File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 17


Date: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 17:03:25 -0800
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault


MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER wrote:
> 
> 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
-AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-

Getting back to Lyotard, I think he is a very good reasoner and 
draws on some of the best, as Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein.

With his reference to the Cashinahua, and the French Constitution,
he illustrates the the invention of stories (narratives) about who we 
are which seem essential to the rational animal you mention above, 
and besides that, there are about a couple of millenia of the the three
most popular religions of the planet which go on and on.

One kind of faith practiced by scientists of today, superseded
others, as in the Enlightenment, and we start operating under new
metanarratives, like Globalization without being aware.

Hugh


   

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