Foucault’s radical skepticism makes social formation and state unthinkable

Evidence

But, again, Foucault’s example is positive only if his general epistemological position is not swallowed whole. For in fact Foucault so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a skepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than the largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him, not as an agnostic on these questions, but as deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another. From such a position neither a social formation, nor the state, can be adequately thought. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 207

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Hall’s core diagnosis: suspending determinacy only to commitment to non-correspondence is itself a determinacy position — a precise dialectical critique of poststructuralist anti-totalization worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects with Hall’s Marxism/articulation theory — his quarrel with Foucault mirrors debates over determination vs. contingency in cultural studies. — connects to: Foucault’s anti-economism leads him to erase class and rebellion — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 830