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If Foucault's recent works derive from and surpass the Western Marxist tradition, they also present a formidable challenge to the classical Marxist theory of history. Before assessing the value of Foucault's critical theory for the writing of social history, I want to examine and assess the position of Marx. From the perspective of the critical theory of society, a questioning of the value of Marxism is long overdue. Marxism itself may now be an obstacle to social criticism. What is needed is a relentless, systematic critique of Marxism, one that roots out those features that were problematic from the beginning, those that have become obsolete, and those that have proven themselves inadequate for the task, while preserving those that retain their critical powers.
The historical changes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries call into question many features of the Marxist position. Indeed, Marxism is haunted by the specter of history. Marxism has changed history, but so too has history changed Marxism. Emerging in the midst of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century and proclaiming itself the gravedigger of that society, Marxism today fails to inspire the revolutionary will of the proletariat in the centers of advanced capitalism. It has proved itself instead the great hope of the colonized urban and rural masses in largely pre-industrial social formations. Marxist theory foretells the advent of communism
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in the developed capitalist social formations, those places where, the organic composition of capital is weighted towards machines not labor, where the immiseration of the proletariat exacerbates social contradictions, where the rate of profit has long been declining, where all society has come under the rule of the commodity. Yet precisely in these places, where liberalism has long been relegated to the status of an historical curiosity, Marxism. too appears to be a relic out of the past.
Confronted with these changes Marxist theorists often turn a deaf ear. Marxism is not only a movement; it is also a theory. Marxism raises history to an epistemological principle, but history in turn calls into question the truth-value of some Marxist categories. More than anyone before him Marx opened philosophy to the world, bonded theory to practice, intertwined reason and history. Marx posited the theoretical necessity of taking the situation into account, establishing the context as the pretext of thought. Science could develop, he contended, only by adopting the point of view of the proletariat. For Marx this theoretical act was not moral but epistemological. In order to avoid the pitfalls of ideology, that is, the intentional or unintentional justification of the world as it is, Marx elevated history to the status of a condition of knowledge. Only by comprehending the world as a transitory social formation, therefore as an historically limited phenomenon, could philosophy achieve scientific truth. The historical-social world becomes the internal limit of reason, the nontranscendental foundation of the categories of thought. And yet today Marxists are seemingly unable to respond to changes in the world. What Sartre long ago said of Stalin applies now more generally: Marxists are idealists who continuously restate Marx's categories, who confront the world with the theory of the mode of production, insulating reason from history and saluting the hegemony of Marx's thoughts over a world that has long since belied them. Even beyond the reach of governments that proclaim themselves socialist, Marxists act like the bishop in Brecht's Galileo,
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refusing to look through the telescope for fear of discovering that reality refutes cherished illusions.
In the critique of Marxism, what must be avoided are the traditional stances in opposition to Marx, and these are many. There are classical anarchism and Trotskyism which find a moral flaw in some aspect of Marxism, the former rejecting it completely, the latter seeking to reconstitute it whole outside the evil of Stalin. There is the Frankfurt School stance of benign neglect of Marx's texts. Here the basic anti-capitalist impulse is kept, but the object of critique shifts to the superstructure. With the possible exception of Adorno, the Frankfurt School retains the fundamental premises of historical materialism, never questioning them directly but instead refining and elevating the level of critique. There are also the existential Marxists, among whom I counted myself at one time, who preserve the totalizing power of Marx while expanding the scope of the theory through the concept of mediations. Here again certain limitations of the theory are acknowledged, without, however, a complete commitment to their critique. There are, finally, a host of basically political postures against Marx which focus on the practice of specific socialist regimes and find them wanting in some regard. In this case the critique is limited to an attack on the leadership of the proletarian movement, or to a specific version of it such as the Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists. This strategy too leaves untouched the theoretical premises of Marx and assumes that, though mistakes have been made elsewhere, one can do it right when the time comes. Of course the time never comes as Chronos continues uninterruptedly to mow the wheat of capitalist history.
