Arendt The Human Condition Chapter IV Work

 Questions:

1. General question on homo faber and animal laborans: are these positions, identities, standpoints, perspectives, values, etc.?

2. Can we get clear on some distinctions Arendt makes in the chapter on “work”, especially §20: automation and natural process; operation vs. product; tool vs. machine? I am particularly interested in figuring out how this turn towards automation and the machine has led to the “loss of faculty to distinguish clearly between means and ends in terms of human behavior” (145) and why this faculty is so important for Arendt. 

3. Want to clear up what’s wrong with means-end reasoning vis-a-vis action (i.e. Politics) (p.156-157)

4. Clear up instrumentality of tools vis-a-vis homo faber and animal laborans (p. 144; 156). 

5. Does Marcuse’s one-dimensional man map on to Arendt’s critique of means-end reasoning?

6. Clear up her usage of “use objects” and commodities; how does she map these distinctions (consumption/piece of work/commodities)?

7. Durability as use objects vs commodity? (P. 163)

Discussion:

1. Help clarify other questions by starting here. At one point she’s uses standpoint; Kantian background. In a Kantian critique, developing different standpoints of reasoner/knower. What is interesting is she is also phenomenological that, even though there are standpoints, they are contrary to a Kantian standpoint which would assume neutrality. All of these standpoints hold weight (influence from Heidegger). You buy into standpoint and it is weighty. Social positions would be interesting because in a way she is addressing class, although she doesn’t want to address this in a Marxist sense. These standpoints als o reflect social class positionalities. Who gets to be a homo faber? Who is traditionally an animal laborans? There is a language of ‘mastery’ that feels like a classical imperialist form of writing. What are the patterns underlying these standpoints—who gets to be what—that Arendt is not addressing? She is very aware of freedom but the problem of distribution is not addressed. There is a sense of transcendental analysis but it is interesting to see how there is sociopolitical issues (e.g. class, identities) happening in the story as well. 

Animal laborans are people who labor and homo faber are people who work; but these are not fixed or essential identities. Important to think about the structures of society (e.g. racial or gendered structure) that are not being told here. 

The logic of the homo faber, the moment of instrumentalization; this becomes the dominating view. Arendt critiques this, you need meaning which is a different kind of play; if you only have homo faber, then utility saturates the entirety of society. 

(P. 154) “This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence…” Could we read this as Arendt turning this distinction on its head? 

(P. 155-156) Utility cannot be the only standard. Once the world is built, you can not let utility or homo faber logic to be the dominating one.

(P. 159) Reference to Marx 

Animal laborans operates on necessity and homo faber operates on meaning to means and ends, creativity in a social sense, etc.

Need to break down the ideas happening in the concepts. What is the argument she is making here?

(P. 144) “The same instruments, which only lighten the burden…” Homo faber makes the tools that animal laborans uses to work. That act of invention, making tools and instruments, relies on means-end reasoning. 

(P. 145) “The frequent complaints…factual situation of laboring.” If you are laboring, you’re going to use the tools at your disposal to make things easier and tools are constituting human life from the bottom up. This section feels important; next page talks of losing this faculty. The inability to distinguish between means and ends stems from labor. When you make something, like food, you’re going to consume it; the very means is the ends. Labor is circular and necessary; where exactly are the means and where exactly are the ends? Homo faber has this distinction because they’re not predicated on this necessity. 

(P. 146) Repetitiveness and monotony of labor such that the laborer is able to zone out while laboring. There is this idea that laboring is related to the machine and automation. It seems at moments she is raising homo faber and at other times she is saying there is a means-end distinction between homo faber and animal laborans. 

We’ve always had automated, repetitive work; tools are extensions but machines automate body. Distinction between animal laborans that can only look at material produced by work, not as the end of some practice, but only as the thing that can satisfy their needs. On the other point, the homo faber can only see the product as satisfying the end of the practice but they can’t find the inherent meaning in it.

Action creates ends but doesn’t have an end. The problem with our society is an ability to critique the ends in our society. This is not homo faber (action?)

(P. 151) There’s a sense in which homo faber is in control, makes the world. Animal laborans is an earth in a Heideggerian sense, with earth as natural, cyclical, things like soil; world is artificial, we make it. The work of art creates the world; but would the work of art be an action? From the standpoint of work, the homo faber will look at Van Gogh from perspective of exchange value.

