padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
that's all very interesting as well as helpful, thxI was originally thinking post modernism as Jameson's 'cultural logic of late capital,' so social atomization, low point of collective power, high point of labor alienation, all consuming nature of the market and etc. Deleuze is always talking, in ways I haven't completely parsed through yet, that the era were in was always just on the horizon, always pushed back and resisted against by previous societies.
that's exactly why I'm trying to acquire, bit by bit, a real grounding in this stuff, to have those kinds of concepts casually in my grasp instead so I can spend less time feeling like I'm groping around half-blind in a murky twilight
the Deleuze point especially - does he draw on any specific historic examples and/or make comparisons?
because I do have a bit of a history background and it certainly jives with what I know about history - the long record of peasant rebellion, for example, from famous large-scale events like 1381, the Jacquerie, and Engels' favorite, the German Peasants War, to lower-scale resistance to social control that was part of the fabric of medieval life. the multivolume history of the 100 Years War that I'm (still) reading frequently returns to the extreme difficulty of the French and English monarchies in getting their subjects to pay taxes to fund their war efforts (nervos belli, pecuniam infinitum), especially for things that weren't an immediate local concern. and Foucault's historical work is clearly related - trying to uncover how we arrived at where are, how that resistance was subdued. there was a large shift in historiography beginning in the 60s toward social history (or as Marxists put it "people's history"), preceded by the French Annales School, which was a definite influence on Foucault's approach to history.