Chomsky v Foucault. posted by Richard Seymour

In time, Foucault will become the trademark proprietor of the views he expressed here, about the role of educational and cultural institutions in the enforcement of class domination, views which of course had already been held, as commonplaces, as the height of obviousness, for generations by every schoolchild in a colonial condition and had already been firmly established as a theme of major European Masterpieces pondering the question of class and class mobility such as Jude The Obscure and The Princess Casamassima.

(Like the bourgeois liberal humanist imperialists, but in disgust and anger rather than admiration and pride, Foucault added an emphasis to these observations and strove, perhaps unwittingly, to establish and purify the bourgeois claim of absolute unchallenged property in all human culture in societies in which it dominates, so that both struggle and creativity are denied all humanity with the exception of the bourgeoisie, and only the ruling class can be at home in, can lay the least claim to, the world humanity made; nothing in this world is proper to the underclasses; their own nature is borrowed from the bourgeoisie; only the ruling class can claim nativity in the civilization humanity made; the bourgeoisie - as a disembodied spirit - have generated justice and love as figments, guises of oppression, and imposed them on the classes they dominate; all is tainted/owned by the masters; all beings, all feelings experienced by beings beneath them in the economic order, are merely the passive creatures, the creations and impositions, of the godlike ruling class, who is indeed imagined godlike, limitless, its material reality repressed in Foucaultian musings, inhabiting power and 'class society' more as a reigning spirit than a human agency.)

Foucault himself did not plant the flag in the commonplaces he expressed regarding the role of seemingly neutral institutions in the reproduction of class power; he did not himself seek to claim this aspect of the perceptual commons for France, French Theory, and Its Great Explorer; it was the institution, manned with professionalised bureaucrats and awed acolytes, which would enclose and christen this ancient territory Foucaultia, set up the tollbooths, and establish the custom of tribute.

And it occurs to me that one of the effects of these enclosures is diffusing the critical perspective's product: if something obvious is branded as belonging to Foucault, it may be treated as dubious, subjective, and inapplicable in most circumstances, the quirky creation of a quirky individual, a peculiar and esoteric work of art, and not 'found in nature'. The branded thought or observation need only be acknowledged when the discussion is about Foucault; this purges thought of the accumulated observations of text producers and liberates the next producer of the burden of responsibility for inconvenient awareness which might interfere with new abstractions, new complications, new 'insights'. So when speaking of Foucault, and only then, one acknowledges the role of specific textual practises established by specific institutions in reproducing class oppression. When not speaking specifically of Foucault, one can revert to the clean slate of Common Sense which treats those practises as mere tools for the transmission of information or 'ideas' in a transparent and utile code contrived pragmatically for convenience in the disinterested and earnest pursuit of knowledge and its communication.