French intellectual celebs from the period only started talking postmodernism in the 70s and 80s, after Anglos started asking them about it!
the idea itself is largely derived from Fredric Jameson's writings on it in the 1980s. he characterizes it primarily as a flattening of emotional and historical affect such that all time periods represented in culture fundamentally partake of a liberal market-oriented ideological framework. in that sense, Foucault can be seen as paradigmatic through his willful 'rewriting' of the historical archive.
Foucault's biggest inspirations were Nietzsche, where Foucault gets the basic notion of power's universal systematicity (everything is already/can be articulated as a master/slave relation); and Heidegger, for whom the core essence of Being was always and eternally retreating from sight. combine these two notions and you get someone endlessly searching for a power he knows is screwing him but which he can't see or hear or touch. and combine THAT with generally declining career prospects for left-leaning Anglos studying continental philosophy... yes i'd say you have yourself a personality type.
great comments and replies in this thread! one thing that it really brings to light for me is that unfortunately, a lot of us in the West just aren't conditioned to receive continental thought. for us academic disciplines are supposed to have specific empirical domains to whose technical development they have a historical mission to contribute. for continentals in the 60s and 70s, that very notion of "missionness" was in question, especially for a discipline like philosophy which had historically partnered as much with labor as with capital.
very good take here, and it gets to the heart of the issue: Chomsky comes out of the analytic tradition where the goal is to rigorously explain and define everything that can't quite be pinned down by mathematical symbolization. French intellectual traditions owe way more to existentialism and phenomenology, where the goal is rather to understand experiences in new, historically appropriate ways. the latter partakes, even where Foucault, for instance, is apparently undertaking a historical analysis, far more of poetic language, because the thinking is "we here in history are disclosing the historically unthought that everyone before us couldn't see"
yes. the point of my post was that Foucault, rightly or wrongly, has a clear delineation of what counts as fact and what counts as Fact. we can freely debate the ideological implications of THAT division. but he does not - and this is my point - throw the baby of reliable objective reference out with the bathwater of ideological knowledge formation.
the idea itself is largely derived from Fredric Jameson's writings on it in the 1980s. he characterizes it primarily as a flattening of emotional and historical affect such that all time periods represented in culture fundamentally partake of a liberal market-oriented ideological framework. in that sense, Foucault can be seen as paradigmatic through his willful 'rewriting' of the historical archive.