G'day Angela,
'Truth is, I allow myself dips in PEN-L's healing waters only when I've
knackered meself on the wheel of telecommunications policy - so I sometimes
write even worse crap than is my usual standard.
What I meant (as opposed to what I might have said) was that historians have
more options available to them than 'the patient construction of discourses
about discourses', which was Foucault's rather limiting, depressing and
ungenerous take on their craft. Just as Freud might have gone a little
overboard in recounting his own brave battle against inert complacency (he
was actually more generally feted than ostracised), so do I think Foucault
goes out of his way to oppose his stuff to what other historians were doing
- and this he does by making a monolithic strawman of an institution that
had EP Thompsons, AJP Taylors and Hugh Trevor Ropers in it (that actually
representing some considerable spectrum).
His attack on reason in *History of Madness* is actually not sufficient if
intended as a rebuttal of reason as such. All he does is attack the reason
of the reasoners who reason others into asylums. He says elsewhere that
Marxism resides within the same epistemic field ('episteme') as this lot.
But Marx *historicises* reasoning - making the very point that a reasonable
act is reasonable only in the context of the act's perpetration. And Marx
is precisely interested in social contexts within which reason does not
infringe human freedom.
When I read EP Thompson (whom I love), I read one who goes to the artefacts
and understands the reasoning of the mill owner as much as the artisan.
Both make all the sense in the world, but the former's reasoning points the
artisan at the gallows, and the latter's points the mill owner at
bankruptcy. Taken together, their reasoning inhibits forces of production -
the former embracing a nascent but doomed factory capitalism, and the latter
just as doomed an attempt to reverse time's arrow. Thompson sees an answer
to this: socialism. Foucault does not. In a grand extrapolation (as befits
a French theorist du jour), he concludes *all* reason is ultimately folly.
Foucault has *no* faith in history really. Not really. Caught in a sudden
need to be consistent, he once called his whole corpus 'little fictions'.
Foucault takes us nowhere, imho.
This is what I thought had so got to Doug a couple of weeks ago, when he
morosely told us he had little faith left in reason. I told him then what I
still think is importantly true: 'Tis all we have ... although I do
sympathise with his suspicion that not a few Marxists (elsewhere) seem to
be trying to get by without it.
Cheers,
Rob.
You'd written:
>rob wrote:
>
>(we need not follow
>>Foucault, who seemed to think history is nought but an accumulation
>of
>>documents written by victors with the future in mind - history has
>left
>>plenty that wasn't particularly meant to tell stories years or
>centuries
>>later
>
>well, i think foucault agrees. as would walter benjamin. i think
>maybe you are confusing what foucault (and benjamin) see as official
>history and the possibility of a history which breaks with such
>'stories from the point of view of the victors'.
>
>angela
>
>
