"existentialism for objects"

[revol68]

Regarding Badiou's apparent Platonism, well I don't think asserting that ideas are part of the real world makes him Platonic, it simply means he isn't a crude materialist or an idealist (them being the flipside of each other). He does however get quite close to Platonic forms in his talk of the Idea of Communism as some sort of pure form, a transcendental idea, a truth event outside the everyday being, but to me that is a hangover from his Maoism and it's Leninist roots, with it's split between everyday (trade union) consciousness and revolutionary consciousness, which of course necessitates an outside transendental deus ex machina.

 

[Drone Module]

So the existence of the United States of America is not explained through power, discourse, or social forces, rather it is an irreducible object, the ontological base from which these all flow? What a ridiculously idealist notion, it would leave Hegel blushing, as atleast Hegel's notion of the state was dialectical.

Honestly this stuff is just a massive regression back from Marxism and post Marxism.

well, i wouldn't support that conclusion any more than you would.

it reads to me more like saying that the OOP wants to explain how assemblages come into being to begin with. so how do the social forces, power, discourses even get assembled to begin with? Foucault doesn't give us an answer, and Marx give us any final answer either.

i don't think object-oriented philosophy is intended to be a political ontology, but rather to subtend politics. a marxist politics could quite happily rest on top of a speculative realist metaphysics.


for instance;

Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted by the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sophos

here Marx is making a metaphysical comment that could be said to be object-oriented. returning a kind of life to the object is hardly anti-materialist.

insofar as there is a neovitalism emerging (and this is the branch i have real interest in) i don't see any reason why SR, which isn't limited to OOP to begin with, can't be wedded to marxism.

after all, how many post-marxists enjoy a Spinozist or Whiteheadian influence?

 

[Drone Module]

eh, no the whole point is that the real contaminates the fantasy through a lack, a knot that resists articulation in the symbolic order. The notion of fantasy contaminating the real is aburd (atleast in Zizek's terms), the real is beyond language, it is thatwhich resists symbolisation entirely.

as far as i understand the 'parallax Real,' the gap is itself retroactively constituted as an object... an object that withdraws or resists conceptualisation . in this sense the Real coincides with the Lacanian objet petit a . as the latter term symbolises the mediation point between the Real and Fantasy i would suggest that there is a level of contamination.
in order to grasp the moment of the parallax shifting one has to reconstruct it in the place where Real and Fantasy touch.

 

[Drone Module]

Regarding Badiou's apparent Platonism, well I don't think asserting that ideas are part of the real world makes him Platonic, it simply means he isn't a crude materialist or an idealist (them being the flipside of each other). He does however get quite close to Platonic forms in his talk of the Idea of Communism as some sort of pure form, a transcendental idea, a truth event outside the everyday being, but to me that is a hangover from his Maoism and it's Leninist roots, with it's split between everyday (trade union) consciousness and revolutionary consciousness, which of course necessitates an outside transendental deus ex machina.

yes, this gets closer to the point.

although this Platonism is also evident in his mathematical ontology, apparently--- i haven't studied his philosophical works to comment.

 

[revol68]

it reads to me more like saying that the OOP wants to explain how assemblages come into being to begin with. so how do the social forces, power, discourses even get assembled to begin with? Foucault doesn't give us an answer, and Marx give us any final answer either.

Yes and it offers nothing new, it is stuck in the same circuit it criticises, it just backs a different horse. It puts the chicken before the egg as opposed to the egg before the chicken.

This is where dialectics come in.

 

[revol68]

as far as i understand the 'parallax Real,' the gap is itself retroactively constituted as an object... an object that withdraws or resists conceptualisation . in this sense the Real coincides with the Lacanian objet petit a . as the latter term symbolises the mediation point between the Real and Fantasy i would suggest that there is a level of contamination.
in order to grasp the moment of the parallax shifting one has to reconstruct it in the place where Real and Fantasy touch.

No the Real of Zizek and Lacan is the same, the object petit a is something in the symbolic order that becomes contaminated by the real, but the real does not become contanimated by the symbolic because the Real is beyond all symbolism, it is an unimaginable void.

