Subject: Re: Foucault and Lyotard
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 21:44:34 PDT


Hugh wrote:
>
>In general, I share your thoughts about Foucault and Lyotard.
>
>I think Foucault's narrative (in several books) described the
>development
>of large, impersonal, faceless, powerful institutions with an 
>insight not equalled by anyone else I've read.
>
>And while much of it is still relevant, Post WWII, and especially
>Post-Cold-War developments have accelerated accumulation by the rich
>and disparity with the poor with incredible swiftness.
>
>In this context I find Lyotard's concern with justice, the links of
>justice/injustice with lanaguage, the mystery of what language is and
>how it works, much more interesting than looking backward to >Foucault.

I find 'looking back' an odd turn of phrase.  We might also accuse 
Lyotard of looking back to Kant and Wittgenstein for example as 
resources for some of his work.  But in what way is this a bad thing?

I think the problem is more that we've had longer to caricature Foucault 
and his work, and the caricatures certainly promise little of value in 
the strange world we live in.

>His observations on Post-modern knowledge and technology, and their
>control by the wealthy as sources of power were a step beyond Foucault,
>and have proven prophetic in decade of so since he formulated them.

Well, I'm not convinced.  It actually seems to me that Lyotard's 
writings sometimes lean too far towards this vaguely Marxist notion of 
wealth as power, a substantialist notion of power if you like, that 
Foucault has made, at least for me, too narrow a field of reference.

It also seems to me that we have to get rid of this damaging and 
ultimately ludicrous view of 'the philosopher' that you allude to here: 
-

>I just hope that somewhere, somehow, some philosopher will pick up the
>threads such speculations and explore them in the context of the 
>current social disasters round the globe.

Foucault was a trenchant critic of this idea of a philosopher, and if we 
take Lyotard's remarks about the failure of metanarrative, then we must 
move beyond looking for Superman, and start doing microphilosophy 
ourselves, start being specific intellectuals ourselves, rather than 
global prophets for emancipation and other profoundly problemmatic 
modernist notions.

Jon

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