Upcoming exam questions involving Foucault - help/assistance through discussion?

I'm doing a social theory course this semester, and my exam is next Saturday. It consists of 60% for 4 short answers explaining 1 theorist from each section of the course, with the second-to-last section including Foucault. What would some more knowledgable Foucaultian comrades think would be his main ideas and the best way to summarize them in a short answer?

Also since Foucault is awesome and a lot of the time I've spent not studying for other exams has been reading about Foucault on the internet for my own leisure, I figure I might as well involve Foucault in the second part of the exam, which is an essay worth 40% in which we contrast theories from more recent theorists (Althusser/Jameson/Zizek/Foucault/etc) with those of the older ones (Marx/Weber/Durkheim/Freud/etc). I like Marx and Foucault the best so I figured I'll compare them. I figure some discussion and debate on this topic as well among other revolutionaries interested in Foucault will help me get a firmer grasp for the subject by next Saturday. So second question, what do you guys consider compatible and incompatible with Foucault/Marx? My main impression is that Foucault at times went a bit too far in reducing things to power and a Marxist analysis of class relations is still needed, but Foucaultian analysis on ruling class ideology, history of ideas and so-on is useful for someone working within a Marxist framework to incorporate. But I'd like to develop these ideas a bit more.

I think Foucault would react most vehemently to the idea that Marxism is a science. That much is obvious.
He says this about Marxism in one of his lectures:

it is vital to question ourselves about our aspirations to the kind of power that is presumed to accompany such a science....What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify. . . . Which speaking, discoursing subjects – which subjects of experience and knowledge – do you then want to diminish? . . . Which theoretical-political avant-garde do you want to
enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it?

I think he would also make the call of economic determinism. Although he doesn't deny the position of the economy, I think he wonders whether, contrary to the view of Marxists, power is always in a subordinate position relative to the economy. He would ask whether it is always in the service of, and ultimately answerable to, the economy. Is its essential end and purpose to serve the economy? Is it destined to realise, consolidate, maintain and reproduce the relations appropriate to the economy and essential to its functioning?

Also, I think on a much more methodological, but nonetheless important note, Marxists would explain much of what Foucault is doing in a fashion like: The Bourgeois Hegemony of the 1800s deemed madmen to be useless to production, and therefore saw them as useless and locked them up. Whereas, Foucault would propose the inverse; find out how these advances were actually allowed to start of with.

Foucault contends that, contrary to the conventional Marxist view of such things, these mechanisms did not give rise to ideological formations (e.g. an ideology of education, or an ideology of the monarchy, or an ideology of democracy etc.). They have given rise, rather, to the "production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge – methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control". Power "when it is exercised . . . cannot but evolve, organise and put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge, which are not ideological constructs", that is, not merely illusory ideas which distract us from an accurate knowledge of reality.

*I summarised most of these points from two lectures that Foucault gave in 1976


Another interesting idea that crops up in Foucaults work is that of "Epistemes".
These are periods in history which are recognisable via their institutions, discourses, world views, rules, knowledge, power relations etc and are structured in such a way as to allow us certain things, and forbid us from others. Examples of these would be the renaissance, or the modern age. Whats interesting about these though is that Foucault sees these as random and contingent. If you contrast that with Marxs view of history, well, some would argue that class struggle ceases to exist, and you can fill in the gaps to where that leads - absolute uncertainty of revolution.

Post-Something mentioned two important points I've picked up on, don't know how much I can add. First Foucault (and Deleuze, too) does not believe "ideology" is a useful analytic category, which I think is one of the most significant places he breaks with his mentor, Althusser, despite his use of the concept of "epistemological break." Foucault and Deleuze both say that theory has nothing to do with the sign, but is rather a "toolbox," which is where Spivak's critique then comes ("when the sign is left to care of itself, that is when slippages occur"). Deleuze refers to this "toolbox" as the theory-practice of multiplicities.

Second, where Marx writes that a historical epoch is determined (even if in a loose sense) by the mode of production, Foucault analyzes epochs with the concept of "episteme." The episteme is basically a forcefield of unconscious categories that generate the terms of debate in a period, so for example Foucault says the episteme of the modern is History. So Foucault might disagree with Marx by saying the category "mode of production" itself is merely a product of an episteme.