The Symbolic realm produces a cut in the Real but it doesn't contaminate it, the infection goes only one way.

 

[Drone Module]

Yes and it offers nothing new, it is stuck in the same circuit it criticises, it just backs a different horse. It puts the chicken before the egg as opposed to the egg before the chicken.

This is where dialectics come in.

except that dialectics severs the subject from the object...which is precisely what is being contested. this is a philosophical decision that is rarely itself justified until after the fact.

i do share a concern with you here though...precisely that the OOP wing, at least, seems to be putting forward a kind of 'agonism.' and the OOP folk certainly have a long way to go before being convincing.

the other problem i have with OOP, which is the reason i'm not attracted to it, is that it acts as a mirror for capitalism...reducing all objects to the same general equivalence, placing them in an indifferent circulation.

 

[Drone Module]

No the Real of Zizek and Lacan is the same, the object petit a is something in the symbolic order that becomes contaminated by the real, but the real does not become contanimated by the symbolic because the Real is beyond all symbolism, it is an unimaginable void.

The Symbolic realm produces a cut in the Real but it doesn't contaminate it, the infection goes only one way.

ah, understood. its been a wee bit since i ate any zizek for tea. pardon my mistake.

 

[revol68]

Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted by the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sophos

I fail to see the relevance of this, Marx is simply criticising those idealists who overlook the materiality of humans. This is nothing new and if rehashing this in obscure jargon is what OOP offers then I feel I'm quite correct to dismiss it as a meaningless tendency. In truth the criticisms of Foucault offered from that OOP blog suggest that it doesn't even offer anything as good as that, rather it overlooks Marx's dialectical approach and instead embarrassingly looks for an ontological base on the back of a naive realism, which rather than overthrowing the issues raised by Foucault and the likes examination of power/knowledge can't even engage with it.

 

[revol68]

except that dialectics severs the subject from the object...which is precisely what is being contested. this is a philosophical decision that is rarely itself justified until after the fact.

Dialectics servers and unifies the subject and the object, we are part of the world, an object of it, products of natural laws and evolution etc and yet we in turn shape this world, this is based not on some absurd system of metaphysics but on our actual experience of the world. A retreat to metaphysics is a massive step backwards, it's a fruitless enterprise.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.

 

[Drone Module]

I fail to see the relevance of this, Marx is simply criticising those idealists who overlook the materiality of humans. This is nothing new and if rehashing this in obscure jargon is what OOP offers then I feel I'm quite correct to dismiss it as a meaningless tendency. In truth the criticisms of Foucault offered from that OOP blog suggest that it doesn't even offer anything as good as that, rather it overlooks Marx's dialectical approach and instead embarrassingly looks for an ontological base on the back of a naive realism, which rather than overthrowing the issues raised by Foucault and the likes examination of power/knowledge can't even engage with it.

it seems odd that you think there is a naive realism at play, or that SR ignores Marx's dialectical approach. isn't it also the case that post-marxism, if not ignores, does not embrace the dialectic and that Badiou himself regards dialectics as one of the four 'anti-metaphysics.'
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/pdfs/Vol_10/Pli_10_9_Badiou.pdf

and to say it doesn't engage with Foucault is odd, as Foucault's problematic of power is itself an assemblage theory and so can be subsumed.
while we're speaking of Foucault, his is hardly a theory in support of Marx's dialectical method, being as it is part of the slew of anti-Hegelianisms that abounded.

 

[revol68]

it seems odd that you think there is a naive realism at play, or that SR ignores Marx's dialectical approach. isn't it also the case that post-marxism, if not ignores, does not embrace the dialectic and that Badiou himself regards dialectics as one of the four 'anti-metaphysics.'
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/pdfs/Vol_10/Pli_10_9_Badiou.pdf

and to say it doesn't engage with Foucault is odd, as Foucault's problematic of power is itself an assemblage theory and so can be subsumed.
while we're speaking of Foucault, his is hardly a theory in support of Marx's dialectical method, being as it is part of the slew of anti-Hegelianisms that abounded.

