Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Book Blogging: Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? - Chapter 4
From Chapter 4 of Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by Jamie Smith: (previous posts)
Key Statements By The Author In This Chapter
- “Foucault’s postmodern axiom is that “power is knowledge.” However, Foucault himself reduces any bumper-stickerization of this notion. As he clarifies, he does not mean that knowledge and power are identical; instead, he means to emphasize the inextricable relationship between knowledge and power” (p. 85).
- Like the Chief [in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’], who can see through the pristine white walls of the hospital to its more monstrous workings, Foucault sees through the neat and tidy claims to objective truth, seeing them as only masks of power” (86).
- Foucault is absolutely right in his analysis of the way in which mechanisms of discipline serve to form individuals, but he is wrong to cast all such discipline and formation in a negative light. ... It is helpful to distinguish the formal structure of disciplinary formation as such from the specific direction the discipline takes (99, 102).
- “The first thing we need to learn from Foucault is how pervasive disciplinary formation is within our culture—from public education to MTV” (105).
- “The church must ... enact countermeasures, counterdisciplines that will form us into the kinds of people that God calls us to be” (106).
Key Questions I Have After Reading This Chapter
- Is power itself epistemic, or just a crucial foundation of epistemology?
- Christians love to emphasize the role of personal choice in resisting temptation, almost construing it as an act of (albeit Spirit-aided) personal willpower—is this an Enlightenment-dependent view?
- How can a Christian critique of consumer capitalism be truly and distinctively Christian, and not just neo-Marxist?