Page 119 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

What matters is not the epistemological problem of truth, but
rather the sociological problem of the fit between new ways of
knowing and new institutional practices. This earlier institutional
emphasis was temporarily superseded by a more deliberate focus
on discourse as such, both in The Order of Things, first published
in 1966 as Les Mots et les Choses, and in The Archaeology of Knowl-
edge, first published in 1969 (Foucault, 1973a; Foucault, 1972).
Here Foucault defined the objects of his inquiry as ‘discursive
formations’ or epistemes—in short, ways of knowing: systematic
conceptual frameworks that define their own truth criteria,
according to which particular knowledge problems are to be
resolved, and that are embedded in and imply particular
institutional arrangements. The central focus fell, unsurprisingly,
on a contrast between the classical episteme, which governed
knowledge in the seventeenth and in the early eighteenth century,
and the modern episteme, which developed from the late
eighteenth century and was 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 pursued a typically structuralist strategy of
demystification towards, for example, modern medicine and
modern psychiatry. And his approach was clearly theoretically
anti-humanist. Thus the strength of the new sciences of psycho-
analysis and structural anthropology consisted in their ability ‘to
do without the concept of man... they dissolve man’ (Foucault,
1973a, p. 379). One very interesting essay of Foucault’s quite
specifically took up Barthes’ theme of the death of the author and
sought to explain authorship by its various institutional uses
(Foucault, 1977). Finally, we should add that Foucault’s earlier
writings were also deeply positivist in inspiration. Given his
obvious animus towards modern science, his persistent attempt
to demystify and relativise ‘scientific knowledge’, this might well
appear the strangest of observations. And yet this vast archaeol-
ogy—a history of previous epistemes, no less—was unthinkable

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