In so much as post marxism rejects a dialectical approach I think it falls short, whether that is Negri's fall into a kind of positivism, with capital acting only as a constraint on communication networks and the general intellect or Badiou's split between the everyday being and the transcendental nature of his event, relying as it does on deus ex machina, be that the Party or the Truth.

In regards to Foucault, well I think he can be read in a dialectical manner, in his writings about power producing it's own excess, the policing of sexuality sexualising the policing itself, I also think he is at his weakest when he seeks a kind of positivist perspective of knowledge, standing outside an epoch, beyond the Episteme break and seeking to grasp it in totality, overlooking the fact that breaks, fissures and gaps are inherent to it, the product of the excess and subsequent lack of any disciplinary regime.

 

[kyser_soze]

whereas the realist treats a number of different types of things as being real. Thus, for the materialist only particles, for example, might be real. For the realist, by contrast, signifiers can be real, the United States can be real, and atoms can be real. All of these things, for the realist, are different types of objects, without being reducible to one type of object.

Dwyer.

 

[Drone Module]

In so much as post marxism rejects a dialectical approach I think it falls short, whether that is Negri's fall into a kind of positivism, with capital acting only as a constraint on communication networks and the general intellect or Badiou's split between the everyday being and the transcendental nature of his event, relying as it does on deus ex machina, be that the Party or the Truth.

In regards to Foucault, well I think he can be read in a dialectical manner, in his writings about power producing it's own excess, the policing of sexuality sexualising the policing itself, I also think he is at his weakest when he seeks a kind of positivist perspective of knowledge, standing outside an epoch, beyond the Episteme break and seeking to grasp it in totality, overlooking the fact that breaks, fissures and gaps are inherent to it, the product of the excess and subsequent lack of any disciplinary regime.

i tend to think that the only dialectic worth having as far as revolutionary theory goes is one of irreducible antagonism... i think i've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that i find it more potent and more interesting to allow the work of the negative to be autonomous from any positive reassertion. this is something i got from my days of discovering anarchism.

as to Foucault, i'm not sure how he can be read dialectically unless you only take up his empirical observations and abandon the theoretical apparatus that sustains them. of course the difficulty there is much of foucault's empirical work is questionable and that still more of it falls down once his problematisation of power is removed.

that breaks, fissures and gaps are inherent to power is both its strength and its weakness... rather than consituting the material for a dialectic this just means that power and resistance spiral around each other, imitating each other. the immanentisation of power, with its nonessence to be found as a quasi-vital force, makes power an eternal problem...which is why in his writings on the state F. can only say that all particular states must be challenged. his very conception of power prevents him from following Marx or the anarchists in declaring that the withering or abolition of the state assemblage as such is desirable.

essentially though, all dialectics require a moment of negativity but F. doesn't admit any into his system, at least not in his work on power. its purely affirmational force seems to me to be a perfect diagnosis of the current trend in society to condemn any negativity.

but we might just be looping back on ourselves with this line of thought.

have you read Baudrillard's Forget Foucault? it makes a cogent argument that Foucault's analysis is a mirror for the power is describes.

 

[revol68]

as to Foucault, i'm not sure how he can be read dialectically unless you only take up his empirical observations and abandon the theoretical apparatus that sustains them. of course the difficulty there is much of foucault's empirical work is questionable and that still more of it falls down once his problematisation of power is removed.

So you don't think his theoretical insights about the excess of power can be in anyway related to a dialectic? As for Foucault not leaving any space for a moment of negativity and therefore therefore no place for dialectics, well the whole point of dialectics is the unity and non identity of something, how something always implies it's non other eg the positive excess of power doesn't just provide a surplus but this excess inherently implies a subsequent lack in it's articulation in a disciplinary regime, that is power never totally dominates itself, for example the sexualisation of the policing of sexuality.

