Post-Marxist Theory: An Introduction

2. From Archaeology to Genealogy: Michel Foucault and Post-Marxist Histories

Chapter 2 _________________________________________ From Archaeology to Genealogy Michel Foucault and Post-Marxist Histories Foucault examines the breakdown of phenomenology, not Marxism, whose limits, he says, the study of the Gulag exposes (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 134–37); nonetheless, like Althusser, he suggests that, contrary to foundational, humanist ideals, the discourses of the disciplines or power/knowledge impose ideals of normality and thereby reproduce themselves and/or the subject. Althusser too claims that, constituting or interprellating the subject, ideology is rooted in institutional rituals that reproduce it (“Ideology” 166), but he argues that, opposed to ideology, science independently develops its concepts and does not conform with practice, fact, or truth (For Marx 182–93). Foucault, who considers science “one practice among many,” repudiates this opposition and explains discourses ’ positive, factual history, including their gaps and ruptures . As a consequence, while Althusser preserves traditional notions of economic determination and working-class or communist party politics, Foucault’s genealogies of punishment or sexuality implicitly foster the politics of marginal groups, what feminists and post-Marxists term a radical coalition of women’s, black, and other “new social movements” (see Lois McNay 111 and Janet Sawicki, Disciplining 8–10). 37 Some critics esteem the subjective, local character of Foucault’s histories but fault his notion that the discourses of power/knowledge constitute a normal subject because they fear that in a functionalist manner this view, like Althusser ’s account of ideological interpellation, leaves too little room for resistance.1 The exception is Foucault’s last works, which maintain that the strategies and tactics whereby males regulated their bodies and thereby assured the health of their souls differed markedly in the classical Greek and in the Christian eras (see Ingram 237 and McNay 3, 87); however, I won’t say much about these works, which do not show much Althusserian influence. They discuss the constitution of the self, not the strategies or tactics of modern discursive technologies nor the social or institutional changes that explain their evolution. Other critics grant that Foucauldian accounts of a discourse ’s history and normative import subvert ruling-class ends and aims but deny that Marxism has very much to do with these accounts.2 It is true that in the relatively early Madness and Civilization Foucault emphasizes the Nietzschean notion that discourse does not uncover a preexistent object; discourse constitutes the objects, including the human “object,” which it purports to uncover. In the early, Nietzschean mode, he parodies the pretentious objectivity of positivist medical or psychological disciplines and esteems the power of madness, the disciplines’ silent and repressed other, to transgress their ethical and social norms.3 In this early and in later work, Foucault also argues, however, that, like the medical historians who discover in ancient treatises examples of modern pathologies or neuroses, scientists treat the forms of madness as eternal and unchanging, but actually the changed, institutional arrangements of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries explain the changing forms that madness takes. Pierre Macherey, Tony Bennett, and Toby Miller rightly suggest that this claim is Althusserian (see chapters 5 and 6). That is, even though Althusser speaks of ideology and not of particular discourses, he too claims that, constituting or interprellating the subject, ideology is rooted in institutional rituals that reproduce it. 38 Post-Marxist Theory In later works, Foucault examines not only these “archaeological” forms but also the “genealogical” import of a discourse, whose power to constitute a subject extends to the individual as well as the “social” subject. He still shows, however, that, organizing and reorganizing social life, the established discourses of “power/knowledge” constitute the “normal” subject” but preserve their autonomy and ubiquity , instead of serving the ends and aims of the ruling class.4 Although this genealogical view repudiates the theoretical critique defended by Laclau and Mouffe and Butler, the view implicitly fosters what they consider the radically democratic politics of oppositional women’s, black, or ethnic movements. In the early Madness and Civilization, Foucault claims that discourse about madness imposes and violates middleclass norms, rather than constituting a subject or organizing society. Like Nietsche, who preserves the ancient view that that Dionysiac madness is a tragic experience, Foucault shows that madness readily transgresses the ethical precepts of “bourgeois” morality, but, to oppose the Kantian notion that the human subject imposes transcendental forms of understanding (see Béatrice Han 64–65), he maintains the changing historical contexts of madness explain this transgression...