File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2000/foucault.0012, message 19


Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 08:25:17 -0500
From: Dan Smith <dls216-AT-psu.edu>
Subject: Re: Intellectual Specificity and Inner Fascism


Hi there, Doug. I can't say I've read a lot of thinkers who might 
be considered poststructuralists, but your characterization of 
them as navel gazers doesn't square with what I have read. Are 
you referring to poststructuralists (whoever they might be) as 
a whole, or to some specific thinkers? If so, could you tell me who
and how their work is disengaged from materiality?
You connect the notion of specific intellectual with the purported 
ineffectualness of poststructuralist thought, so I assume you mean 
at least Foucault. Do you consider him a thinker who makes the symbolic 
(in what sense do you use that term?) foundational? Next, could explain 
a little more the notion of inner life you say capitalism continues to
penetrate?
Is this inner life somehow natural and authentic; not constituted by manifold 
relations? Finally, what would constitute empirical evidence for the
connection 
between performativity and subjectivity?

Thanks,
Dan S.

At 12:53 PM 12/16/00 +0000, Doug Stokes wrote:
>Im not familiar with the thread, or indeed Nussbaum. Maybe what he / she is 
>getting at is Post structuralisms (PS) failure to ground itself in any 
>politico-ethical framework. Furthermore, it has taken left academia into a 
>discursive navel gazing whereby the symbolic becomes the foundational. The 
>retreat from any economic or materialist analysis (which PS caricatures as 
>'economic reductionism') and its attendent effects on concioussness is made 
>all the more ironic as capitalism further penetrates our inner lives. 
>Intellectuals abdicate responsibility for any sustained engagement. Instead 
>they cripple themselves with talk of 'specific intellectuals', meanwhile the 
>globalised juggernaut of late capitalism continues to universalise 
>oppression.
>
>I seriously doubt that Nassbaum was wishing to be 'morally led' by  wishing 
>to know what butler grounds her 'perfomativity' in. By the way, does Butler 
>provide any empirical evidence for her claims except a vague mention of 
>transexualism as indicative of teh performative nature of subjectivity?
>
>cheers,
>
>Doug Stokes.
>


   

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