Your comments on power and resistance in relation to the state get to the root of the issue, namely your reduction of power to a constraining force immediately identifiable with the State, and the subsequent implication that this necessarily leads to a rejection of the smashing or withering of the state or indeed any real emancipatory politics. This is a very poor and dare I say fundamentally wrong reading of Foucault concept of power, power is not merely this disciplining, clamping force but rather it is a constitutive one, power and resistance shouldn't be read simplistically in terms of State = Power and Resistance = anti State, rather power and resistance are moments in both, they are present in both the struggle of workers and the mobilisation of repression. There is power in workers striking, there is resistance in counter revolution. The fact that there is no escaping power nor of power escaping resistance does not imply the end of emancipatory politics against the state, anymore than the inherent alienation of subjectivity in relation to nature implies the acceptance of capitalist alienation or the spiralling open ended dialectic of subject and object means that the dialectic of capitalism, that is of capital and labour can not be exploded/closed.

 

[Drone Module]

i'm well aware of Foucault's conception of power being positive and constitutive, and that it cannot be reduced to the 'repressive hypothesis.' my point on the state wasn't to reduce this nuanced relational network theorisation of power and resistance but to point out that Foucault's understanding of power necessarily limits any politics to responding to specific problems... indeed Foucault endorses this when he writes about heterotopias, situated freedoms ad an aesthetic of existence (which actually sees Foucault depoliticising his project significantly.)

i would suggest that you're understanding of power in a strike and resistance in a counter-revolution is too strong. here you seem to be talking about two forces in opposition one to the other, whereas Foucault's understanding you would need to point to the resistance and power contained within the same moment- within the strike. what relationships come together to form the strike, which subjects are acting and by what discourse have they been subjectivised/are they subjectivising themselves. this is what Foucault's immanent power/resistance dyad means.
and as Foucault says 'resistance always precedes power,' which is to say that resistance and power are always and forever caught up within a mutually constitutive spiral, inseperably tumbling through an ever increasingly tangled genealogical web. the genealogical method itself rejects dialectics. there is no Historical movement, no antagonism (and so no class politics...or simply, no politics), no possibility of emancipatory politics. emancipation is merely a form resistance that precedes, constitutes power. also, don't you find it curious that Foucault speaks of resistance and local struggles, never of revolution and global emancipation?

you also speak of alienation, specifically capitalist alienation. but one of the consequences of Foucault's understanding of power, its immanentisation to everywhere and nowhere, existing inside every network and relationship, is that its constitutive, productive power is exactly what produces us. in Foucault's model of power there is no outside or origin that gets lost, alienated or otherwise damaged. there is no time before power (as genealogy defers origin) and fundamentally there is no psychological subject or ontologically primitive or primary essence- even in terms of an activity or history.

for Foucault we are produced by power, emerging out of the confluence of discourses and their material effects on space, routine, ritual and body. this is again the problem of the subject that Foucault himself realised was a major flaw in his work. but crucially here, because power has no outside and because it is constitutive of any knowledge or subject that might be turned against it there can be no antagonism or contradiction.

insights can be taken from Foucault, such as subjectivisation, subjectivation and individualisation and biopolitics. but to weld Foucault and dialectics just cannot work, and its the last thing Foucault had on his mind;

Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory

- The Birth of BioPolitics

and this is really the point i'm making throughout. Foucault explodes the reductive violence of the dialectic, opening things up to spirals within spirals. what is lost is dialectical violence.

 

[Drone Module]

The fact that there is no escaping power nor of power escaping resistance does not imply the end of emancipatory politics against the state, anymore than the inherent alienation of subjectivity in relation to nature implies the acceptance of capitalist alienation or the spiralling open ended dialectic of subject and object means that the dialectic of capitalism, that is of capital and labour can not be exploded/closed.

this is entirely true. there is no end to power-resistance, just the ongoing strategic battles within heterogeneous, local domains. there can be no total challenge and no hope of an outside being found or recovered.

essentially, there is no end of history (or of the historical epoch of power, or of capital.) this is where Baudrillard's critique becomes powerful as it is itself productive, that is it admits no negation of Foucault's system. Following this system, Baudrillard correctly asserts that there is no End, nothing can End.

