Below are some very interesting quotes I got from Douglas Kellner's website, anybody care to react to these portions of his paper? The paper is actually a critique of postmodernism. I think Keller has a very good appreciation of Foucault, and a stinging rebuke of where he can take us. Note, however, that his paper is long and interesting, thus if you would like to find out more about it you must got to his website.
Naro
By theorizing the connections between knowledge, truth, and power, such as emerged in the domain of the human sciences and are bound up with constitution of individuals as distinct kinds of subjects, Foucault transforms the history of science and reason into a political critique of modernity and its various modes of power which assume the form of "normalization" or "subjectification." Foucault holds to the Nietzschean view that to be a "subject" -- that is, to have a unified and coherent identity -- is to be "subjugated" by social powers. This occurs through a "deployment" of discourse that divides, excludes, classifies, creates hierarchies, confines, and normalizes thought and behavior. Hence, toward the end of his career, Foucault declares that his ultimate project has been not so much to study power, but rather the subject itself: "the goal of my work ... has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our [Western] culture, human beings are made subjects" (1982: 208).
Yet this is a misleading distinction that signals merely a shift in emphasis rather than approach, since subjectification is the means through which modern power operates in Foucault?s later writings. In a series of historical studies, Foucault analyzes the formation of the modern subject from the perspectives of psychiatry, medicine, criminology, and sexuality, whereby limit-experiences are transformed into objects of knowledge. His works are strongly influenced by an anti-Enlightenment tradition that rejects the equation of reason, emancipation, and progress. Foucault argues that an interface between modern forms of power and knowledge served to create new forms of domination. With thinkers like Sade, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Foucault valorizes transgressive forms of experience, such as madness, violence, or sexuality that break from the prison of rationality. Where modern societies "problematize" forms of experience such as madness, illness, and sexuality, that is, turn them into governmental problems, into areas of life in need of control and regulation, Foucault in turn queries the social construction of ?problems? by uncovering their political motivations and effects and by challenging their character as natural, necessary, or timeless. In what he calls a "diagnostic critique" that combines philosophy and history (1989: 38-39, 73), Foucault attempts to clarify the nature of the present historical era, to underline its radical difference from preceding eras, and to show that contemporary forms of knowledge, rationality, social institutions, and subjectivity are contingent socio-historical constructs of power and domination, and therefore are subject to change and modification.
Foucault's ultimate task, therefore, is "to produce a shift in thought so that things can really change" (quoted in O'Farrell 1989: 39). The goal of Foucault's historico-philosophical studies, as he later came to define it, is to show how different domains of modern knowledge and practice constrain human action and how they can be transformed by alternative forms of knowledge and practice in the service of human freedom. Foucault is concerned to analyze various forms of the "limit experience" whereby society attempts to define and circumscribe the boundaries of legitimate thought and action. The political vision informing Foucault's work foresees individuals liberated from coercive social norms, transgressing all limits to experience, and transvaluing values, going beyond good and evil, to promote their own creative lifestyles and affirm their bodies and pleasures, endlessly creating and recreating themselves.
Foucault denies there can be any basis for objective descriptive statements of social reality or universal normative statements that are not socially conditioned and locally bound. He tries to show that all norms, values, beliefs, and truth claims are relative to the discursive framework within which they originate. Any attempt to write or speak about the nature of things is made from within a rule-governed linguistic framework, an ?episteme,? that predetermines what kinds of statements are true or meaningful. All forms of consciousness, therefore, are socio-historically determined and relative to specific discursive conditions. There is no absolute, unconditioned, transcendental stance from which to grasp what is good, right, or true. Foucault refuses to specify what is true because there are no objective grounds of knowledge; he does not state what is good or right because he believes there is no universal standpoint from which to speak. Universal statements merely disguise the will to power of specific interests; all knowledge is perspectival in character. For postmodern theorists like Foucault, the appeal to foundations is necessarily metaphysical and assumes the fiction of an Archimedean point outside of language and social conditioning.
Keller goes on to conclude much later in his paper:
Thus, while postmodern approaches offer much to the reconstruction of critical theory and democratic politics for the present age, theories that fail to engage the proliferating and intensifying problems of capitalist globalization, that do not articulate the continuities between the old and the new, and that renounce the normative resources of criticism are severely limiting. Failure to provide justification (of a nonmetaphysical kind), or defense of critical theories and alternative visions of what history, social life, and our relation to the natural world could be, continue to be necessary to the project of understanding and changing the world. We are in a troubling and exciting twilight period, in the crossroads between modernity and postmodernity, and the task ahead is to forge reconstructed maps and politics adequate to the great challenges we face.
foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>If Foucault argues for the end of Subjectivity (the death of Man) and that
>resistance to the dominant discourse or regime of truth does not exist,
>where does that leave Foucault?
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>Is Foucault a Subject? Is his work a successful challenge to the dominant
>discourse of the age?
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>I think the answer to both questions is yes, which pardoxically undermines
>his arguments.
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