A response to the issue of poststructuralism's ethical "impotence.":
The negative critique (shall we call it?) and the prescriptive ethical
pronouncement are two different types of speech acts. The former shows
what is wrong with a certain kind of social relation of power knowledge
(among other things); the latter prescribes what people ought to do.
I see no evidence that a prescriptive utterance is any more likely to
change behavior and relations (or change anything at all) than a negative
critique.
In fact, though it is tied to a (perhaps passing) historical moment, the
reverse may be true.
At any rate, a lot of the criticisms of poststructuralism's "impotence"
emerge when one imagines that the important part of thought is the
thought itself--what it can figure out, discern, and so forth. My
position emerges when one focusses on the reception (or dialogic scene)
of ideas--when one says that there are "ideas-an-sich" and chooses to
look at them instead as speach acts.
Foucault's later work often was almost explicit about its self-conscious
status as a speech act (though Foucault sometimes suggests that it is a
speech act addressed to himself). In this light, his work has been
referred to as "an ethic [!] of permanent critique." Moreover, the
distinction potence/impotence (rather than true/false, for instance)
suggests we are already in the realm of what words or utterances DO--a
completely different question from that of whether the utterance itself
can tell us what we ought to do.
I think this is a really important and interesting issue, but I don't
think that it is a matter of ethics vs. no ethics. All utterances,
rhetoricians will tell us, after all, do have an "ethos."
Erik
Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53211
email: edl@xxxxxxxxxxx
------------------
The negative critique (shall we call it?) and the prescriptive ethical
pronouncement are two different types of speech acts. The former shows
what is wrong with a certain kind of social relation of power knowledge
(among other things); the latter prescribes what people ought to do.
I see no evidence that a prescriptive utterance is any more likely to
change behavior and relations (or change anything at all) than a negative
critique.
In fact, though it is tied to a (perhaps passing) historical moment, the
reverse may be true.
At any rate, a lot of the criticisms of poststructuralism's "impotence"
emerge when one imagines that the important part of thought is the
thought itself--what it can figure out, discern, and so forth. My
position emerges when one focusses on the reception (or dialogic scene)
of ideas--when one says that there are "ideas-an-sich" and chooses to
look at them instead as speach acts.
Foucault's later work often was almost explicit about its self-conscious
status as a speech act (though Foucault sometimes suggests that it is a
speech act addressed to himself). In this light, his work has been
referred to as "an ethic [!] of permanent critique." Moreover, the
distinction potence/impotence (rather than true/false, for instance)
suggests we are already in the realm of what words or utterances DO--a
completely different question from that of whether the utterance itself
can tell us what we ought to do.
I think this is a really important and interesting issue, but I don't
think that it is a matter of ethics vs. no ethics. All utterances,
rhetoricians will tell us, after all, do have an "ethos."
Erik
Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53211
email: edl@xxxxxxxxxxx
------------------