File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 16


Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 08:16:59 -0800 (PST)
From: MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER <mattw-AT-sfsu.edu>
Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault


Dear Jon

Foucault actually said that power was not only normative and oppressive
but that it could also be constructive in the sense of creating new
discourse.  As far as I know he never said that power was essentially
constructive (that would be to give a much more optimistic turn than he
merited--it would be reading more Nietzsche into his political writings
than is there).

I think this conflict between power that is constructive and power that
normalizes is a conflict Foucault never resolved.  It is in some sense the
conflict between Nietzsche and Marx, between an emphasis on the body and
its embeddedness in a world of practises and language, and the body as a
social and economic being historically informed.  Nietzsche never had a
viable or desirable political philosophy--it didn't interest him--while in
Marx the individual vanishes into the totalitarianism of State.

I can't see how an appeal, however, to the Enlightenment--via Lyotard or
anyone else--would be a solution to this problem of the metanarrative.  It
could be argued that the Enlightenment was in part responsible for this
problem, in its privileging of reason over other forms of discourse, its
emphasis on Man as a rational animal that constructs a social contract
when he begins to live in agreement with others.  I would have thought
that Nietzsche's critique of this would have been sufficient.  I imagine
that Lyotard maintains his suspicion of the Enlightenment, as have most of
the other French post-structuralists.

Matt Wettlaufer


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005