Listics

Jeff Ward takes a swing…  and a miss!

There’s a fine aesthetic afoot here in blogaria, and people like Ward and Woods reflect a lot of truth and beauty here.  A few days ago however, Jeff Ward let his critical sense, or perhaps “non-sense,” get in the way of his creativity and presentation. 

One of the topics of discussion in the Foucault Seminar this week was: “What does Foucault mean by sexuality?” I found a fairly concise answer from Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermenutics.

The historical form of discourse and practice which Foucault labels “sexuality” turns on an unmooring of sex from alliance. Sexuality is an individual matter: it concerns hidden private pleasures, dangerous excesses for the body, secret fantasies; it came to be seen as the very essence of the individual human being and the core of personal identity. It was possible to know the secrets of one’s body and mind through the mediation of doctors, psychiatrists, and others to whom one confessed one’s private thoughts and practices. This personalization, medicalization, and signification of sex which occurred at a particular historical time is, in Foucault’s terms, the deployment of sexuality. (171)

Prior to “rationalization,” sex was tied primarily to issues of property rather than identity. Customs regarded as kinship— alliances, inheritance, matters of bride-price, etc.— reflect concern over economic exchange, rather than the constitution of identity. Thinking about this opposition, it occurred to me that there is a quality to “sexuality” which neither of these attitudes deals with— the persistence of the entertainment value of sex.

I think Jeff and Michel (or at least Michel’s acolytes) are a little slipshod here in the service of “rhetorical discourse.”  Besides offering sweeping generalizations that aren’t particularly meaningful or true, they seem to be confusing sex with marriage.  Then Jeff drives on to confuse sex with “entertainment.”  Burp.  Is this a case of a blogger stroking it in the service of post modern conformity?

I recently posted in its entirety Florian Cramer’s interview with Connie Sollfrank.  As an effort to add value, I provided a lot of links that will hopefully add context for the person who hasn’t been following the emergence of cyberfeminism over the past six or eight years.   

A critical reading of Sollfrank shows that she’s comfortable enough around self absorbed and emotionally distanced critics, but that she sees a lot of humor in the attempts to classify her work in such an outmoded context as so-called post modernism.  At every turn, when Cramer tries to impose the tired old aesthetics framed by these latter day sophists, you can see Sollfrank politely dodging his inept and blunt attempts to pull her into the tent.

Jeff is a gen-x student of rhetoric so he is tied to a curriculum that requires a sensititivity to the recently deceased post modern movement.  I hope he moves beyond it in time to advance his understanding.