revolution implies a rupture from one historical sequence, one conception of the present, to another...it requires a future with futurity...a future which radically breaks with, or ends, the present. Foucault's productive power cannot allow for this.


there is no emancipation nor is there any victory for communism...just an endless fight. this is why, in the end, Foucault's notion of power perfectly compliments the fantasy self-image of capital. it is through this fantasy image that we get projects like Hardt and Negri, where the best we can hope for is that capital itself delivers us communism.

none of this is to say Foucault cannot be put to work, only that he cannot be put to work for revolution from within his own theoretical framework.

ETA: to phrase some of the above otherwise... resistance is always already co-opted within its necessary partner, power.

 

[Drone Module]

the real problem is Foucault is the question of who is resisting, who is revolting? its not the proletariat, a category that even when he was in conversation with Maoists he chose to reject.
there is, in Foucault, no moment of invariance, no untouched core, no humanism whatsoever. humans are productions of power. resistance can only ever come as power working on power. there is a name for that; reformism. no one would say reforms are unwelcome, but as the sole goal? both political and ontological?

at time Foucault comes close to suggesting the abolition of power, hence his adoption by anarchists...

But what will be left? Foucault does not believe, as earlier anarchist did, that the free human subject is a subject of a certain sort, naturally good, warmly sociable, kind and loving. Rather, there is for him no such thing as a free human subject, no natural man or woman. Men and women are always social creations, the products of codes and disciplines. And so Foucault’s radical abolitionism, if it is serious, is not anarchist so much as nihilistic. For on his own arguments, either there will be nothing left at all, nothing visibly human; or new codes and disciplines will be produced,

- Waltzer (telling that a liberal communitarian makes this criticism.)

to bring this full circle, back to metaphysics and a project like that of the SR folk (though not by any means necessarily there own), what is required to make Foucault work politically is a metaphysics that secures a world in itself, free of contamination from discourse, we need extralinguistic terrain. but in Foucault this cannot emerge.

 

[revol68]

i'm well aware of Foucault's conception of power being positive and constitutive, and that it cannot be reduced to the 'repressive hypothesis.' my point on the state wasn't to reduce this nuanced relational network theorisation of power and resistance but to point out that Foucault's understanding of power necessarily limits any politics to responding to specific problems... indeed Foucault endorses this when he writes about heterotopias, situated freedoms ad an aesthetic of existence (which actually sees Foucault depoliticising his project significantly.)

There is nothing in his constitutive understanding of power that insists that political action must focus itself on specifics within the co ordinates of capitalism and the state, rather I'd suggest that Foucault's rejection of such revolutionary politics steam much more from his really crap take on class and Marxism, coming as it did through a prism of Althusser. Capitalism and the state are only particular formations of power, they are disciplinary regimes no more guaranteed to contain their own excess than feudalism was, even if capitalism as a dynamic system depends on this perpetual movement of excess, of escape and capture.

Like you say the real problem isn't the impossibility of resistance breaking completely from power, the problem is that Foucault rejects the proletariat as a revolutionary agent, not surprising since his notion of the proletariat was one passed down through the Leninist orthodoxy. Likewise Foucault's rejection of dialectics should be understood within the context of a orthodox Marxism that saw history unfolding towards a nice neat ending and all conflict and contradiction would wither away into a unified organic whole. Foucault's rejection of concepts such as alienation can also be linked to this Althusserian marxism he was raised on. Althusser rejected the early Marx's writings on alienation, species being etc and rather dishonestly painted these concepts as relying on some ahistorical (humanist) essence, that should of course be rejected, infact you ape his argument with this;

you also speak of alienation, specifically capitalist alienation. but one of the consequences of Foucault's understanding of power, its immanentisation to everywhere and nowhere, existing inside every network and relationship, is that its constitutive, productive power is exactly what produces us. in Foucault's model of power there is no outside or origin that gets lost, alienated or otherwise damaged. there is no time before power (as genealogy defers origin) and fundamentally there is no psychological subject or ontologically primitive or primary essence- even in terms of an activity or history.