The first assumption in Marx's texts that needs to be questioned is the notion of human beings acting upon nature. Marx constitutes the social field as one in which human beings act upon natural materials to produce useful objects. This is, of course, the activity of labor from which Marx derives the entire complex of ideas known as the mode of
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production, as well as those ideas associated with the critique of political economy. In The German Ideology the figure of laboring man and woman is posited as a 'premise', one that is necessary for the writing of history. Marx reasons that
. . .we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to 'make history'. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life... Therefore in any interpretation of history one bas first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance.1
The fate of the doctrine of historical materialism hangs on Marx's fundamental 'premise' that men and women work in. order to survive, a statement that arrived like a thunderbolt in the Hegelian Germany of the 1840s. Social theory rapidly had to shift gears. It had to abandon the airy reaches of the human species' self-constitution in spirit in order to arrive at the earthly steppes of the laboring animal, one who fashioned the world, then became its object, only to become conscious of this dialectical detour and hopefully in. the end to make the world once more, this time in a shape consonant with freedom.
Marx cautiously bestows upon his position the status of a 'premise' and regards the cognition of history as an act of 'interpretation'. At the epistemological level then, Marx's claim for his theory of history falls outside Descartes' absolutism, the quest for certainty. If historical materialism is not grounded on a claim to a truth superior to other theories of history, what then is the basis of its value? In
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The German Ideology Marx does not attempt to justify his 'premise' or his 'interpretation' in epistemological terms. He presents his view coherently, appealing to the reader to recognize its advantages. It is as if Marx were saying to the reader, 'Surely you cannot deny that human beings must labor in order to eat, clothe and house themselves.' Once that postulate is granted Marx is content to go on and elaborate the concept of the mode of production, a concept which demonstrates that class struggles (and polities generally) derive from contradictions in the relations and forces of production. Still the original turn in Marx's argument to the premise' of labor remains little more than that, a premise.2
What is most surprising to me about Marx's relative silence on the issue of the labor premise is the strong contextual case that could have been made for it but was not. For in the mid-nineteenth century Western Europe was undergoing a great transformation precisely in the way men and women labored. The institution of the factory and its incorporation of steam power, all within a capitalist legal context, were altering drastically and therefore making historical the act of labor. Before the nineteenth century one could argue that labor was a constant, a relatively unchanging feature of the social landscape, unworthy of attention by historians because of its stagnant quality. That position was of course incorrect, but it was plausible. In the nineteenth century industrial capitalism was upsetting patterns that had endured for a thousand years, and its implication, as Marx noted well, was 'the automatic system' (automation) which might do away with manual labor altogether and inaugurate the 'realm of freedom' in place of the 'realm of necessity'.3 For whatever motive, Marx chose not to bolster his argument on contextualist grounds and instead to present his analysis of industrial capitalism as the conclusion reached by his theory. And at that level one can examine the premise of labor as a possible source of limitation to the theory of historical materialism.
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The premise of labor contains within it a Hegelian sub-premise: that the social field consists of subjects (laborers) and objects (matter), and that the interaction between the two results in the transformation of both. Marx, it is true, revises Hegel's position, insisting on the independence of the object and thereby resisting the Hegelian tendency to collapse the relationship of the two into the immanence of the subject. What interests us, however, is the way this subject-object relation limits the critical capacity of historical materialism. In a later moment of the theory it plays a crucial role in the determination of alienation and exploitation as the specific features of the capitalist system that require revolutionary transformation. In the instance of alienation, Marx's structural critique of capitalism contends that under this mode of production the subject-object relation is reversed.4 The laborer becomes the object of the machine, as men and women lose control over the work process. Or, on another issue, human species' being is thwarted because the creative characteristics of the subject become subordinated to its objective, material need to survive. Human beings work in order to live, Marx complains, not in order to fulfill their creative potential; work is not enjoyment, realization, or satisfaction, but necessity and drudgery. Capitalism is in need of revolutionary criticism, Marx asserts, because it constitutes improperly the subject-object relation in the realm of work.
This critique from the 1844 Manuscripts is echoed in Capital when Marx analyzes the commodity structure of labor. Under the capitalist mode of production the commodity form is generalized. Products are manufactured not for the use of the producers, but to be sold in markets. These products, or commodities, flow through the social system, taking on peculiar qualities and transforming relations between men and women, Marx is disturbed by the fact that under the commodity form, the subjective quality of labor
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is distorted:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor.5
Commodities are a source of concern to Marx because human properties are invested in things, or become fetishized. The object appears to be the subject. But what is worse is that the reverse is also true: the subject appears to be the object. Labor itself becomes a commodity, a thing. Just as there is, under capitalism, a market for soy beans, so there is a market for soy bean pickers. Work is subject to the double character that all commodities have: it has a use value and an exchange value. As a consequence, human qualities are evaluated in the same terms that one uses to evaluate things.6 Once again, capitalism is faulted because subjects become objects, workers become things.
