At 0:51 PM 96.7.27, Flannon wrote:
>Maybe it could
> be said that Foucault gets to the point that postmodernists (at least the
> postmodernists of Lyotards variety) could only speak about whithout ever
> arriving at. But then again such a statement might itself be nothing
> more than the ever so hopefull hangover of modernities fantasy of
> progress.
I think it's as you say, that a multiplicity of viewpoints attempts to delineate the postmodern. I don't know that Foucault (nor even Baudrillard or Virilio) could be said to arrive at that paradoxical point, however. Jameson outlines an aspect of the problem nicely in _Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism_, along the lines that, whenever one isolates a particular effect amongst those with which a postmodernist "work" is attempting to distance itself from modernism, it invariably defines itself as a high modernist tenet. The most they can do is set things in motion. Perhaps in question is the place or possibility of the critical text, and the as yet incomplete definition of modernism (a modernism, for instance, that may be in the process of revealing its origins in a postmodernism that predates it).
In the context of the post-modern, which is "ideally" the fragmentation of meaning and reality/representation, does Foucault describe the obsessive mechanisms of power, or institute them? This seems to be the issue when, as so many tend to, people talk of building some kind of mechanism into one's (Foucault-esque) philosophy whereby one can (or delude oneself that one can?) act meaningfully (i.e. politically) in the world. To me this is quite an interesting point of contact between Foucault and the postmodern. The other is, along much the same path, his approach to an aesthetics of existence.
Michael G
guest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
**LIving souls, you will see how alike they are** (SB _The Expelled)
>Maybe it could
> be said that Foucault gets to the point that postmodernists (at least the
> postmodernists of Lyotards variety) could only speak about whithout ever
> arriving at. But then again such a statement might itself be nothing
> more than the ever so hopefull hangover of modernities fantasy of
> progress.
I think it's as you say, that a multiplicity of viewpoints attempts to delineate the postmodern. I don't know that Foucault (nor even Baudrillard or Virilio) could be said to arrive at that paradoxical point, however. Jameson outlines an aspect of the problem nicely in _Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism_, along the lines that, whenever one isolates a particular effect amongst those with which a postmodernist "work" is attempting to distance itself from modernism, it invariably defines itself as a high modernist tenet. The most they can do is set things in motion. Perhaps in question is the place or possibility of the critical text, and the as yet incomplete definition of modernism (a modernism, for instance, that may be in the process of revealing its origins in a postmodernism that predates it).
In the context of the post-modern, which is "ideally" the fragmentation of meaning and reality/representation, does Foucault describe the obsessive mechanisms of power, or institute them? This seems to be the issue when, as so many tend to, people talk of building some kind of mechanism into one's (Foucault-esque) philosophy whereby one can (or delude oneself that one can?) act meaningfully (i.e. politically) in the world. To me this is quite an interesting point of contact between Foucault and the postmodern. The other is, along much the same path, his approach to an aesthetics of existence.
Michael G
guest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
**LIving souls, you will see how alike they are** (SB _The Expelled)