Foucault rejects Marxist models of a determining economic base and a determined superstructure as well as refinements based on conceptions of totality by Marx’s twentieth-century successors. Like Althusser, he retains a concept of practice, however. Also like Althusser, he utilizes a model of complex and multiple causation and determination within the social structure, although the specific elements and mechanisms of such processes, as
elaborated by Foucault, differ in important respects.
After 1968, says Poster, Foucault attempted to come to grips with Marxist scholarship, and while the positions he adopted in some cases resembled those of Western Marxists, generally he went beyond those positions towards a new formulation of critical theory. Although Foucault rejects Marxism as a specific theory of the mode of production, as a critique of political economy, or as a dialectical method, he advances a critical view of domination which, like historical materialism, takes all social practices as transitory
and all intellectual formations as indissociably connected with power and social relations (Poster, 1984: 3 9 4 0 ) . Poster explains what he sees as Foucault’s greater relevance than Marxism in terms of a shift from nineteenth and early twentieth-century forms of capitalism based on the “mode of production” to new forms of later twentieth-century capitalism based on the “mode of information.” These changes were associated, says Poster, with changes in the nature of the economy, an increase in the service and white-collar sectors, the increasing development of information technology, and developments in electronic communications, together with new possibilities that these developments generate for a decentralization of political power. Although Marxism’s focus on labor and the central causal priority of the economy may have had heuristic value in the age of ascendant capitalism, in an era of “information capitalism” historical materialism finds its premise in power that is the effect of “discourse/practice.” Thus, according to Poster, “the couplet discourse/practice enables [Foucault] to search for the close connection between manifestations of reason and patterns of domination. . . . Foucault can study the way in which discourse is not innocent, but shaped by practice-without privileging any form of practice such as class struggle. He can also study how discourse in turn shapes practice without privileging any form of discourse” (Poster, 1984: 12).’ Foucault thus rejects Marx’s conception of historical materialism as a mechanism by which discourse is split from material (non-discursive) practice and by which the former is then subordinated to the latter. By representing the mental operations of consciousness as derivative from the material base of society, Marx, for Foucault, remains firmly fixed within a traditional Enlightenment problematic (Poster, 1984: 16-18).