Alienation doesn't require some pure essence to be corrupted, rather Marx's species being is a historical being, a product of power, it is alienated not from some static base level but from it's historically contingent self, this is because Marx's approach is dialectical, the subject is a product of history but also it's producer, this opens up a gap between what is and what could be, between fact and value. In saying we are alienated it is not saying we are alienated from some eternal state of being, rather we are alienated from what we can become. To say we are alienated from the product of our labour, that our activity comes to stand over us an external power (capital) does not require some static human essence or soul, it simply requires that our historically contingent subjectivity is capable of imagining something else, that what is is not what should be. Or in other words the excess of power produces a subjectivity at odds with itself (that is as a disciplinary regime).

Personally I find that it's quite possible to simply swap Foucault's constitutive power for Marx's starting point of human activity or labour with very little difficulty. Capitalism is a structuring of labour that like power produces (not to mention needs) it's own excess, or in Marx's terms it's own grave diggers.

 

[revol68]

But what will be left? Foucault does not believe, as earlier anarchist did, that the free human subject is a subject of a certain sort, naturally good, warmly sociable, kind and loving. Rather, there is for him no such thing as a free human subject, no natural man or woman. Men and women are always social creations, the products of codes and disciplines. And so Foucault’s radical abolitionism, if it is serious, is not anarchist so much as nihilistic. For on his own arguments, either there will be nothing left at all, nothing visibly human; or new codes and disciplines will be produced,

The sort of anarchists who believe that are simpletons.

And of course new codes and disciplines will be produced in the abolition of the state or capitalism, I see no problem with that because I understand that freedom is not some idiotic absence of power, but is an active process produced by power.

I find it odd that you can claim to grasp Foucault's constitutive concept of power and yet quote such simple minded tosh as this, which so stupidly falls into the trap of thinking of codes, regulation and discipline as negative constraints on freedom.

 

[revol68]

Oh and in essence Foucault is just Marxism for poofs and mentals.

 

[Drone Module]

don't have time to respond properly now and i may not tomorrow either (essays to write, job to be done)... just to let yas know in case all goes quiet i'm not evading.

 

[revol68]

don't have time to respond properly now and i may not tomorrow either (essays to write, job to be done)... just to let yas know in case all goes quiet i'm not evading.

no worries, I probably won't be about anyway, going out tonight and tomo is my birthday.

 

[Drone Module]

There is nothing in his constitutive understanding of power that insists that political action must focus itself on specifics within the co ordinates of capitalism and the state, rather I'd suggest that Foucault's rejection of such revolutionary politics steam much more from his really crap take on class and Marxism, coming as it did through a prism of Althusser. Capitalism and the state are only particular formations of power, they are disciplinary regimes no more guaranteed to contain their own excess than feudalism was, even if capitalism as a dynamic system depends on this perpetual movement of excess, of escape and capture.

i agree that Foucault's understanding of Marxism was skewed however, his own activism confirms that his system only allows for specific actions... prison reform, gay rights, the vietnamese boatman crisis.

as far as i'm aware the latter is the only time Foucault ever attempted to make an effort towards a universal politics, where the best he could come up with was the international community of the governed. which really just comes down to a very general those who speak inside of power and those who speak as included exclusions within power. i can't find a link for this anywhere unfortunately.

discipline itself cannot be resisted, and as you have said there will always be codes and structures of power.......so why bother resisting? to swap one set of codes for another? well thats all well and good, and its true one set will be better than another...but from within Foucault's system there isn't anyway of saying that. as everything is constituted by power, power becomes the only measure........ as such, there is a lack of normative grounds for distinguishing between better or worse. this is what Foucault himself referred to as his pragmatism....and its clearly part of his Nietzschean inheritance... politics, power-resistance, becomes little more than the competition of mutually constitutive forces.

here i think Badiou's idea of a universa singularity is useful, and can rescue elements of Foucault's project...but it involves a return to antagonism and contradiction which Foucault has no interest in.

