Page 290 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

NOTES TO PAGES 17–22 279

see Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism (Pluto Press 1976); also the discussion by
Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature.
95 In our usage the historical/conjunctural emphasis in Gramsci is essential, a sign not
of his thought being left in its ‘practical state’ but of its proper theorization (though
by no means fully developed) at the appropriate level of abstraction: definite
historical societies at definite moments.
96 There seems to be a difference between ‘early’ and ‘later’ Foucault: see Madness
and Civilization (Tavistock 1971) and Birth of the Clinic (Tavistock 1973),
contrasted with Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon 1977) and The
History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon 1978); The Archaeology of
Knowledge (Tavistock 1972) and the essays collected in Language, Counter-
memory, Practice (Blackwell 1977) mark the break. The latter deploy a new
conception of the relationship of ‘knowledge’ to ‘power’, which remains, however,
very general and unspecified. For critiques, see Poulantzas in State, Power,
Socialism (New Left Books 1979), and Dews, ‘Nouvelle philosophie and
Foucault’, in Economy and Society, vol. 8, no. 2 (May 1979).
97 The concept ‘discourse’, however, remains highly ambiguous. In current usage it is
almost synonymous with ‘practice’—but it silently absorbs the earlier meaning (the
extended ‘articulation of language over units larger than the sentence’) without
making the distinctions/convergences clear. Thus it blurs the key issue—if all
‘practices’ are mediated by language, what aspect of a practice is not language?—
and favours a slide between these different meanings without confronting them.
Foucault’s unelaborated ‘extra-discursive’ is open to the same question: what is it?
This issue is not resolved in recent contributions, which, however, assume its
secured theoretical status: for example, C.MacCabe, ‘On discourse’, Economy and
Society, vol. 8, no. 3 (August 1979).
98 Many writers, unable to resolve first-principle epistemological questions, seemed to
be released, by Foucault’s example, into the analysis of particular discursive
formations. But Foucault’s agnosticism about the connections between discursive
formations remains troublesome and ambiguous. The relation to class formations
frequently works its way back into his texts by another door, sometimes
reappearing in an untransformed, even ‘vulgar’ form. For example: ‘With the new
forms of capital accumulation, new relations of production and the new legal status
of property, all the popular practices that belonged either in a silent, everyday,
tolerated form, or in a violent form, to the illegality of rights were reduced by force
to an illegality of property…. Or, to put it another way, the economy of illegalities
was restructured with the development of capitalist society….’ (Discipline and
Punish, pp. 86–7). This has a disconcertingly familiar ring, not disguised by the
phrase ‘Or to put it another way’, especially since what distinguishes his work,
theoretically, among his followers is precisely his refusal to put it that way….
99 The thesis of the ‘no necessary reduction’ of all contradictions to class
contra dictions has been most elegantly stated by Laclau in Politics and Ideology in
Marxist Theory, though not directly with reference to patriachal relations. See,
passim, Women Take Issue.
100 See, especially, the Introduction to Women Take Issue.
101 The key text in this break was P.Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production
(Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978). Also important were the two as yet untranslated
books by R.Balibar and D.Laporte, Les Français Fictifs and Le Francais National,