"Foucault implicitly and explicitly draws on Marx’s arguments in Capital to help explain the logic for historical change. Foucault always introduces Marx as supporting evidence and never as a figure to be disproved. As Foucault makes clear (221), capitalism could not exist without the form of control that Foucault calls ‘discipline’ and discipline could not succeed without the rise of capitalism. In many ways, one of Discipline and Punish’s main projects in its treatment of class-struggle, power and knowledge is to provide a way for new students of Marx to escape the PCF’s increasingly unfruitful use of the terms ‘ideology’ and ‘false consciousness’ as explanations for why the working class submits to middle-class authority. … At its heart, Discipline and Punish is a stunning dismantling of the cherished bourgeois ideal of the individual and the political, economic and cultural valences of that concept. … Foucault uses Discipline and Punish to argue that the cultivation of the individual in these terms camouflages the middle class’s desire to become the dominant group within a capitalist economy. The scene of the contract obscures actual power inequalities, Enlightenment reason is linked to coercive force and the humanist mythos of the authentic personality of the individual has been historically constructed as a device to control threatening collectives, namely those of the working and lower classes."

Anne Schwan, Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Pluto Press, 2011
@2 years ago with 30 notes
#foucault #marxism #bourgeois liberalism #enlightenment 

"Raphael Samuel on historical memory"

“The historical discipline encourages inbreeding, introspection, sectarianism. Academic papers are addressed to a relatively narrow circle of fellow-practitioners. In thesis work, the problematic is likely to come from within. Often it is suggested by ‘gaps’ which the young researcher is advised to fill; or else by an established view which he or she is encouraged to challenge. …
"The Balkanization of the subject and the multiplication of sub-disciplines, a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years, has produced a crop of new specialisms, each with its own society, its schisms and secessions. Intended to take scholarly inquiry into hitherto untravelled terrain, and to create a space for subjects which have been ‘hidden from history’ in the past – as, say, women’s history, ‘folk’ medicine or occult science – it can also have the unintended effect of staking out proprietary claims to knowledge, and locking it up in academic publication and seminar circuits. …
"Behind such negativities lies the unspoken assumption that knowledge filters downwards. At the apex there are the chosen few who pilot new techniques, uncover fresh sources of documentation, and formulate arresting hypotheses. These are the practitioners of what Professor Elton calls ‘real’ history, the heavyweights of the profession, who bring their trained minds to bear on an apparently disorderly assembly of material.6 Their findings are rehearsed in academic papers, published in the learned journals, and amplified in scholarly monographs. Then at a lower level there are the textbooks, which relay the findings of higher research to the student public. Below them come the enthusiasts, ‘amateur brain surgeons’ as they have been disparagingly described; at best ‘antiquarians’ – the plodding accumulators of inconsequential facts – at worst the purveyors of myth. …
"All of this involves a very hierarchical view of the constitution of knowledge, and a very restricted one. Fetishizing the act of research while ignoring its conditions of existence, it takes no account of that great army of under-labourers, handmaidens and scribes who, in any given period, are the ghostly presence in historical work; nor yet of those do-it-yourself retrieval projects, such as barrow-hunting in the sixteenth century or family reconstitution today, which give new directions to writing and research, and create new landscapes for the historically minded to explore. So far as pedagogy is concerned, it allows no space for the knowledge which creeps in sideways as a by-product of studying something else: geography, for example, with whose fortunes history, ever since the Elizabethan ‘discovery’ of England,7 has been umbilically linked; or literature, with which – in the days when the great historians were anthologized as stylists – history was freely bracketed.”
- Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture.
@2 years ago with 7 notes
#raphael samuel #history #marxism #historical materialism #socialism 
"Foucault implicitly and explicitly draws on Marx’s arguments in Capital to help explain the logic for historical change. Foucault always introduces Marx as supporting evidence and never as a figure to be disproved. As Foucault makes clear (221), capitalism could not exist without the form of control that Foucault calls ‘discipline’ and discipline could not succeed without the rise of capitalism. In many ways, one of Discipline and Punish’s main projects in its treatment of class-struggle, power and knowledge is to provide a way for new students of Marx to escape the PCF’s increasingly unfruitful use of the terms ‘ideology’ and ‘false consciousness’ as explanations for why the working class submits to middle-class authority. … At its heart, Discipline and Punish is a stunning dismantling of the cherished bourgeois ideal of the individual and the political, economic and cultural valences of that concept. … Foucault uses Discipline and Punish to argue that the cultivation of the individual in these terms camouflages the middle class’s desire to become the dominant group within a capitalist economy. The scene of the contract obscures actual power inequalities, Enlightenment reason is linked to coercive force and the humanist mythos of the authentic personality of the individual has been historically constructed as a device to control threatening collectives, namely those of the working and lower classes."
Anne Schwan, Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Pluto Press, 2011
2 years ago
#foucault #marxism #bourgeois liberalism #enlightenment 
"Raphael Samuel on historical memory"
“The historical discipline encourages inbreeding, introspection, sectarianism. Academic papers are addressed to a relatively narrow circle of fellow-practitioners. In thesis work, the problematic is likely to come from within. Often it is suggested by ‘gaps’ which the young researcher is advised to fill; or else by an established view which he or she is encouraged to challenge. …
"The Balkanization of the subject and the multiplication of sub-disciplines, a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years, has produced a crop of new specialisms, each with its own society, its schisms and secessions. Intended to take scholarly inquiry into hitherto untravelled terrain, and to create a space for subjects which have been ‘hidden from history’ in the past – as, say, women’s history, ‘folk’ medicine or occult science – it can also have the unintended effect of staking out proprietary claims to knowledge, and locking it up in academic publication and seminar circuits. …
"Behind such negativities lies the unspoken assumption that knowledge filters downwards. At the apex there are the chosen few who pilot new techniques, uncover fresh sources of documentation, and formulate arresting hypotheses. These are the practitioners of what Professor Elton calls ‘real’ history, the heavyweights of the profession, who bring their trained minds to bear on an apparently disorderly assembly of material.6 Their findings are rehearsed in academic papers, published in the learned journals, and amplified in scholarly monographs. Then at a lower level there are the textbooks, which relay the findings of higher research to the student public. Below them come the enthusiasts, ‘amateur brain surgeons’ as they have been disparagingly described; at best ‘antiquarians’ – the plodding accumulators of inconsequential facts – at worst the purveyors of myth. …
"All of this involves a very hierarchical view of the constitution of knowledge, and a very restricted one. Fetishizing the act of research while ignoring its conditions of existence, it takes no account of that great army of under-labourers, handmaidens and scribes who, in any given period, are the ghostly presence in historical work; nor yet of those do-it-yourself retrieval projects, such as barrow-hunting in the sixteenth century or family reconstitution today, which give new directions to writing and research, and create new landscapes for the historically minded to explore. So far as pedagogy is concerned, it allows no space for the knowledge which creeps in sideways as a by-product of studying something else: geography, for example, with whose fortunes history, ever since the Elizabethan ‘discovery’ of England,7 has been umbilically linked; or literature, with which – in the days when the great historians were anthologized as stylists – history was freely bracketed.”
- Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture.
2 years ago
#raphael samuel #history #marxism #historical materialism #socialism