After reading Foucault for the second week – thanks Nic—I think I have resolved the question from my previous post. Foucault’s work is one of post structuralism in transition. His piece begins by stating, as Derrida does in his work, that “think[ing] in terms of a totality as proved a hindrance to research” because “a certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence.” This fragility, of course, is that “the center is not the center.” What Foucault goes on to do is what threw me last week. He begins an examination of history, in which he searches for center in the cyclic struggle for power. He examines history in the search for “subjugated knowledges.” He does this by examining searching for a pattern connecting power and economics; this search leads him to find a relation between power and force. His analysis results in a conclusion of two answers: “the oppression schema…, and domination – repression or war.” He ends with the idea that the research model he used to come to this conclusion may be “insufficient.”
This seems like a structuralist approach, but it is his anxiety about the imperfection of language and his inability to nail down a “center” or reliable locus in his theory that prompts him to write that his “impression” which he has based his entire work on is “wholly inadequate to the analysis of the mechanisms and effects of power that it is so pervasively used to characterize today.” In this piece, Foucault is on the verge (pun on Doug is intended) of making a deconstructionist leap.
Jameson, on the other hand, is wholly certain that he has found a center to base all theory around: Marxism. Jameson is asserts that “only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism.” He goes about proving his point in variety of ways that I’m sure we’ll discuss in class, but the most interesting thing he says is on page 184 when he writes: “the text means just what it says.” What a revolutionary idea! Now, he does go on to point out that that there is a subtext beyond the textual meaning, but that subtext is not centerless as Derrida states. For Jameson, “History can be apprehended only through its effects…This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and unstranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification.” The "effects" of History are its center which also exist as the interior and exterior of our shared narrative.
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What Jameson was saying about "the text means just what it says," (184) is in reference readers' objections to critcism. Jameson is defending the case against such an objection, or for criticism.
ReplyDelete"If everything were transparent," Jameson says, like reading a text as words on a page, "then no ideology would be possible" (184). He continunes on 185, "...even if discursive language were to be taken literally, there is always [...] a problem about the 'meaning' of narrative as such," which requires criticism to clarify.
I just want to thank you. I was scouring all of the posts to see if anyone could really see what Foucault was getting it, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that he was trying to process while giving this lecture. It seems to jump around and he also has a tendency to wander in some areas, which makes me think that he is just as uncomfortable without a center as the rest of us...but he's experimenting with post-structuralism.
ReplyDeleteI am beginning to think that, as an idea, and as a tool, post-structuralism is really a great way to get out of our traditional views and boxes, and to really think. Using post-structuralism in order to pick apart a text is brilliant, but--without a center--writing can be rendered unreadable (props to Johanna).