Page 95 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

institutional arrangements. The central focus falls, unsurprisingly, on
a contrast between the classical episteme, which governed knowledge
in the 17th and in the early 18th century, and the modern episteme,
which develops from the late 18th century, and which is only now
coming to be challenged by a putatively postmodern, in fact structuralist,
episteme.
The structuralism of this entire project should be readily apparent.
Despite Foucault’s profession as historian, his work remained radically
anti-historicist, unable either to judge between epistemes, or to explain
the shift from one to another (hence the characteristically structuralist
sense of change as discontinuity). Moreover, Foucault pursues a typically
structuralist strategy of demystification towards, for example, modern
medicine and modern psychiatry. And his approach is, of course,
theoretically anti-humanist. Thus, the strength of the new sciences of
psychoanalysis and structural anthropology consists in their ability
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“to do without the concept of man…they dissolve man”. One very
interesting essay of Foucault’s quite specifically takes up Barthes’s
theme of the death of the author, and seeks to explain authorship by
its various institutional uses. Finally, we should add, Foucault’s earlier
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writings are also deeply positivist in inspiration. Given Foucault’s
very obvious animus towards modern science, his persistent attempt
to demystify and relativize “scientific knowledge”, this might well
appear the strangest of observations. And yet, this vast archaeology—
a history of previous epistemes, no less—is unthinkable except as a
knowledge of an object produced by a subject external to it, which is
precisely the positivist, and structuralist, position.
At the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault confesses,
uncomfortably, that his discourse “is avoiding the ground on which it
could find support”. The embarrassment is distinctive, but not the
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problem. For Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, Saussure and Barthes, as
for Foucault, the central repressed problem had been throughout that
of how to guarantee the scientificity of a knowledge that was itself,
according to the logics of their own argument, either social or intra-
discursive. No solution to this problem seems possible from within
structuralism itself. Hence the move by both Barthes and Foucault,
during the 1970s, toward different versions of post-structuralism.
Hence, too, the meteoric rise to intellectual pre-eminence, during the
same period, of Jacques Derrida.

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