Like you say the real problem isn't the impossibility of resistance breaking completely from power, the problem is that Foucault rejects the proletariat as a revolutionary agent, not surprising since his notion of the proletariat was one passed down through the Leninist orthodoxy. Likewise Foucault's rejection of dialectics should be understood within the context of a orthodox Marxism that saw history unfolding towards a nice neat ending and all conflict and contradiction would wither away into a unified organic whole. Foucault's rejection of concepts such as alienation can also be linked to this Althusserian marxism he was raised on. Althusser rejected the early Marx's writings on alienation, species being etc and rather dishonestly painted these concepts as relying on some ahistorical (humanist) essence, that should of course be rejected, infact you ape his argument with this

i can concede that... but even with alienation secured, there is nothing within Foucault that makes alienation and non-alienation good or bad, damaging or restorative (if that word isn't still too linked to organic wholeness.)

like with his work on madness, Peter Dews rightly points out that Foucault ends up in a curious position where a mentally healthy subject and a subject of madness are identical, except for the operations of power that subjectivise them in their relation. he can't condemn the process, nor can he say that madness is an authentic experience (which he wants to) as his system can't admit of authenticity.

this criticism isn't wholly unsympathetic. we could well do without authentic/inauthentic distinctions...but only if we have a standard to put in its place.

Or in other words the excess of power produces a subjectivity at odds with itself (that is as a disciplinary regime).

this is true for Marx but not for Foucault. resistance as excess is always immediately captured by power. Foucault did attempt to begin formulating a subjectivity that exceeded power's original generation... but he never got there.

]Personally I find that it's quite possible to simply swap Foucault's constitutive power for Marx's starting point of human activity or labour with very little difficulty. Capitalism is a structuring of labour that like power produces (not to mention needs) it's own excess, or in Marx's terms it's own grave diggers.

negativity allows for a form of escape from capital. but power/knowledge cannot produce that kind of agency because resistance (or excess as you say here) is still caught within power. it is a constitutive excess... one which, excessive though it is, is caught within power's orbit. it cannot escape its conditions, cannot escape its power-effects. if it could then power and resistance would be separable categories, dialectical categories. but in Foucault this is inadmissible...impossible.

further, capitalism is a total system with a central term... capital. power has no central term. there is no centre to attack or to liberate. foucault's society is the society that is fractured into agonistic competiting discourses and counter-discourse, constituted subjects reclaiming or denying their identity.... essentially its liberal fair with a multitude of voices in continually carving out a public sphere........... as he asserts quite strongly on his essay on Kant's What is Enlightenment?

also, i'm not sure that you can really talk of power having an excess and try to wed this to Marx. Captialism doesn't produce an excess in the proletariat, it produces a lack, an evacuation, a negation. isn't that the point of the proletariat? the theoretical and actual negation of the present?

as a side note, disciplinary techniques are still at work but i would fall more to the Deleuzian-Agambenian side with their talk of 'societies of control' and security.

 

[Drone Module]

The sort of anarchists who believe that are simpletons.

And of course new codes and disciplines will be produced in the abolition of the state or capitalism, I see no problem with that because I understand that freedom is not some idiotic absence of power, but is an active process produced by power.

I find it odd that you can claim to grasp Foucault's constitutive concept of power and yet quote such simple minded tosh as this, which so stupidly falls into the trap of thinking of codes, regulation and discipline as negative constraints on freedom.

thats not the point. the point is that Foucault cannot provide any reason for why one set of codes, disciplines, rituals, discourses and so forth should be preferred to any other. as effects of power, all codes are pragmatically equal.

and i will that whilst i had overlly emphasised the restrictive aspect of power at the start of this discussion, you are now over emphasising its positivity.

foucault himself has shown a number of negative aspects of power, and protested them. this is part of the problem with his eschewing the repressive hypothesis... that repression gets lost........every repression is also a production...this does not mean power never represses...just that repression is not a unilaterally negating force.

and of course i agree freedom has limits.