From: "jon roffe" <i_mimesis-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 1997 03:34:17 PST


Dear Matt

>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.

This is interesting. (I remember reading a short piece by Deleuze who 
was suggesting this perspective too, somewhere)  My reading of Foucault 
is different to this.  It seems to me that power _is_ finally and 
ultimately constructive for Foucault (and I would priviledge Nietzsche 
over all other 'personal' influences his work).  The normative effects 
of modern society, as I read Foucault, are not normative effects of 
power per se, but rather the effects of a certain form of society, or 
the group of micro-political mechanisms that make up a society.  It's 
not the power that normalises, but certain forms of power mechanisms 
that do so.  

For my money, all this leaves Foucault very much out of the Marxist 
scheme of things, because ultimately, for Marx, power is seen in a 
substantive, oppressive manner.


>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.

Yes, I agree with you here.  Nietzsche in many ways sunk the boat of the 
Enlightenment.  One thought I have, though, is part of what I've just 
written in a post to Eric:  it seems to me that part of the 
enlightenment tradition we can keep, and in fact a part which is 
inherent to Lyotard's celebrated statement about the metanarrative, is 
the stringently critical mode of thought, a la Kant.

I think that the way forward is to leave aside metanarratives, and seek 
new ways of going about things that aren't based on the 'practice out of 
theory' model.  The details of this, unfortunately, escape me at the 
moment!

Jon Roffe

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