Critical Theory Poststructuralism And The Social Context

In Critical Theory and Poststructuralism Mark Poster enacts a dialogue between the French poststructuralists, especially Michel Foucault, and the tradition of critical social theory as developed by the Frankfurt School and by other Continental theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre. These confrontations between poststructuralists who represent "postmodern" thought and theorists committed the "modern" project of the Enlightenment is, according to Poster, of urgent importance because of the failure of critical theory to sustain a convincing critique of today's radically changed social formation.

In this path-breaking work, Mark Poster highlights the nature of the newly emerging forms of social life, in the current era. The flexibility of language which the computer allows makes the written word less certain and less concrete. The result of these changes, Poster argues, is a new communication experience, an interaction between humankind and a new kind of reality. Poster discusses the addictive properties of television and arcade video games, as well as the surveillance possibilities which the new communication technologies offer the state. His wide-ranging analysis incorporates the new language-based theories of mathematics, philosophy and literature in Wiener, Derrida and Barthes, among others. This work is a major new contribution to the debate surrounding the future of electronically mediated-experiences.

'Poster has begun to theorize a very significant topic.

"Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation" analyses the major themes and developments in a period that brought continental philosophy to the forefront of scholarship in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines and that set the agenda for philosophical thought on the continent and elsewhere from the 1960s to the present. Focusing on the years 1960-1984, the volume examines the major figures associated with poststructuralism and the second generation of critical theory, the two dominant movements that emerged in the 1960s: Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Habermas. Influential thinkers such as Serres, Bourdieu, and Rorty, who are not easily placed in "standard" histories of the period, are also covered. Beyond this, thematic essays engage with issues as diverse as the Nietzschean legacy, the linguistic turn in continental thinking, the phenomenological inheritance of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the influence of psychoanalysis, the emergence of feminist thought and a philosophy of sexual difference, the renewal of the critical theory tradition, and the importation of continental philosophy into literary theory.

Volume 1 is concerned with the theoretical and conceptual framework for reflecting about values, culture and education and thus provides an introduction to the series as a whole. It provides state and policy level analysis across the world.

Reinvigorating critical theory by extending its range and its intellectual trajectories through strategies of inclusiveness that respect and build on parallel traditions, the authors reinterpret Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger in relation to central figures and themes of critical theory.