(P. 152; 154) Basic functions and machines replace utility of the world.  Homo faber as unable to distinguish between meaning and utility and utility replaces meaning. The problem with homo faber, and instrumental reason, colonizes, it becomes the logic of a society. The problem is not having different spheres, we need them all, but the problem is when one dominates the others. It is a labor society that is mechanic; machines come out of homo faber but do the work of animal laborans.

Homo faber seems like reference to Aristotelian and essential functions; how does this relate to two distinctions mentioned earlier?

(P. 153) Fabrication process and homo faber; “The trouble with the utility standard…” She says earlier this is something that comes from a notion of animal laborans. Perhaps one; this process collapses into necessity and on the other hand it collapses in utility and we lose the ability to distinguish between means and ends. Meaning is what stops the chain; meaning can never be an end. You need a meaning but it doesn’t respond to the logic of means and ends. 

When she says utilitarian, she is not referring to Mill’s utilitarianism, she includes Kant in this; it is related to the notion of utility. 

Arendt’s discussion of transcendentals and who fulfills these categories; in her examples of Ancient Greece, women and slaves are animal laborans. Homo faber as identified with early capitalism/modernity. This reasoning grew as capitalism grew is the historical punch she’s making. 

(P. 162) On the last public realm; relation to Hegel’s explanation of the market as a place of recognition where we, in some sense, become equal to each other. There is a dark side; the problem is not the issue it was colonized by the logic of value. This is an index of labor taking over work. Production to productive goods to conspicuous consumption.

(P. 163) “Commercial society, or capitalism in its earlier stages…” The loss of distinction between means and ends. There’s a sense in a which you consume so you produce and produce so you consume. Transition from use things to exchange objects. Attempts for homo faber and animal laborans to locate value in something objective outside of itself.

(P. 164) This is what action will give us. But is this positive? (P. 166) and “loss of intrinsic worth…inherent in the very concept of value itself.” 

Value is not something that exists in isolation; but there is something other than value that is generated that we haven’t quite addressed yet. Is it that people no longer value the polis but something else? Does she want something private or something not dependent on this public realm? Is that what art is? 

(P. 165) “Confusion in classical economics” related to value/worth. She is problematizing the exchange market. Anything can be exchanged for anything and so everything becomes fungible.

Arendt, The Human Condition Chapter 3 "Labor" Sections 13, 14, 17

 Arendt, The Human Condition Chapter 3 “Labor” Sections 13, 14, 17

Questions:

1. Pg 132: Connection between AI and “waste economy.” Where are all these aspects of life where automation (today) is rendering away tangibility in work?

2. How is history operating in the text, if at all? Locke, Smith, and Marx do understand civilization in relation to labor (and wealth). So, since Arendt underplays this relation here, how should we think about civilization in Arendt’s account?

3. Pg 127-128: When Arendt talks about playfulness/ hobbies. What do we make of this? 

4. What does Arendt mean by the world? E.g., p 97, “Without a world into which…” If the world is what brings people together, then should we understand it aside from just physicality or objects?

5. “Metabolic rift,” vis-a-vis labor and waste, what is this? (99)

6. P. 109: How do classical distinctions between productive/ unproductive and skilled/unskilled labor map onto her categorical distinctions? (i.e. labor, work, action)

7. What is Arendt doing with the zoe/ bios distinction?

Discussion

• We’re going to start with the labor/work distinction by way of a parlor game, i.e., going to see what sort of “activities” belong in each category. 

• Seems like a lot of things that come under “labor” are what would be particular to social reproduction, though Arendt doesn’t discuss gender in this text.

• At the level of civilization, we can see that who gets to be assigned different categories is gendered as well. 

• (99): regenerating life processes produce new labor power (c.p. Marx), and she discusses the repetitive aspect of laboring. Unlike working, where something is finished, it moves into the common world.

• Part of the argument seems to be that things that used to be work have fallen into the category of labor. Where, things that can be commodified have now made life’s reproductive activities and the cycles of regeneration. 

• So, some activities can mean different things, however, depending on their relation to capital. 

• There is a worry then about this work/labor distinction because it doesn’t seem to track the blurriness or the “how” that an activity is situated in relation to capital, especially given the gendering that isn’t being extricated. 

• Worry that there is an overcorrection of work at the expense of labor.

• Seems like she may have a naturalistic view of labor, which would be departing from late Marx, where the society determines.

