File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1999/foucault.9903, message 21


Date: Wed, 03 Mar 1999 00:11:29 -0500
From: sam binkley <sbinkley-AT-erols.com>
Subject: Re: Postmodernism & Liberalism


Well, I think its interesting that questions about discourse come up at
the same time that one of the (by now) quite familiar POMO trashings is
posted.  I have often thought that someone should write a good
Foucauldian discourse analysis of the broader discursive formation of
postmodern publishing.  I mean, let's face it, everything Foucault ever
said about a discursive formation, (the manner in which it maintains it
coherence by making exclusions, it creates differentiations, it
presupposes its own continuities, and so on), can be said about
postmodern scholarship.  Postmodern analyses, which take the rhetorical
posture of ambiguity and evasion as a self-regulating principle, seem to
constitute a discursive formation that is just as entrenched and
ossified, and is just as capable of policing its boundaries and
constituting subordinated, excluded elements as any other—say, medical
science, psychoanalysis or positivism.  Which, as Foucault would say
about any of the discourse formations he studied, does  not negate its
"legitimacy".

It has always amazed me that postmodernists have been so reluctant to
apply their own methods of analysis to their own practice.

sam b

Darren Smith wrote:

> published in Macquarie University Newspaper, Australia
>
> At 19:30 2/03/99 -0600, you wrote:
> >Exactly what issues has this article from a student newspaper (by
> >whom? published where?) "raised."  I see no issues, merely a tired
> >and cliched repetition of the standard canards (mostly feeble
> >and unsupported generalizations about a "class" of people identified
> >by a pair of labels that mean nothing but "these are people with whom
> >I disagree and so they are bad and worthy of punishment").  I suppose
> >the repeated metaphor of the foam is supposed to be evidence of
> >creativity and wit, but it does nothing but tie together the
> >article. If there are issues--specify them?
> >Tom Dillingham
> >
> >

--
____________________________
Sam Binkley
Department of Sociology, New School University
65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003

Address: PO Box 20202, New York, NY 10009
phone: (212) 420 9425   web: http://www.erols.com/sbinkley/



   

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