At 12:19 PM 10/25/96 -0600, you wrote:
>just when you thought it was dead ...
>
>i wrote this post to a grad class list i'm on, in response to the accusation
>that there is no ethics possible in a postmodern context. the quote i
>include is another example of what i'd call "beauty" in theoretical langauge
>in the plain style, but it also expresses something i feel in radically
>obvious constructed situations: the responsibilty to interrogate assertions
>and ideas, for indeed, everything is potentially dangerous.
>
>mike
>
>>Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 00:10:50
>>To: @style
>>From: "Michael J. Salvo" <salvo@ttu.edu>
>>Subject: postmodern ethics
>>
>>in class on tuesday, everyone got to see me fumble about trying to explain
>the relationship between postmodernity and ethics. the relationship is
>contrary to the popular media representation of deconstruction,
>specifically, and a bit counter-intuitive, not to mention complex. chances
>are i'll botch the explaination here as i did tuesday, but this position is
>important enough for me to want to take another stab at it.
>>
>>the popular representation of deconstruction in particular and
>postmodernity specifically is the nihilistic extreme one can put lyotard's
>reference to the death (dearth?) of master narratives, those myths --
>neither true nor false -- which we use to inform our everyday practice.
>these, once gone, seem to pull the ontological rug out from under us.
>indeed, Dada-ist art, the theater of the absurd, the work of baudrillard
>come to mind. if there is no truth, why do i go on? what do i pursue if i
>know (or believe) there will be no revelation?
>>
>>foucault, as expressed in rabinow's _Foucault Reader_, takes a much
>different tactic. every ethical position has a history, an ideology, and an
>epistemology. investigating, questioning, interrogating these aspects of
>ethics is not only important but vitally necessary. we risk the continued
>repetition of historical problems, we always do, and as Foucault phrases it,
>everything is dangerous. he doesn't assert that everything is meaningless;
>rather, he asserts that everything is a *danger*. left unexamined, the
>dangers can be left unknown, mystified, undisturbed. so too, a postmodern
>ethics will require grounding, but grounding in *what*, exactly? excuse
>this long contextualizing quote:
>>
>>______________________
>>Q. And what will come next? Will there he more on the Chris- ians when you
>finish these three?
>>
>>M.F. Well, I am going to take care of myself . . . I have more than a draft
>of a book about sexual ethics in the sixteenth century, , in which also the
>problem of the techniques of the self, self- lamination, the cure of souls,
>is very important, both in the Protestant and Catholic churches.
>>
>>What strikes me is that in Greek ethics people were concerned with their
>moral conduct, their ethics, their relations to selves and to others much
>more than with religious problems. For instance, what happens to us after
>death? What are the gods? Do they intervene or not?-these are very, very
>un-important problems for them, and they are not directly related to ethics,
>to conduct. The second thing is that ethics was not re1ated to any
>social--or at least to any legal-institutional system. For instance, the
>laws against sexual misbehavior were very few and not very compelling. The
>third thing is that what they were worried about, their theme, was to
>constitute a kind of ethics which was an aesthetics of existence.
>>
>>Well, I wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this
>one, since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion,
>nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private
>life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find
>any principle )n which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an
>ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on
>so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the
>unconscious is, and so on. I am struck by this similarity of problems.
>>
>>Q. Do you think that the Greeks offer an attractive and plausible alternative?
>>
>>M.F. No! I am not looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution
>of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by
>other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions,
>and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. I would like
>to do the genealogy of problems, of *problematiques. My point is not that
>everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly
>the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something
>to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic
>activism.
>>
>>rabinow, paul. (ed) _The_Foucault_Reader_. Pantheon Books, New York.
>1984. p.342-343
>>___________________
>>forgive me for the frappe' of foucault and lyotard (that sounds vaguely
>obscene), but in the postmodern condition, in which we have lost our master
>tropes, religion being one and coherent unified nationalism being another,
>what do we build an ethics upon? what *foundation* is free from the taint
>of worldliness? none. and for foucault, that means that every assertion of
>"truth" is also an assertion of ideology which needs to be interrogated:
>>
>> my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper-
>> and pessimistic activism.
>>
>>apathy is *furthest* from the archeological move. the whole reason *for*
>interrogation is the search for an ethics, for if our ethical system leads
>to unethical ends (here i allude to the holocaust as an example of an ethic
>in which the *end* overwhelmed any consideration of *means*) the *ethic*
>wasn't worth all that much. but, simultaneous to interrogating what we
>have, what we had, and what others had, it is not sufficent to "find" a
>solution elsewhere and translate it into current context:
>>
>> I am not looking for an alternative; you can't
>> find the solution of a problem in the solution
>> of another problem raised at another moment by
>> other people.
>>
>>perhaps what is most deisturbing is that we are taught history and cultural
>change as it *already* happened, as a few historic figures did/did-not
>create, cause, inspire change. he have here, now, a different sense. we
>are in the flux. many theorists propose that we are at a moment of
>constructing a post-history, a moment in which we will no longer define or
>understand history as we have for the last 150-200 years or so