• Could be following the early Marx

• Passage on 101: Hercules and the stables, is labor, or the danger of it, really just its monotony, its “relentless repetition?” 

• Ultimately, Arendt isn’t giving any delineation between the “activity” as subjectively versus objectively meaningful, but maybe that’s not the point. The point being that we are accustomed to seeing most things today as labor, whereas otherwise we could view some activities as work. 

• Transcendental condition of labor is actually work, that is, need or require work and its products to sustain birth and death. 

• Perhaps Arendt wants a normative conception of the subject of the vitae activa, and in articulating this distinction of activities, she is affirming a world wherein we all partake in each aspect of these: labor, work, action.

• That capitalism expropriates time, connected to Arendt’s account of “laborification” as pushing aside possibilities for time or temporality that overflows or disrupts chrononormativity and cyclical time.

• Maybe her concern isn’t that we aren’t all equal in inhabiting all three spaces, but that none of us are currently free to. Not so much that she’s worried about equality, but about freedom. 

• Okay so there is now another can of worms: What is Arendt’s conception of freedom? Freedom from labor?

• No, that’s impossible really, since labor is necessary for the human condition. 

• Going back to the automation question…something interesting about fertility and what it would mean to automate labor as a sphere.

• Parlor Game: is exercise labor or work?

• Also worth bringing up Benjamin’s worry about art and mechanical, mass reproduction. The problem isn’t so much that art is subsumed, but that perception is changed. Like a form of subjectivation. 

• Under what conditions does an action become labor, work, or action? The trichotomy maps conditions, not kinds of action.

Arendt, The Human Condition, Ch. 2 and 3

1. What is Arendt's distinction between private property and wealth?

2. How is Arendt understanding "privacy/privative"? 

3. How does Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labor map on to Arendt's account of labor? Also, what is "labor-power" for Arendt? (pp. 87-89).

4. What kind of continuity or discontinuity do we get with Arendt's account of modernity? (e.g., the secularization of political concepts) (p. 64).

5. Dissolution of private space --> depth/hiddenness that is lost? What is the "darkness"? Is it normative? How do we square this with her method? (p. 71).

Private property not in the economic sense, but something more like "a space of one's own." Where one protects oneself from others. That's why Arendt is reluctant about the abolition of private property and maybe wants to disassociate the abolition of wealth (inequality?) with the abolition of private property (contra Marx?). 

Why does Arendt equivocate private property with hiddenness? In other words, why "hidden" and not something like "unavailable" or "un-regardable"? In the public realm, you're in this space of constant accountability; the private sphere is the way to hide away from that -- something which the public cannot penetrate. e.g., even slaves were not without property (pp. 61-62).

Private property was also tied to place, and place was identified with family (p. 61). Also tied to citizenship, if you were relinquished of your property then you'd be relinquished of your citizenship. Slaves still held "personal or private possessions" even if they did not private property in the sense of a place of their own. The working class is the craftsmen; the laboring class was the slave.

The point is that modernity/Marxism conflates property and wealth. There's also sacredness associated with private property, wealth was never concerned sacred in antiquity. It was considered bad to entirely expend one's private property in pursuit of wealth because you're giving up political freedom. Private property as the means of political freedom; making slaves do the labor for you.

Have y'all read Benjamin Constant's essay on the distinction between ancient liberty and modern liberty? For the ancients, freedom is the ability to act and speak in public; for the modern, liberty is the right to do what I want in their privacy.

Hiddenness in the sense of retreat vs. hiddenness in the sense of hidden-away (e.g., slaves and women). Slaves and women as living "laborious life," laborious because devoted to bodily functions (e.g., production and reproduction) (pp. 72-73).

For example, people nowadays talk about their domicile/homes as an investment, rather than as a place of existential significance (where one dwells and lives one life). 

Marx, Smith, Locke (e.g.,) are unable to make a distinction between property and wealth; private property as the basis of wealth accumulation, rather than as a place of hiddenness. 

Arendt's idiosyncratic vocabulary can make it hard to track her critiques of other authors (e.g., Locke, Smith, Marx) who don't use those concepts in the same way(?).

Wtr Term Readings: Arendt's 'The Human Condition'

We will focus on Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition this term -- we will read selections from this book during weeks 1 through 6 and then in weeks 7 through 9 we will focus on comparing Arendt's and Foucault's historical methods.

