The collection of essays Tradition and renewal, on 20th century literature, is 49 years old and I am donating it, even though there are good things in it (it is available on archive.org). I feel that scholarship really has improved since then. I am again so sad that I couldn’t connect to it for so long. It was about thirty years, all told, that Reeducation took from me (and remember, Reeducation was a series of things including my first academic job). It’s not that I’m lazy, or not interested, I just got so piled on that I couldn’t think.
All this is criminal, really, but it’s like that literary or real-life character who loses their profession due to a war, something like that. And the fact that I can even go through the books and papers from that era now is a great advance. There’s also an issue of New Left Review with Peter Dews’ article “Power and subjectivity in Foucault,” and here we have it right online. This, too, was important to what I was going to do with Vallejo.
“Power in modern societies,” says Dews, “is portrayed as essentially oriented towards the production of regimented, isolated, and self-policing subjects.” And this, I feel, is what psychotherapy tries to create, and what academic jobs try to do as well. So we have psychotherapeutic discourse as a technology of power. This, according to Weber and the classical Frankfurt School, is “a profounder threat to human freedom than the class oppression specific to capitalist society.”
“[I]n modern philosophy it is a view of the status and capacities of the subject which defines the content of concepts of domination and freedom. In classical Critical Theory subjectivity is needed for freedom. Foucault says no, subjectification is related to subjection. Dews says that capitalist modernity holds “an interplay of progressive and regressive elements far more complex than anything post-structuralism appears able to envisage” … and that this is why post-structuralist assessments of the subject [oscillate] “between irrationalist rebellion and resignation.”
There is more in this piece, of course, but now we have it.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 