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Re: [xmca] Foucault and Vygotsky?



With regard to Foucault, I find that one of the crucial divergences between his paradigm and that of CHAT as a potential emancipatory project, is his concept of the human subject. As I understand it, Foucault?s ?anti-humanism? is a critique of the modernist premise of the individual human subject, and tracing the construction of this subject as an object of knowledge (the ?archaeological? and later ?genealogical? method). However, Foucault criticizes a thoroughly Kantian concept of the subject as an individual, and as not only a producer/agent of knowledge, but also as an object of knowledge. Foucault?s anti-humanism then takes as its substance not the subject, but the forms of discourse, the arrangements of truth and power which create human subjects.

The philosophical problem with this paradigm is that it does not account for a Hegelian/Marxist/cultural concept of the subject which is human activity and its material and ideal mediations, whereby subject and object are positions which are constantly subsumed under one another. The political problem is that it does not take seriously forms of subjectivity which co-exist within or react against the modernist era, but are neither "modernist" nor ?traditional? themselves. In order to obtain a notion of non-oppressive regimes of truth, Foucault either went back to the epochs before modernism (e.g. early Christianity), or had a brief and naïve flirt with the Islamist character of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which he discerned a ?spiritual politics? which stood outside politics and approximated a Heideggerianesque ?authentic being?. Foucault posited the Islamist turn of the revolution as a form of self-recognition and self-construction of a subject vis-à-vis ?external? modernist and colonial notions of the self. (Ironically, the Iranian revolution, because of its spontaneous, bottom-up, mass character, and the decisive role of industrial workers organizing a mass strike, was qua activity probably the most modern of all ?Third World? revolutions until the Arab Spring today.)

In my opinion, Foucault?s ?anti-humanism? should not be read as an ?anti-humanism? at all, but as a critique of a very particular historical concept of the disciplined, individual human subject/object, which exists against other concepts of the subject that express struggles of emancipation and liberation.

Best,

b.

--
Dr. Brecht De Smet
Researcher at MENARG (Middle East and North Africa Research Group)
Center for Conflict and Development Studies
Department of Political & Social Sciences
www.psw.ugent.be/menarg
Ghent University
Universiteitsstraat 8 / 9000 Gent / Belgium


Citeren Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>:

Jenna, I will give you my response to your question as best I can.
My theoretical home is Vygotsky reading Marx reading Hegel, OK?

Foucault doesn't really fit into that, but I find that Foucault (and his interpreters in post-structural theory, especially feminists) have given us such valuable insights, that I am happy to welcome them into my mind and try to work with them. But I have never been able to integrate Vygotsky/Marx/Hegel with Foucault, in the way they fit with each other, coming from the one intellectual stream. I might say that the popularity of Vygotsky in the US from the late 1970s was owed in part to that much maligned book "Mind in Society," but in large measure was also due to the student radicalism afrfecting campuses and the students were looking for a radical critique of psychology, and Vygotsky provided that.

I find myself checking what I think, thanks to help from Vygotsky/Marx/Hegel against what I think Foucault would say. And vice versa. Certainly there are simplistic elements of "orthodox Marxism" (such as was taught by the Communist Parties during the Soviet days), extreme idealistic positions in Hegel, and some naivete at times in Vygotsky, which in these postmodern times we can see are mistaken, and that is partly thanks to Foucault as well as quite simply the times we live in. It is not too difficult to take these simplistic elements out of the legacy of Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky without touching what is essential. For example, it would be ridiculous nowadays to take Hegel's "formation of consciousness" to be represented in a single nation-state. That is almost self-evident to us today, because every nation-state is riddled with contradictions between conflicting projects, a.k.a, "formations of consciousness" or "projects" or "social formations." No nation-state is a harmonious community in any sense at all. For example, some of our Russian friends still, loing after the fall of the USSR, still take their culture to be historically superior to that of indigenous cultures, as a totality. That implies the same kind of totalisation just alluded to. Again, I think we owe these better insights to Foucault and other late-20th century thinkers ... and the nature of our own times! But I find that at a foundational level, these latter philosophers are wanting. That's my opinion. But as we found last month, my understanding of Foucault is also far from perfect. Others will have to give more informed answers.

Andy

Jenna McWilliams wrote:
... about how folks conceive a poststructural frame(ing) of sociocultural theory and, in particular, of CHAT.


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