Hmmm, this essay was forwarded me as a clarification of some of the themes Foucault tackles in The Order of Things, but I think that great work is done a disservice thereby. It starts with an impressively lucid discussion of Kant's response in 1787 to the question "Was ist Aufklärung?", as posed by the magazine Berliner Monatschrift. And though it's lucid, it seems a little bit misguided--Foucault seems to want to take seriously as a proposition to be discussed the Kantian idea that humanity is approaching its "adulthood", as marked by a general order adhered to by all because it allows freedom of conscience and freedom to reason as long as personal obligations to the collective are met (I am avoiding "public" and "private" here because Kant, as Foucault points out, actually reverses them--it's not public kowtow and intellectual liberty in private; he sees the private level of workaday bourgeois life as that on which the rendering unto Caesar goes on, and the great rational conversations as belonging to a broader, more public, less self-interested sphere.


(And that's where you have to make another note, that the reason you're avoiding calling them "humanist" conversations is that that conflation in fact gets made too hastily and much. There is an enlightenment humanism, to be sure. But there's also the humanism of what we now call the humanities, as opposed to the sciences, and the great classificatory project of the 18th century is kind of on the pocket-protector side of that divide in ways. And then we start to think about the ways in which humanism aligns with religion, and how we all to often elide those when we treat as given the idea that those are oppositional. Not that I'm saying religion and science are opposed either. It's complicated. "Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.")


Phew! This review is coming off the rails. Allow me to backtrack to "misguided". The idea of a life-cyclical rhetoric of civilization--that humanity, like individuals--moves from "childhood" to "adulthood" in measurable ways and over a timeframe roughly referrable to as "history" is of course fascinating, but if we're meant to take it seriously as an intellectual proposition, as Foucault here does, I wanna note that it's also ludicrous? Like this flailing mess of persons is reducible to a chugging linear narrative. Aude sapere is a slogan and a challenge, not an explanatory model. I didn't think that needed arguing, but here it might. (Although, again, I have to selfcaveat, because the whole idea that we're "beyond that" kind of simplistic positivism implies the same or another kind of simplistic positivism on my part. Paradoxology.)


The middle section is about Baudelaire and the modern person, as "'the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal'". In that sense, as I've thought before, the Romantic is just the modern--the flip side of Harold Bloom's old observation that the Romantic era never ended is Baudelaire talking about "man's indispensable revolt against himself". The nineteenth century is when the episteme becomes a chronotope (I think that's the douchiest possible way to say it). The postmodern and the Enlightenment have interesting commonalities in that sense--if modernity is characterized by production, forward motion, and the active construction of the self as a heroic necessity, the postmodern and the Enlightenment are excavation, atemporality--"enlightenment" to my ear is a state first and foremost, as opposed to progress, a process, and postmodern scepticism about progress is too boring to bring up here. And wouldn't you say that the self or "human nature" in the 18th century is being revealed rather than constructed? And that the key postmodern technique of construction is consumption, not production?


but here's the thing: Foucault doesn't actually have much to say about it? And what he does is pretty incoherent, and not all that interesting? Baudelaire gives us in an image what I've tried to yammerhammer out here: the key figure of modernity is the dandy, who he opposes to the flaneur (who I think can be described as the key figure of postmodernity--him or the marketing exec). Doesn't that just say it all? And instead of taking that up, Foucault futzes around with Western exceptionalism (Deleuze was bad for this too. Something about those French poststructuralists. Too much Hegel in their coffee; they can't let go of the idea that we're special). He also, in vague language, lays out the same grand epistemological project that, the more I read of the guy, he seems to spend more time laying out than actually working on. "You know what I'm gonna do, man, when I get some money, I'm gonna design a Theory of Everything that's solid gold. And 20 feet tall!"


I mean, I get it. I like having big ideas more than following through on systematizing them too. But after a while it wears thin, and it's late and you're tired and people have heard it all before. I think it was late when Foucault wrote this, and the second half is not good for much. Time would be better spent reading Baudelaire, I ween. ( )