Die Reproduktion der Gesellschaft und die Praktiken der Freiheit

Abstract

How is modern society reproducing itself? This question is handed on from Marx via Althusser to Foucault. One important theoretical mean to solve the puzzle is the concept of ideology. But ideology is misconceived if understood as mere appearance of material processes. Marx' own method of grasping the order of appearances is phenomenological, i.e. he is destructive of the immediately given but contradictory order of appearances and tries to reconstruct an order at the same time intelligible and incorporating the diverse phenomena. This successive method entails the promise of a totally ordered whole of the appearances. Foucault understands the dangers of such a promise. Marxism tends to close the theoretical quest for the modes, conditions, and practices of social reproduction. Therefore Foucault propagates the anti-scientific methods of genealogy, which take real practices into account again. His objectives are revolutionary practices of freedom. To write their genealogy Foucault also wonld have been forced to encounter the reproduction of society as a whole.