subjects. Basically Foucault’s critique is two-fold: on the one hand he targets how Marx begins with the premise of the male laboring body, on the other his critique is aimed at how Marx conceptualizes ideology as mystification and situates resistance in the agency of the same human (male) subject. Both of these separate but related critiques are bound up with a greater appraisal of the way Marx conceives of power as a fundamentally repressive force. For Marx, power is always a kind of physical coercion (how the forces of production extract from the worker his very life and make it something alien to him) and is always opposed to “truth” because it relies on ideological mystification. Contrarily, Foucault argued that modern capitalism coupled with the economic/political theory of liberalism gave birth to a form of power he termed biopower that operates productively and effectively produces/invests in the bodies of individuals to be laboring subjects (so we are not born naturally to labor, as Marx thought). As for ideology critique: for Marx, the obfuscatory intervention of ideology, overcome through a return to its material genesis, is rendered impotent by the subject who has recourse to material reality outside of the ideological grasp of power (aligned very clearly with the bourgeoisie). Foucault critiqued Marx’s conception of ideology through his analysis of power-knowledge, which he argued does not work at the level of form—that is, at the level of meaning or consciousness, like ideology—rather, it operates at the level of the physical forces of the body and the material forces that make up the population as a biological species. This is not a strict account then, of subject formation per se, but rather an analysis of the processes and techniques power makes use of for the purposes of utilizing life as productive force—how power is “exercised rather than possessed.” The subject or consciousness is fabricated by techniques of power, but only insofar as it is useful for the maximum extraction of life. In this schema of the mechanisms of power, “false consciousness” cannot exist since any ontological essence of the subject, however material, is already foreclosed. Materialism for Marx always involved the mode of production, and, in its most basic sense, labor as the concrete material essence of human life. Foucault does away with any metaphysical conception of life as possessing a concrete essence, instead he asks how life as an ontology of force(s), to borrow a phrase from Deleuze, functions and how power, as life’s implied double, not only works on but produces the most basic material element of human life—the human body.
You can begin to see here how Foucault’s (radically materialist) critique of Marx is basically that he didn’t go far enough (Derrida and Deleuze do something similar). Many people see the implied praxis of these thinkers as a “cop out,” as you put, and that’s understandable given the fact that they don’t espouse a prescriptive (i.e., macro-) politics, per se. It’s not just about “bodies and pleasures” though—remember for Foucault “where there is power there is resistance,” so it’s a less pessimistic framework (all that “there is nothing outside of power” bullshit) than people assume. And they don’t do away with “macropolitics” completely, they just maintain that the locus of “resistance” must be “infrastructural,” or focused on “microfacisms” as Deleuze put it.
SORRY THIS WAS LONG I WAS ON A ROLL AND I JUST WROTE A PAPER ABOUT THIS. Anyway feel free to chime in with your thoughts/response/critique.
Anonymous asked: i've been thinking about that supposedly banal post about your male friends fucking up or whatever... in light of a conversation i had with a friend about post-structuralism vs marxism. basically in crass terms we opposed post-structuralism's focus on micropolitics (intensities, discourse, gestures, etc) to marxism's old fashioned structuralism, and decided that the latter helped us better come to terms with men being produced as MEN, and always betraying themselves. sry for lack of detailnospac
See but I disagree. Men are produced, constituted, and subjugated by discursive regimes of power that work not just ideologically (as in the traditional Marxist schema) but also at the very level of the body (Foucault demonstrated this well). Even Marx takes for granted this body as already a laboring man—and he’s very specific here since traditional Marxist theory does not account for women’s (i.e., domestic and reproductive) labor. Further, because Marx located ideology as produced and centralized in the bourgeois class, i.e., that the proletariat need only “demystify” it, he had recourse to a kind of “true” reality that was not obscured by ideology. The structuralists (especially Althusser) showed why this was wrong, and Foucault took it a step further—rather than locate ideology as the superstructure of the superstructure as Marx did, Foucault recognized the inherently relational nature of power (a “web of power relations”) that could not be centralized nor resisted in the normative sense by a willing subject-agent (who has already come to being as an effect of power).
This is not to say that patriarchy isn’t intimately tied to capitalist exploitation (Marx/Engels themselves maintain that the first commodification is that of the woman)—to class, but also to race, etc.—but a Marxist theory alone simply cannot account for the way that patriarchy functions—at the level of the body/individual, but also at the level of the population and of culture. A micro political struggle then, seems a much more adequate template for “resistance,” because these strategies of patriarchal power exist themselves at the micro political level—at the level of “infra-power” as Foucault described.
reinventionoftheprintingpress:
The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
- Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
- Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
- Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western though has so long held as sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
- Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
- Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
- Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
- Do not become enamored of power.
- Michel Foucault, in the Preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari
yo foucault knows rights are horseshit too
reminding yall to vote against rights in 2012
Wow, I’m actually impressed that you engaged with my points. I find it interesting that you basically agree with my reading of Foucault, and yet maintain that he was a neoliberal/libertarian (when it’s very obvious that he’s critiquing neoliberalism). So, there seems to be some cognitive dissonance on your part that I’d like an explanation for. Also, remind me how a neoliberal/libertarian conception of freedom and the individual is compatible with Foucault (who says that both are produced and maintained through technologies of power)? Just a heads up—I won’t be home tonight so won’t get to respond till morning.
