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August 4, 2008
Australian conservatives routinely talk in terms of postmodernism as rigidly imposed dogma, of us being paralyzed by postmodernism. It hobbles Australia's best and brightest university students by locking them into narrow, prescriptive and politically correct ways of thinking and using language.
We find similar views amongst Left liberals of the modernist variety. Thus Gavin Kitching, whose entry into this discourse is the linguistic determinism of postmodernism (language that people speak forces or causes them to think and act in certain ways), argues in his The Trouble With Theory, that postmodern theory is at best irrelevant to, and at worst undermining of, persuasive political arguments. Irrelevant?
Compare that account with Christina Hendricks in her Foucault's Kantian critique: Philosophy and the present in Philosophy & Social Criticism [Vol. 34, No. 4, (2008)] argues that Michel Foucault is engaged in a kind of critical work that is similar to that of Immanuel Kant. The abstract states:
Given Foucault's criticisms of Kantian and Enlightenment emphases on universal truths and values, his declaration that his work is Kantian seems paradoxical. I agree with some commentators who argue that this is a way for Foucault to publicly acknowledge to his critics that he is not, as some of them charge, attempting a total critique of Enlightenment beliefs and values, but is instead attempting to transform them from within. I argue further that Foucault's self-professed Kantianism can also productively be read as a means of encouraging change in his intellectual audience, a call to courage to take up the thread of Enlightenment thought that Foucault finds in Kant's essay, `What is Enlightenment?': that of directing one's philosophical efforts towards questioning and transforming one's own present in its historical specificity, for the sake of promoting the values of freedom and autonomy therein.
She argues that Foucault e encourages his audience to take up for themselves through tracing his own intellectual lineage to Kant. In so doing, he encourages contemporary philosophers to consider the value and effects of their work on the present social and political contexts in which they live.
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