Finally, I would say Marx and Foucault have two different focuses. Marx is concerned with macrological analyses, whereas Foucault is concerned with what Spivak calls "power-in-spacing." So Foucault sees power as "diffuse" and spread through social capillaries, whereas Marx might say power is concentrated in the hands of capital. Now, I can't remember Marx even using the term power in such an all-encompassing way, which was more of a Foucauldian insight in order to link power to knowledge and the creation of analytic spaces and disciplinary regimes. This of course can obliterate the role of economics, as Said and Spivak have pointed out, in less careful hands. The macrological is still a powerful element of social-political analysis, especially when analyzing imperialism and world-historical processes.

If you have journal access, you should check out William Roseberry's "Marx and Foucault" (forget the exact title) in the Annual Review of Anthropology.

Also, and this is something I have a vague awareness of thanks to my "political economy" tutorial in college, Foucault has a debt to Durkheim. Even if you are just discussing Marx and Foucault, you might want to check out Durkheim's analysis of social solidarity ("mechanic" and "organic").

It seems to me that Foucault accepts some of the same fundamental assumptions that Marxists do, their view of history for example. He repeatedly makes mention of the "bourgeois revolution" as the starting point of the modern epoch, and he talks about how modern systems of power-knowledge (the "age of man", or the episteme which was mentioned above) are a result of the overthrow of the landed aristocracy and the establishment of secular (democratic) government and private property. I think that argument goes hand in hand with and even strengthens Marxist analysis. Also I think Foucault would have agreed more or less with the statement "[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." Foucault always emphasized how we are shaped by power, and how power is not necessarily a thing but a relation. I believe he also rejected universals like human nature.

That being said post-something is right, he did have a lot of disagreements with Marx and Marxism, and he did reject some of the ideological underpinnings of Marxism like class struggle. I believe he viewed Marxism as a reaction to the specific historical conditions it arose in (industrial revolution, early capitalism, etc), and therefore only valuable when applied in that framework.

edit: nice post Kalu.

Wow, this stuff is great! I think you guys basically just answered every single question I needed to know for my exam. Furthermore, I asked my lecturer a question regarding how I was comparing two theorists for the exam, and when he asked me which theorists and I described to him a brief 4-sentence overview of comparing Marx/Foucault (which I largely gleamed from here) he said it sounded great. So cheers guys. My essay's structure would probably go something like this:

1. Talk about the base conflict between Foucauldian theory and Marxism for the introduction, with Foucault questioning the thesis that power is always subordinate to the economy
2. Use that to talk about their methodological focuses and how they're different, mention Post-Something's contrast of how a Marxist would describe the history of madness as opposed to Foucault and kalu's observation of "macrological" analysis of power in the hands of capital vs. "power-in-spacing" social capillaries.
3. Talk about "false ideology" vs. "production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge"
4. Talk about historical materialism vs. epistemes
5. Use the concept of episteme to launch into Organized Confusion's point to talk about the assumptions Foucault shares with Marxism
6. Conclusion

Also Post-Something: I searched up that "Marx and Foucault" thing and I could only find one titled "Marx and Anthropology". Is this the one you're referring to? Google Scholar shows it mentions Foucault.

And Kalu: what are the works where Spivak and Said talks about the issues you mentioned?

Also in regards to short answers summarizing the theories of Foucault, i'm still having a bit of a difficulty. I'm familiar with most of his concepts (power, discourse, episteme, geneaology of knowledge, critical study of social institutions, etc) but it's the whole writing a short answer explaining it all and linking all the concepts together I'm finding troubling. I can explain the concepts of the other 3 I'm focusing on (Marx/Freud/Jameson) quite simply.

Arizona Bay:

You can read both the lectures here.

That looks like a solid essay structure by the way, I'm sure you'll do well

Arizona Bay:

You can read both the lectures here.

Cheers I'm gonna have a read of that. But I meant the thing in that Anthropology journal you were talking about by William Roseberry.

That looks like a solid essay structure by the way, I'm sure you'll do well

Thanks

Sorry, I thought you were refering to the lectures. Kalu was the one who mentioned the journal.

Oh whoops! So he did.

Arizona Bay: The Said and Spivak references come from Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak" (you can get the article free online, I believe Spivak's wikipedia page still has a link. The original article is in the book Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures). I have to warn you: it's dense. But there are definitely readable references. I might have the Roseberry article on my laptop, so maybe I can post that tomorrow. I can't find it by google search either, but I'm almost positive Roseberry wrote it for the Annual Review of Anthropology (try a journal locator/archive).

Done the exam now anyway, thanks for the help guys

Got an A- for the entire course, fucking sweet. Cheers guys.

Well done man, that's awesome!