Genealogy has taken on new meaning in Michel Foucault's thought-provoking article. Tracing the vulnerability of the 60s "A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence" (129). His lecture delivered in 1976 points out that the most familiar is now instable. Foucault argues that only "historical contents" offer a point of revelation. Scholarly knowledge in union with popular knowledge (local popular knowledge) allows criticsm to perform its work of uncovering the "historical knowledge of struggles" (131). This leads to viewing power through a unique lens which in turn attempts to decipher the role of power in economics, concluding that power not only represses, but power leads to hostile engagements. These actions can only be interpreted through the term genealogy "to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories" (131). It is only through this approach that history of conflict can be interpreted.
Jameson's article written in 1981 regarding the interpretation of literature as a socially symbolic act declares that it is the political interpretation of literary texts that is "the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation" (181).
Capitalism, politics, and history are some of the parameters that define postmodernism according to these critics. Jameson takes a strong stance that the anxieties of modernism are now replaced in the postmodern era with not only a liberation from anxiety but "a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well" (274).
As contemporaries, perhaps Foucault and Jameson have anticipated the detachment enhanced by the saturated technology of the twenty-first century. A technology that allows each generation to be engaged in multiple levels of communication without having to connect from the "self". Is it possible to experience a sense of "local memory" at this level of disconnect? How will our historical legacy be interpreted?
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Foucault believes that "'archaeology' [is] the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities" (Foucault 132-33).
ReplyDeleteI know this is not to be necessarily taken at face value - however, I have a fork and a knife from a set of my grandmother's silverware. I don't know how I got them, and it's only the two pieces, but they are artifacts that hold local memories of her and the stories she told of struggle during the Great Depression.
These artifacts then are memories connecting me to my own local history but also to the historical struggles of a world and a generation who lived long before I did.
I think that whether or not the new generations will find a connection to the greater picture of the "historical knowledge of struggles" (131) will depend on what archeological artifacts they eventually find in their own (metaphorical) kitchens as adults.
I must say I disagreed with Jameson one the loss of feeling within the postmodern culture/era. Anxiety may be less but it may be argued that there is more room for the exploration of emotional understanding thanks to the postmodern detachment.
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