The notion of exploitation derives from similar assumptions. The worker-subject produces thing-objects for the capitalist but does not receive back the proper amount of thing-objects from the capitalist. Surplus value, created by worker-subjects and stolen from them by capitalists, is the structural basis of the capitalist system. It should be pointed out that the current divergence between humanist and structuralist Marxists does not affect the issue. Both positions fail to question the labor premise. The structuralists attempt to extricate Marxism from the subject-object relation, but they do so at a later point in the theory. What remains unchallenged is the premise that men and women labor and that they do so by acting upon materials to produce objects.
The question that needs to be asked about Marx's premise is this: is domination revealed best on the basis of consti-
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tuting the social field as one in which men and women act on things? Another premise, one which constitutes the social field in quite another manner and which shall be defined below, would serve that function better. Besides, there is much reason to question the premise even if an alternative were not available. It cannot be taken for granted that human societies are structured by the subject-object relation of labor, nor that change in society can best be understood by referring back to a subject who makes something, in this case a social change. On the contrary, there is reason enough to be suspicious. It can be argued, for example, that the model of subject acting upon object derives from the Judeo-Christian vision of creation, in which God acts upon (speaks to) matter and brings forth the Earth and its inhabitants as a finished product. The model of labor easily slips into a model of creation.
For a theory that calls itself historical materialism, a creationist model is suspect. The leanings towards aspects of idealism which Marx wants to avoid are strong in the subject-object dichotomy. In fact an immediate source for Marx's concept of labor was Hegel's discussion of the master-slave relation in the Phenomenology of Mind. 7 In that book the slave-worker represents human freedom not so much because he manipulates things, but because he establishes an idea of what he wants to make and then produces in the world a material artifact that represents that idea. The slave-worker in that way derives a sense of his powers, a confidence that his subjectivity can be the basis for the order of the world. The worker apprehends the force of his intellect and this is the basis for his freedom. Things operate much the same way in Marx's texts. One can argue that the 'materialism' of the labor premise is deceiving, that it has rather a loud note of idealism, that Marx celebrates and analyzes not the grime of the body's activity but the power of the mind over it. The entire analysis of the organization and exploitation of labor is subordinate, in one sense, to Marx's conviction that the
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subject's freedom to act upon its ideas is violated under the capitalist mode of production.
FOUCAULT'S PREMISE OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Another premise available to historical materialism has been offered by Foucault. In this case the social field is constituted by a grid of technologies of power which act upon the body. It is assumed that there are human beings and things, but it is argued that the level of intelligibility pertinent to critical theory lies elsewhere, at the point where specific arrangements are located through which discourse/practices are created and constitute the social field as varying modes of domination. This alternative premise does not deny the existence of human beings and things, or their interaction, but it does maintain that the significant objects of investigation for historical materialism are arrangements in which the model of labor does not serve as the impetus of interpretation. The premise of technologies of power suggests that discourses and practices are intertwined in articulated formations having the domination of one group over another as their primary trait.8 In addition, Foucault is able to focus his analysis on the body more directly than Marx. Because he is not looking for subjects and objects but for techniques of domination, Foucault is able to raise the question of the body more effectively than Marx. He, asks how the body is marked, positioned, temporalized, collected, and so forth, not so much how human beings have been degraded into things.
Suggestive as it is, the premise of technologies of power is not fully conceptualized in the works of Foucault and requires further theoretical elaboration. Even in a rough state, however, the premise is supported by an important contextual argument, one that has not received enough attention. If the Marxist premise of labor was bolstered, at
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least implicitly, by the dramatic change to industrial capitalism, that support has begun to evaporate in the advanced societies of the late twentieth century. Put quite simply, one can no longer assume as a basic paradigm of practice human beings working on things. The labor premise itself has been revolutionized as the factory system is increasingly marginalized. The United States, economists calculate, is the first service economy in world history. More than half of the working population is engaged neither in the primary sector (agriculture) nor the secondary (industry), but rather in the tertiary (service). This means that labor now takes the form of men and women acting on other men and women, or, more significantly, people acting on information and information acting on people. Especially in the advanced sectors of the economy, the manipulation of information tends to characterize human activity. Some economists, argue that information workers do not characterize only the advanced sector but are in the majority overall.9 The creation, transformation, and movement of information are the objects of most of the important new technologies that are introduced into the economy. We are told that very soon movement in the social field will involve information (electronically processed), not men or commodities. People will stay put while pulsations of electronic information will flow through social space.
