metonymy4u

Much of Foucault’s cultural critique centers on an archeology of form vs. function; as models for understanding human experience. These existential (explanatory) models changed significantly in post-Enlightenment Europe. The industrial revolution, Darwinian biology, the ascendancy of liberal republicanism—-all of these reshuffled the deck on human understanding. Whereas Adam Smith replaced formal economies of need and simple exchanges with a functional analysis of labor and capital, Darwinians replaced aesthetic appreciation of form with a functional genealogy of competition and reductive selection. I think Foucault’s point is simply that this had an effect on our view of ourselves. Perhaps salutary, perhaps not. But the dethroning of human aesthetic exceptionalism had far reaching implications that we have thus far failed to thoroughly interrogate. And perhaps—who knows?—to overcome?