Week 1	Ch. I (Introduction) §1 = 11 pages Ch. II (Public and Private) §§ 4-6 = 28 pages
Week 2	Ch. II (Public and Private) §§ 8-10 = 21 pages  + Ch. III (Labor) §11 = 14 pages
Week 3	No Meeting
Week 4	Ch. III (Labor) §§ 13, 14, 17 = 23 new pages
Week 5	Ch. IV (Work) §§ 18, 20, 21, 22 = 28 pages
Week 6	Ch. V (Action) §§ 24, 25, 29, 30 = 26 page
Week 7	Ch. V (Action) §§ 31, 32 = 16 pages  + Ch. VI (Modern Age) §§ 35, 36 = 20 pages
Week 8	Ch. VI (Modern Age) §§42-45 = 32 pages
Week 9	Arendt, essay on history and method from Between Past and Future tbd Foucault, essay on history and method tbd
Week 10	Tentative  Essay on Foucault and Arendt by tbd (See also this recent special issue of Journal of Philosophy of History:  https://brill.com/view/journals/jph/18/3/jph.18.issue-3.xml?srsltid=AfmBOooK18torb3hvUVfY0A4g9IlPr53_MBAvdgWtJ9vfQLrTYNz2icv)
Week Exam	Tentative

 

 

 

The Birth of Biopolitics, 14 March lecture

 Questions:

1. If this is a genealogy, what kind of genealogy is it? Should we consider it as such?
2. Question of neoliberalism about scarce resources and allocation of them. What is the relationship between this allocation and strategic programming? (P. 223, 227)
3. Criticism against theory of imperialism; how much is MF concerned with Schumpeter’s criticism of Marxist/Luxemburgian theory of imperialism? (P.231-232)
4. When MF discusses theory of human capital—move from labor to time, what is the role of temporality in MF conception of human capital?
5. MF offers a historiography of neoliberalism; how do we reconcile this with genealogy? (P.216–219)
6. Why does he choose these three events specifically; one could argue there’s a lot more events he could have chosen, what was the significance of these?
7. “Let’s methodologically suppose universals don’t exist…” (P.3) The contrast between “dialectical logic” and “strategic logic”…”I suggest replacing dialectic logic with strategic logic…” Is this cool? (p.42) 

Discussion:

Q 1: By ‘it’ being a genealogy..what do we mean?

It has a genealogical impetus but it is trying to track the present so it doesn’t have the same ability (Like D&P, for example) to examine an established archive. We don’t have the privilege of looking back on what is now obvious to us. MF sees this as a policy project but it is early to assess the nuance of techniques. Interesting that there is a lot of debates re why it is the “Birth of Biopolitics”? There is a foresight—maybe an anticipatory genealogy? 

Is this where he is articulating his notion of biopolitics? What do we mean by it? The neoliberalist subject? 

Post-war, Chicago school neoliberalism are main objects of critique. Is there a clear method or are these just observations? 

 Would Birth of Neoliberalism be a more accurate title? History of Sexuality where he works through concept of biopolitics/biopower. 

He’s tracking a mode of thought, a mode of analysis…looking at how a specific form of subjectivity is made. 

Maybe this is more of an archaeological analysis than genealogical?

Elements of policy, there’s a practice related to this discourse…a way of being. 

Now we can track this because we are in the future of this present (could have not happened).

Not just empirical examples; MF as trying to create a system for these examples? P. 228 on taking a spouse with equal levels of human capital…P. 225 “principle of decipherment…” “problematic of needs…” There’s a sense in which he has these methodological terms that does sound more like an archaeology. The problematization more like genealogy; trying to constitute the thought undergirding the examples he uses.

Not starting with a universal but how a universal is being built. (Q 7)

We could look at a universal in neoliberalism and perform a genealogy on how it was built. 

(P.223) “Adopts the task of analyzing a form of human behavior…”

Maybe this speak to Tiisala’s argument re an underlying savior? It’s not only about rationality in a science but rationality in a human behavior.

MF as citing theorists; this is pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher…Sounds like a description of a “political rationality.” This is quintessential archaeology; the rationality isn’t an exercise of power. It’s another thing to have this in play, in policies. It’s not that there is no genealogy here but it’s not above and beyond History of Madness a Birth of the Clinic.