If advanced capitalism is becoming an information society, in addition to the older configuration of a labor society, the labor premise can no longer be the first principle of critical theory. Domination cannot be theorized from the point of view of the labor activity, of the subject acting on matter to produce things. A new logic is called for that conceptualizes the social field on a different basis. And certainly one of the important features of the new premise must be that it accounts for the prominent place of information in the social space. I would maintain that Foucault's category of discourse/practice begins to meet the criteria for the new premise.
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When discourse is theorized as the prominent feature of the social field, a new logic of domination is suggested, one that eschews the traits of the subject-object relation but follows rather the model of technologies of power. Historical materialism in the age of informational capitalism finds its premise in power that is the effect of discourse/practice. By the same token, the logic of discourse/practice finds its justification in the proliferation of information technologies. The value of the category discourse/practice can be demonstrated only in empirical studies.10
MARX'S DOCTRINE OF REASON
There are other premises in Marx's writings that poorly serve the interests of historical materialism. One in particular that needs criticism and revision is the notion of reason. Marx made very few statements about epistemology, leaving the impression that the development of revolutionary thought could proceed without extensive re-examination of existing (Hegelian?) doctrines of truth. In its assumptions about the nature of knowledge, critical theory was not, in Marx's eyes, substantially at variance with traditional theory. At least one can deduce this from Marx's silence. He did, it is true, offer one major innovation in epistemology. The eleventh 'Thesis on Feuerbach' states, 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.'11 Since revolutionary theory is not simply interpretation but the basis for action, the criteria for truth cannot be limited to attributes of reason but must include judgements about the practical consequences incurred by it. Hence in the second 'Thesis on Feuerbach', Marx dismisses the epistemology of contemplative reason: 'The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.'12 Given this distinc-
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tion, Marx does not explore further the relation of thought to practice.
The first difficulty encountered with Marx's doctrine of reason is the assumption that the individual theorist can and should conceptualize the totality. In Marx's writings one cannot find the slightest hesitation on this question. He assumed as surely as he breathed that with the proper effort the intellectual can represent the real in conceptual terms. By the same token he takes it for granted that it is necessary to do this in order to develop revolutionary theory. At stake here is not the issue of the complexity of the world, a skepticism that would retreat from knowledge in modest homage to the ineffable mysteries of life. The issue is rather one of power, the power of discourse. By assuming that the totality is available to the theorist, Marx arrogates to his discourse and to his function as intellectual a kind of power that does not serve the interests of historical materialism. By fashioning itself as a theory of the totality, historical materialism ends in affirming the power of reason itself, appropriating for discourse the very revolutionary capacity it would attribute to the proletariat. In this sense, Marxism, although explicitly revolutionary, is implicitly a conservative doctrine tied to a traditional epistemological premise.
In the texts of Marx, the effects of this leviathan reason are at play and do their damage in numerous ways. A good example is the use of the notion of universality in relation to the working class. Before Marx, liberal theory attributed universality to democratic revolutions. When states were erected based on popular sovereignty, freedom would become universal. Universality was thus a political weapon in the hands of liberals in their battle against the 'partiality' of monarchical and aristocratic regimes. Liberals agitated for the freedom of all against the freedom of the one or the few. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, political constitutions were, drafted and put into effect which claimed universal
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freedom. Marx, of course, saw through the duplicity of liberal universalism. It was little more than a bourgeois device, perhaps well intended but then only self-deluding, to legitimate the hegemony of the capitalist class. The political emancipation of the liberals established the freedom of the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat.13Under the rule of representative democracy, the state became universal, but civil society remained divided into classes and subject to the domination of capital.
