Foucault is SmallTalk.
Tangentially inspirational, but mostly useless in modern practice.
Deleuze's postscript... "metastable states coexisting in one and the same, like a universal system of deformation."
That's your counter-argument?
Deleuze's postscript... "metastable states coexisting in one and the same, like a universal system of deformation."
That's your counter-argument?
I don't think you can categorize a philosopher/historian in such crude terms. For one, this pressuposes that there's some "modern practice" of history, which makes it incompatible or difficult for practical reasons to use Foucault's theory anymore. That's not the case in the least -- modern academic discourse in such matters refers to Foucault all the time.
(And even if the comparison was apt, I'd still take SmallTalk over, say, Java that replaced it, any time of day).
>That's your counter-argument?
No, his counter-argument is a lucid essay, of which you extracted, out of context (and cut in half), a small, non characteristic, phrase that you find troubling. Might as well extract some oneliner from type theory full of heavy math notation to "prove" that Haskell is impossible to learn.
In fact, the paragraph the excerpt belongs to is crystal clear, wether you agree with it's contents or not.
What he says in that part is that in older societies (those based on disclipline), a person moved from one place of instilling discipline to the other (from school, to army service, to vocational education, to the factory, etc). In contrast to that, in modern societies, all those distinct places and stages have been merged (the school is also like a prison, the workplace is also like the army, etc).
I agree that there are lots of things that are worth understanding but can't be expressed in rigorously logical terms. Things like the subjective experience of falling in love or laughing at a joke or the value of behaving toward others with compassion. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
And I really wish postmodernists would stop hiding behind the banner of "the humanities". Analytic philosophy, history, classics, religious studies, and art history are all capable of making meaningful and even true statements from time to time, and most of them can be made comprehensible to the typical person.
As for the humanities thing, yes, I agree. Just as physicists can make many clear statements that resonate with people who don't even know math, there are many aspects of the humanities that are accessible and clear to people who have never studied theory. Your disdain for higher level theory would also make it difficult for you to enjoy certain texts by people like Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, none of whom are "postmodernists".
Every discipline has technical terminology. It always sounds weird to those who aren't involved.
Disclaimer: I'm moderately obsessed with Deleuze.