(P.232) “…programming of the processes I am talking about…” he sees the emergence of a kind of power here but you cannot get the full story. It’s archaeological but it’s more about where he’s standing in regards to this method. 

Maybe MF is just developing a neoliberal theory of governmentality? Do all MF’s works have to be conscious of methodology?

Does seem there is something he is trying to track. 

What is the difference between an archaeology and a traditional theory here?

These lectures approach interesting theoretical approaches to neoliberalism.

Even at the level of research, you don’t start with a method but observations…

MF also begins stating interest in government and art of government; liberalism as a government; the conduct of conduct. There is a continuity thematically with other things he’s doing as well. 

The methodology question is important with MF because his work is so empirical. It seems like there is an onus on the research or the work to not be done in a pell-mell manner whereas speculative philosophy can get away with this more. We can then track that methodology in some extent. If we assume he is more or less applying a methodology, what in the method more or less causes him to deduce this theory of neoliberalism as opposed to others?

One question: how much is the method dependent on the historical dependence? If the neoliberal policy prescriptions haven’t been implemented, how can you give an adequate genealogical account of their power? 

Distinction between recent past and near future: MF always discussing about recent past, describing something up until a few decades ago. 

Rabinow and distinction between historiography for the past and anthropology for the contemporary investigation.

(P.33) “I don’t think we can find the cause….we should establish the intelligibility of this process…” Maybe one difference—one event as the cause for something, there’s still a focus on the event but there’s multiple and its not over-rationalizing the significance of the event?

Marxist critiques flatten the plurality of neoliberalism (it exists different in different political economies).

Regardless of it is a genealogy, how does genealogy figure into these broader historical events he is discussing? 

Genealogy operates through multiple historical concatenations. 

Role of the individual; we think of things like policy changes in terms of individuals; dangers of thinking of this in terms of ‘one event.’ Economic historian might point to one cause of an event, how does genealogy respond? History places a lot of emphasis on subjects as the movers of events rather than events themselves.

Interesting look at the family and the ways the private is folded into economics in ways others don’t notice, new to this period, not addressed by traditional Marxist analysis. 

Discussion of migration as an investment in life; similarities to the way people discuss migrants today. 

What did he have in mind in this section? (P.230)

“Migration has a cost…” Cost for the migrant, nation? Cost for who?

“What is the function of this cost…” 

(Q 4) He contrasts economic subject qua labor power; (p 220) comment about Marx and the worker as just a worker; in neoliberal, worker is not a worker in social time it is an entrepreneur who invests in the future. 

This is not about exploiting the worker til its death; you have to invest and replenish; it’s not capital against life but capital and life; a traditional Marxist view not sufficient for analysis. 

Different kind of work; it’s not just abstract labor for a job but involves a level of self-investment as a worker. We can see this in people’s responses the things like why we go to college; not many would answer they go for the intrinsic value of wanting to know. 

Time and temporality…(p 221) “neoliberals and marxists…[on] variables of time” How actually is time the key variable for neoliberals? How does this connect to Punitive Society lectures? 

In the old capitalist model: time as purely abstract; in neoliberalism time: time reconstituted and matters, it’s about the individual’s future; time as something you plan.

(P 223) “Analysis of internal rationality…” there’s something intentional happening when you look at economics through the lens of behavior. 

Key concept of neoliberalism MF draws on: choice. Choice is a phenomenon that governs economic behavior. Everyone is an entrepreneur capable of making good market choices on their own. Good economics cultivates good choices. It’s an economic theory that does away with broad economic theories. (P 222)

(P 226) “…Man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer…” This has a hold on how we both experience and use our time. 

Fundamental shift from classical factory model (worker sells labor and that’s it) to labor as a function of classical accumulation which is itself a temporal motion? 

Discipline and Punish, "Illegalities and delinquency" (pt. 4, ch 2)

 Questions

1. Is there anyone to whom surveillance does not apply (200; 204)?

2. How is "work" operating in this chapter (and in The Punitive Society)? What is the relation between disciplinary power and work?

3. Production of delinquency appears as a demobilizing tactic, but how does his class analysis figure into Foucault's methodology with respect to discipline? 

4. The delinquent is produced "as a pathologized subject" (277). How does said production connect with the "usefulness" of delinquency in the relation to work-labor?

5. How does genealogy determine what is "a target" (276)? In this case it appears to be illegalities or illegalisms. 

6. How do we understand illegalities through the failure of penality (272)? Does this help us define illegalities/illegalisms?

