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04/12/2008
Theory party
Recently, Stanley Fish offered up a nice essay on French theory/deconstruction and those who fear it's a huge leap away from rationalism. Fish explains the critique of Enlightenment-style thinking and so-called "liberal" humanism better than I ever could, so, please, read away.
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Having recently been exposed to Foucauldian discourse analysis, it seems that Foucault is either speaking nonsense or saying nothing at all. In defining everything social as a discourse, he's either conflating words with things, or else providing a new word to describe things. Neither approach seems profitable.
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | 04/13/2008
There are some misreadings of Foucault that have been circulating for quite some time, especially those that take his notion of discourse analysis and his important work on power to mean that everything is socially constructed, as though there's no biology and no possibility for objectivity. As someone pointed out to me recently, the big question that these misreadings don't ask is as follows: If "everything" is socially constructed, doesn't that also mean that the notion of social construction is also socially constructed in order to serve some sort of power-related purpose?
Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" is a good place to go for his work on power relations, in my opinion.
Posted by: PrimroseRoad | 04/13/2008
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