After effectively revealing the class interests at work in the liberal use of the notion of universality, Marx went on to apply the term in his own very different but still problematic manner. If the bourgeois revolution emancipated humanity only in the political sphere (and therefore only partially), the proletarian revolution would emancipate humanity in the social, sphere and therefore totally. Complete emancipation is possible because factory workers, unlike the bourgeoisie, constitute a universal class. The classic statement of Marx's position is found in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction:
A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.14
The same statement is made again by Marx in The German Ideology, after the supposed epistemological break that Althusser thinks liberated Marx from Hegelian superstitions:
This appropriation [of private property] is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in
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which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organization is overthrown, and on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished.15
Factory workers, are thus elevated from the plane of everyday life and assume heroic proportions at the center of the world-historical stage, upon which the drama of humanity's redemption is being enacted.
Reason indeed has its ruse, but not the one indicated by Hegel. Marx wants to argue that factory workers are subjected to a mode of domination which is difficult to comprehend because it is not based on personal domination and is shrouded in the liberal theory of the free contract. Surely he is correct: alienation and exploitation are structural effects of the capitalist mode of production. But that is not enough for Marx. He insists on attributing to the oppression of factory workers a universal suffering. He piles argument upon argument to make this case: the workers'- suffering is universal because men and women must eat before they can pray, because they have no property and hence no private interests to protect, because in the labor activity they subordinate their life to their work, because the bourgeoisie has expanded trade to a world scale and to overturn this system is to prepare for world-wide freedom, because automation is at the heart of the industrial system promising the liberation of human beings from toil, because labor is a commodity stripping workers; of their humanity, and so forth - all of which is true but none of which proves the point about universality.
A simple objection can be raised against the claim of proletarian universality. Marx contends that only proletarians are capable of creating a classless society because their subjugation is total, because they have nothing to protect once they take power. Hence they have no interest
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in domination. The bourgeoisie failed to establish a free society because it had an interest in protecting its property. Once it abolished aristocratic rule, it proceeded to erect new class divisions. Not so with the proletariat, Marx maintains. Yet Marx overlooked important considerations. Even the wretched state of the nineteenth-century factory worker was not devoid of interests in domination. The male proletarian had 'interests' in dominating his wife and children so that his revolution would be one that would perpetuate patriarchy and the authoritarian family. In this sense proletarians did not suffer 'wrong in general' and could not become the bearers of a universal revolution.
I do not know how this argument escaped Marx's attention, although it can be mentioned that in relation to his own family he was in many ways a typical bourgeois father, More significantly, this 'oversight' contributed to the systematic subordination of the questions of women's and children's oppression within socialist movements. It was easy to assume that once the universal class attained power, others' concerns would naturally be resolved. If we limit ourselves to the task of interpreting Marx's texts, however, an answer to the question appears at hand, Marx allowed himself to attribute more to the proletarian revolution than was warranted because of the assumption be held about the capacity of reason. His discourse appropriated the power to invest universality in the proletariat because he assumed that it was a legitimate function of the philosopher-theorist to make such judgements. Indeed such judgements were the stock in trade of the theorist. Countless thinkers in Western Europe and the United States were setting about the task of determining the nature of the universal. Marx was participating in a collective discourse in which it was taken for granted that reason could and should define the nature of the universal. Although his solution to the question was bold and original, it perpetuated a theoretical discourse which, far from enacting an epistemological break
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with the past, continued and even expanded the power of reason. At one level (the critique of the capitalist mode of production), Marx's discourse effects a critique of domination; at another level, it establishes and reinforces a mode of domination peculiar to discourse itself.
Emancipatory discourse need not attribute the universal to a particular social group and it need not theorize the totality. When it does so, it conflicts with emancipatory practice in two important respects: (1) it removes from the popular forces the ability to define the limits and aims of practice, and (2) it gives the intellectual power over the liberation movement. The function of theory as 'guide' for practice becomes in the course of history the direct domination of theory over practice. The division of mental and manual labor in the capitalist mode of production is mirrored in. the anti-capitalist movement as the intellectual becomes the brain and the proletariat the muscles of the revolutionary body.16 By totalizing the social field in terms of the universal suffering of wage labor, Marx at the same time effected a closure which prevents other modes of domination from being named and analyzed. The epistemological problem for critical theory is thus not the one defined by Althusser, that is, to demonstrate the scientificity of Marx's theoretical revolution. It is rather a Kantian project of defining the limits of reason. The question is this, How can modes of domination be theorized and analyzed in such a way that the theorist does not appropriate more power than is necessary to carry out the theoretical function? If Foucault is right that discourses are always already powers, can a distinction be drawn between discourses whose powers strengthen existing modes of domination and those that work to undo them? If it is impossible adequately to define this epistemological distinction, it may at least be possible to enumerate aspects of critical theory which operate as modes of domination, such as Marx's use of the term 'universal'.