When I first read Foucault (in a class on global ideologies taught by the Marxist Vijay Prashad), I took BoB as basically just descriptive of the prevailing neoliberalism without any normative content regarding it (i.e. neither for nor against it). It’s in this, Foucault’s descriptions of social institutions like the state and neoliberalism, that I first found the relevance of Foucault to libertarianism. If you read my linked post on the state vs. property, I locate both the state and property as disciplinary manifestations of popular governing mentalities but using Hayekian institutional lingo rather than Foucauldian power discourse.
It looks pretty clear to me that Foucault was influenced on this matter by Hayek and other institutional economists, especially in his later lectures where he critiques both left and right wing essentialisations of the state. And this was I think my first disagreement with you, when you claimed that Foucault was only interested in Hayek et al insofar as criticizing them. I think that’s quite clearly wrong.
I’ve more recently come across scholars (e.g. Allen, Patton, Stocker) arguing that the later Foucault tacitly endorsed or provided a rationale for accepting neoliberalism as a feasible governing mentality that can provide effective counter-arguments to disciplinary power; and find these arguments both interesting and convincing on their own terms as far as I can tell. It is precisely the case for libertarianism that does not rely on an essentialised, atomistic ontology of the self or the cosmic sense of liberty from all constraint that I am interested in, because that is the case that I (with Anthony de Jasay and FA Hayek) have been attempting to make while others have been attempting to define my position out of existence by insisting that libertarian conclusions necessarily entail certain premises or arguments along the lines Foucault criticised.
Foucault is careful to avoid prescriptive politics in his work and yes, “normative claims” in the general sense because he saw even his work implicit within a certain power-knowledge dispositif. However, if you consider for example, his treatment of juro-disciplinary society in Discipline and Punishment—say, his example of Bentham’s panopticon—it becomes quite clear that the entire book is a critique of disciplinary techniques of power. Likewise in his later work, History of Sexuality (written in the same period as Birth of Biopolitics), for example, his critique of biopower, coupled with neoliberalism as a political ideology that allows it to function, is one mostly concerned with how this new form of power appears to us as a kind of injunction to be “free”—a “freedom” he outrightly critiques as an internalized form of subjugation (hence the famous quote in HoS: “we have not yet learned to cut off the head of the king”). Hence also why he provides a lose scheme of resistance where “it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible” (96, and that is revolution in the Marxist sense, in case you were wondering). His criticism of biopower (intimately tied and dependent on neoliberalism, as he states numerous times in Birth of Biopolitics) is also concerned with its “right of death and power over life”:
“massacres have become vital…the power to expose a while population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence” (137).
Now, I’m not really sure how you can read that and say that he’s not making normative claims about biopower and by extension neoliberalism. Just a couple pages later he describes biopower as
“numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations…techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions, operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them…guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of biopower” (140-141).
That’s a blatant critique of homo economicus/neoliberalism as the politico-ideological wing of biopower. A few pages later he critiques neoliberal rights discourse:
“The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or “alienations,” the “right” to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this “right” -which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty” (145).
So he critiques “rights” and a liberal conception of freedom as tied/necessary to biopolitical regimes of power that are in actuality a new form of hegemonic subjugation. This subjugation operates on the level of power-knowledge, of “truth” discourse, as he says in Birth of Biopolitics:
“The emergence of this regime of truth as the principle of the self-limitation of government is the object I would like to deal with…the point of all these investigations concerning madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, and what I am talking about now, is to show how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth [neoliberal principle of self-limitation] form an apparatus (disposition) of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between true and false…this is the basis on which something like biopolitics could be formed. But it seems to me that the analysis of biopolitics can only get under way when we have understood the general regime of this governmental reason I have talked about, this general regime that we can call the question of truth, of economic truth in the first place, within governmental reason. Consequently, it seems to me that it is only when we understand what is at stake in this regime of liberalism opposed to raison d’Etat—or rather, fundamentally modifying it without, perhaps, questioning its bases—only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to graph what biopolitics is” (19, 21-22).
And then he continues, as you know, to analyze liberalism and neoliberalism in relation to homo economicus and biopower. Let’s assume that there is such thing as a libertarian conception of the individual that does not rely on a subject as free and willing agent (which is one of Foucault’s greatest critiques of neoliberalism)—something you have yet to explicitly describe and I would be quite interested in seeing how it works—neoliberalism, as the art of governmentality that makes biopower possible, is implicit in/makes possible/relies on these new forms of subjugation, hegemonic power relations, and widespread death, as Foucault maintains. It is a rather blatant criticism then of neoliberalism—if anyone says otherwise I would be, as I mentioned, prone to consider them either 1) dense/a poor reader or 2) purposefully misrepresenting Foucault’s work to further their own political ideology.
Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 1 of 7
This is the first in a series of three lectures in which French philosopher Michel Foucault examines Western culture’s conceptual development of individual subjectivity. He gave these lectures, in English, at UC Berkeley, beginning on April 12, 1983, roughly a year before he died. There are some negligable distortions in the tape.
I am absolutely in love with this man and his thought. I think it’s safe to say that I would make passionate love to him if he were to miraculously rise from the dead (and be AIDS-free). Also, his English is surprisingly good. After hearing him in French, I never expected him to sound like this in English.