7. Foucault anti-dialectical form of argument: prison and reform (264-265). Who are his interlocutors here? Or is this an argument geared at dialectics more broadly?

8. If the function of the prison is not to render docile those who transgress the law, how do we square this with the "opening illegalities" which function towards rendering docile (272; 277)?

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Discussion

Description of delinquency in relation to labor, labor organizing, and labor rights (and its relation to the formation of social class) was very interesting as forms of resistance or counter-conduct (274ff). This had not been developed before as clearly. 

Illegalities are targeted by disciplinary power and the constitutive failures produce delinquency in a way that favors or is useful to the bourgeoisie. In that sense, it is not only the production of workers but also the disruption of dissidence or sedition that is crucial for class (or capitalist) power. (see, e.g., 280). In that sense, the emergence of the delinquent is parallel to that of the worker.

Another important relation of delinquency with labor can be found in Foucault's analysis of the paralegal development of police to manage "the mass of reserve labor" (280). But the delinquent is also useful as a political weapon.

What is difference of this genealogy from a Marxist account of class formation? It could be seen as a response of why certain revolutionary attempts failed (the internalization of discipline). Different emphasis of the emergence of the working class and the reserve army but in terms of the productivity of power.

Diffusion of illegalities (273-275): the association of crime/criminality and class is something novel (the "classization" of crime) that Foucault is attempting to track. There is a production of class disymmetry as a vector through which penal discourse and practices travel. 

There is an introduction of the present in the text that brings into view the contemporaneity of the archive and Foucault's genealogy (268): the uprisings in French prisons are articulated as a "reform" and therefore as an "improvement" or "amelioration" of the prison that is thus unable to recognize its functional and historical specificity.

Notion of tactics as "reach[ing] their target" (285). This sounds intentional. How do we square this with Foucault's emphasis on power a non-intentional? Why is there such a "need"? Is it a need to solve a problem that arise in conflict/class/revolutionary struggles?

Tactics are bound up with articulations of a problem – The coming into power of a class is contingent upon it being able to articulate a "class dissymmetry" (276) successfully and functionally. 

Part of the argument could be that the moralization of the lumpenproletariat is a fuller story of this form of subjectivity. (the lumpenproletariat). Delinquency is nonetheless the vector for class differentiation. If you tell the story that way, you can tell a different story about the emergence and hegemony of the capitalist class that does not assume that they had power in advance.

Interesting that he refers to indiscipline in terms of a "native, immediate liberty" (292) when addressing the Fourierists.

The Punitive Society, March 28 Lecture

 1. Foucault's use of habit to describe disciplinary power? How do we understand its critical use?

2. What is the relationship between genealogy and habit? Particularly, the "change" of habit. 

3. Fleshing out distinctions between ideology and "strategies of power"? 

4. Can we track the four theoretical schemas of power? (pp. 228 - 229, 231, 233).

5. What is an "institution" for Foucault? How does this differ from something like "apparatus"? (p. 235).

Institution as social form? "... institutional condition of possibility..." (227). Institutions as "effects" of techniques, practices, knowledges -- Foucault's "nominalism." Institutions as something like "anticipatory dispositifs"?

Example:

power-knowledge ---> surveillance, examination, normalization ---> techniques(?) ---> institutions (e.g., prison, clinic, army, etc.).

Four schemas of power:

(1) power as exercised as opposed to appropriative (i.e., not a matter of possession) 

(2) power as diffused as opposed to localized (centralized?)

(3) power as constitutive of production, not subordinate to it 

(4) power as knowledge formation, not ideological (i.e., power-knowledge)

Who is Foucault mogging? Arguably, political philosophy hitherto.

(1) Hobbes and the social contract tradition.

(2) Althusser 

(3) "post-Hegelians," i.e. (early) Marx

(4) Critical theory, i.e., Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse (and Althusser, again). 

In terms of ideology, what is meant by "transparency" and "opacity." Against the idea that ideology distorts actual knowledge, whereas Foucault wants to suggest that we need not posit hidden motives and interests to understand the operations of power. Ideology critique as revealing how operations of power distort consciousness of subjects (false consciousness).

Foucault distinction between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-cenutury discourses. What's the exact nature of the shift? Foucault doesn't seem to be offering a comprehensive theory of habit -- wish he was saying more here.