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MARX'S USE OF THE DIALECTIC
Equally disturbing, from this perspective, is Marx's use of the dialectic to account for historical change. Discussions of the dialectic in Marx often hinge on the relationship with Hegel. Did Marx simply turn an idealist dialectic onto its materialist feet, or was the alteration more drastic in nature? Can a materialist kernel be extracted from an idealist husk, as another Marxist image of the relationship maintains? Was the Hegelian influence limited to the early Marx, or did it persist throughout his life? These questions have inspired much interest and produced a vigorous debate. For the present purposes, however, the issue of Hegelian influence can be bypassed and the discussion limited to an analysis of Marx's position.
In Marx's hands the broom of the dialectic was able to sweep away into the proverbial ashcan the commonplaces of liberal historiography. The dialectic gave a different shape to the past, presented a different explanation for the birth of the modern world, and foretold a different future for it. Historical change was not to be conceived as an incremental rise in the incidence of a given variable, such as scientific truth or gross national product. Nor was it to be seen as the emergence of an already existing natural property. Social systems, the dialectic taught, had internal contradictions. The seeds of their own destruction were inherent in their structure, specifically in the shape of class conflict. Historical change, therefore, was not the evolutionary rise of some feature of the social scene, but the complete transformation of society as a consequence of the contest of masters and slaves. History was not a continuous increase in law over arbitrary will, but a periodic, fundamental reshaping of systems of sanctions and restraints, to cite one example.
Liberal histories were populated by scientists and magicians, lawyers and tyrants, rational merchants and fanatical
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obscurantists all locked in a conflict that was traced to the dawn of time. The dialectic, on the contrary, revealed the inner transformation of both object and subject, without relying on fixed characters to perform the historical drama. Rather than a liberal vision of good and evil individuals, the dialectic established an image of humanity in a continual process of self-creation, with each set of characters emerging out of the past through a mechanism of opposition and transformation. Like the transformation of the slave in the chapters on Lordship and Bondage in Hegel's Phenomenology, social groups in Marx's dialectic were fundamentally different in each epoch. From the perspective of the dialectic, change was far more wide-ranging than liberal evolutionism would have it. The birth of industrial capitalism, for example, signified not simply a rise in living standards for manual laborers along with the institution of the labor contract. As Marx demonstrated, it included a new organization of labor, with tools and labor processes no longer at the disposal of the laborers- It meant, in short, the creation of a new social figure, the proletarian, who in no way resembled the artisan of the past even though he may have produced the same product.
In addition, the dialectic enabled Marx to show connections between phenomena that otherwise remained unrelated. Political revolutions and ideological changes were now illuminated by being related to changes at the social and economic level. Ideas no longer popped up inexplicably from the brain o f some genius. Intellectual invention 'corresponded' to some aspect of social practice, without being determined mechanistically by it. The use of the dialectic permitted Marx to analyze historical phenomena that remained hidden from those wearing liberal spectacles. Above all, it enabled Marx to present a systematic critique of the existing social system, to reveal its transitory nature and to foresee a possible alternative course of historical transformation. The capitalist system was structurally flawed because it depended on a
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degraded type of labor which could not be ameliorated by improved material conditions. In that setting, representative democracy would be forced to operate in. the interests of the capitalists against the workers. Scientific advances would serve not the integration of the human species and nature at a higher, more automated level, but would be limited by the constraints of the process of capital accumulation. Relations between the industrial and non-industrial worlds would involve not an equal exchange of surpluses but a brutal system of exploitation by the former.
In yet another way the dialectic provided Marx with an advantage over his liberal opponents. The dialectic not only conceptualized the historical field in a new way; it also transformed the nature of reason. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre provides a comprehensive discussion of the difference between the analytical reason of liberalism and the dialectical reason of Marx.17 Only one aspect of this, difference needs attention here. The dialectic led Marx, against liberal presuppositions, to theorize from within the historical conjuncture. Marx explicitly adopted 'the point of view of the proletariat'. Reason was thus dependent upon the situation. For liberals, reason was a capacity inherent in human nature, one whose exercise was identical regardless of time or place. For Marx, reason was far less contemplative and deductive. It was bound to the task of the critique of domination and hence to the social field. Although the dialectic was not determined in a Lockean manner by sense impressions, it nonetheless prevented the theorist from adopting a vantage point outside time and space.
