History Bump

White, Hayden. “Foucault Decoded.” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978, 230-260.

Foucault sees Structuralist treatment of human phenomena as a consciousness of the “imprisonment” imposed on disciplines by the discourse modes within which they operate (231). Concepts like “man”, “labor”, and “culture” which seem “real” are actually empty vessels. The overarching figurative and structural nature of the mode of discourse controls the meanings, and the methods of discovering meaning, that are available. Attempts to uncover meaning are meaning-making games whose rules are already set, and whose outcomes are inherent in the structure of the game (231-232). Words are seen as both transparent and value-neutral, but also as capable of representing other things. The latter sets them apart as if they were not also, themselves, things in the world. Because words are privileged, they cannot be value-neutral. Because they are things-themselves, they cannot represent other things completely.

The world is neither orderly nor disorderly; it simply is (233). Human consciousness simply exists; but consciousness imposes categories to create a world which exists in order and disorder. Language must constitute organization both in conception in the mind and in perception of the world (233,235). In order to interrupt the historian’s game of temporal order in historical narrative, Foucault proposes “transcription” to permit discontinuous consideration of historical materials (233,234), interrupting historical narrative, focusing on the gaps between epistemic domains (234).

Foucault resists creating any sort of progress narrative (235) or other explanatory strategy (236). Different epistemes license different objects of study, different sets of discourse modes, and even different relationships between objects which are able to be represented by language (236). General categories and events only gain factual status when they are included in what can be named and analysed (237), within a domain which offers an explanatory myth (238). Comparison, typology, causality, and the worldview are rejected; the preordering mode of discourse licenses them as explanatory after the fact (238-9). Inclusion in the explainable implies the rejection of the inexpressible (239). Inquiry into a set of formalization’s organizational strategies identifies the modes of discourse and epistemological grounds within which they are sanctioned (240), delimiting “reality” (241). The overarching mythos of each epoch may be metaphor, metonymy and so on. As the explanatory adequacy of an epistemology is stretched new epistemic grounds for understanding may come to the fore (eg in 241-245), but not (as it was for Vico) in a cyclical repetition in a set order.

The social sciences, because they rely on the validity of their modes of discourse, don’t see that they are contained within the walls of those discourses (251). For example, the history of medicine narrates progressively more enlightened treatment for insanity, but transcription-interrupted narrative (245-249) reveals internally unrelated definitions for “insanity” in different eras, licensed by different political exigencies and licensing different treatment of people so marked. Foucault considers both privilege and exclusion from outside the boundary modes of discourse within which terms and their meanings are generated (249).

White sees in Foucault’s explanatory system the same poetic theory of transformation that Vico set out in corsi and recorsi: a system of metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and irony, succeeding each other (354). Foucault’s program, however, is not only to make sense of the unfamiliar but also to challenge what is known, to accept “mysteries and obscurities” (257). In the end, White classifies Foucault with the Eschatological Structuralists, who consentrate “on the ways in whcihc structures of consciousness actually conceal the reality of the world” (259).