The theoretical advances of the dialectic are well known and cannot be effectively disputed. Nevertheless, significant difficulties remain unresolved by the dialectic, difficulties which are actually introduced by it. First there is a teleological momentum in the dialectic, a forward motion directed toward the resolution of social contradiction, even when historically no such movement exists. With a dialectical
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vantage point, the Marxist looks for and anticipates social agents who will recognize the contradiction and act upon that class consciousness. When such practice is not discovered by the historical materialist a negative term - false consciousness - is introduced, a term that does little to illuminate the specificities of the conjuncture. It is difficult for the dialectician to follow the sharp turns and sudden starts of historical events. In short, the dialectic is an over-ambitious concept that foresees too much, determines too much, and too easily fools the analyst into a false security. Armed with such a powerful analytic tool, the historical materialist falls into the habit of class analysis and becomes unwilling to seek out the unexpected.
Second, there is a homogenizing tendency in the dialectic. After all, Hegel's great ambition was a unified view of the real and the strategy of his dialectic was always to discover the connections between things, connections often lost in the humble procedures of Aristotelian logic. Historical materialism carries over this characteristic of the Hegelian dialectic, at times approaching a version of evolutionism. The application of the category of class struggle to different historical epochs introduces into the analysis an unwanted constancy. Subordinate classes always seem to oppose domination and ruling classes begin to look alike in the strategies they adopt to prevent revolution. At another level of analysis - that of the change from one mode of production to another - the same trend toward unity makes itself felt. Modes of production, from a dialectical vantage point, lead into one another to such an extent that the breaks and ruptures of history are smoothed over. Beneath the sound and fury of the class struggle, the logic of contradiction continues uninterruptedly, moving from one mode of production to another, each time approaching more closely the inevitable result - the classless society. Decades ago Merleau-Ponty complained that the dialectic does not allow for contingency.18 One may add to that accusation that it does not allow for difference either.
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If one, goal of historical materialism is to demonstrate the transitory nature of practices and institutions, thereby avoiding an ideological justification of what is, a primary consideration must be to indicate that things were not always the way they are, that difference existed. But the dialectic moves by a logic of reconciliation or synthesis, bringing opposing forces together in a resolution that at once cancels and preserves their differences. Such a logic serves to domesticate the past, taming its strange and threatening features. The medieval chroniclers traced the glories of a noble lineage from the distant past to the present, celebrating each generation's contribution to the house. In different ways and to different degrees, liberal and Marxist historians resemble their medieval colleagues. In each case, the present age emerges as a culmination of the past, finding support in the sheer weight of bygone practices.
ALTERNATIVES TO THE DIALECTIC
Friedrich Nietzsche, that determined hater of his own age, developed an alternative historical logic.19 Genealogy, as he termed it, was an effort to delegitimize the present by separating it from the past. The historian could depict the present as finite, limited, even repugnant, simply by locating differences in the past. The Nietzschean historian begins with the present and goes backward in time until a difference is located. Then he proceeds forward again, tracing the transformation and taking care to preserve the discontinuities as well as the connections in the historical line.
With the notion of difference as the guiding thread, historical materialists could open up the social field, unlocking the door of dialectical confinement. Instead of the search for totalized, universal suffering, historians could locate particular modes of domination, indicating the operations of technologies of power, as Foucault calls them,
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and tracing their lines of differential, discontinuous development. The rationalizations, justifications, and ideological niceties that mask practices of domination in the present could be revealed in juxtaposition to equally coherent, but very different, ideas and practices from the past. Foucault has provided this sort of analysis of the prison systems of the Old Regime and the nineteenth century; Ariès20 and Gutman21 have achieved similar analyses of family life in France and the American South. In each case, a specific mode of domination is analyzed, its ancient contours rendered comprehensible and juxtaposed by parallel, modern practices. In these analyses, the historical field is left open and reduced to the mode of domination in question. It is true, as Michel de Certeau points out,22 that Discipline and Punish at times regresses to a totalizing logic in which the Panopticon becomes the model for all forms of domination. But this must be considered a lapse in a study that attempts to set into play a Nietzschean logic of difference.
There is one place in the German Ideology where Marx reflects on the nature of his premises. In the section entitled 'Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular', Marx distinguishes his own position from that of the various forms of contemporary Hegelianism. Hegelian philosophers, he argues, do battle against 'conceptions, thoughts, ideas', 'illusions', 'fantasies' - all the 'phrases' of the world. Unlike these quixotic warriors, he will take on reality itself. From the fact of having the real as his object, Marx deduces the epistemological certainty of his premises:
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.23
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THE LIMITATIONS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
With these fateful words, Marx opens the door to historical materialism and closes the door behind him on idealism. Historical materialism locates its beginnings in a double maneuver which splits discourse from practice and then subordinates the former to the latter. In that way he introduces a division in critical theory between what human beings say and what they do, a division which can no longer go unchallenged. By excluding mental operations from the domain of historical materialism, Marx remains within the traditional, Enlightenment metaphysic, only he favors its Lockean, sensationalist school. In the notebooks of historical materialists, impressions of labor activity can be recorded. Thus the critique of capitalism is 'verified in a purely empirical way'.
Unfortunately Marx's premises remain arbitrary as the distinction he draws between idealism and materialism preserves in a mirror image the metaphysic of liberalism. The problem is not, as Derrida thinks, that Marx privileges matter or idea because of the former's property of otherness.24 In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx defines his new type of materialism against the existing forms of idealism and materialism. He is interested not so much in the logical coherence of each position, as in the kind of field each opens up for historical investigation. Thus idealism can be rejected because it is concerned only with what men and women say, not with what they do. Materialism can be rejected because it constitutes its object as a passive determinant, forgetting 'that it is men who change circumstances'.25 The conclusion Marx reaches is that historical materialism must combine the 'real' object as defined by materialism and the characteristic of activity as defined by idealism. The resulting historical materialism would have praxis as its object; that is
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to say, history would be constituted as class struggle, as human beings acting to change the world.
Without denying the advantages for critical theory of historical. materialism as compared with liberal definitions of history, one can still not overlook the difficulties it contains. Historical materialism presumes an active subject who is ready to change the world and it privileges practice over discourse. In order to reconstitute historical materialism, it is necessary to proceed from different assumptions. Instead of an active subject, critical theory needs to constitute its object as modes of domination. Similarly, instead of 'real individuals', a category such as discourse/practice in Foucault avoids many of the hazards of giving priority to action over thought.
Historical materialism is not the opposite of historical idealism. In many respects the same premises are employed by historians of both liberal and Marxist stripes. The former write the history of politics, diplomacy, and ideas; the latter write the history of modes of production, social groups, and imperialism. Liberals narrate the past as evolution and record the moral acts of the hero, the individual subject; Marxists analyze social contradictions and register class conflicts, the collective subject. But this opposition is like that of Protestants and Catholics. Luther and Calvin broke the hegemony of the Papists and changed some doctrine, rituals, and organizational forms. In the end they still remained Christians just as Marxists remain children of the Enlightenment or humanists,
The texts of Marxist historians employ many of the categories and premises of the liberals. Both positions totalize the social field, presume the capacity of reason to grasp the real, search for causes of change and origins of phenomena, domesticate the past by tracing its continuity with the present, conceptualize the historical field through the subject-object dichotomy, and establish a human science in which theory governs practice, reason controls history, the intellectual dominates the movement of emancipation. Today, when the
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roles of the humanities and the social sciences are called into question, neither historical idealism nor historical materialism can provide the framework for critique. Once knowledge is implicated in power, Marxism like liberalism cannot escape the abuse of history.
With the limitations of classical Marxism clearly before us, we can turn to an examination of Foucault's proposals for developing a new kind of history, one that attempts to avoid the difficulties of both liberal and Marxist historiography. I will be interested in particular in establishing Foucault's credentials as an historian, in reviewing the categories he develops to provide an alternative to existing models, and in assessing the success of his position as a critical theory of the mode of information. As a reminder to the reader, let me state that I will be concerned primarily with his post-1968 works, books in which the critique of domination and the concept of power are central and therefore authorize an evaluation in relation to the problems developed by Western Marxists.
NOTES
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