ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault (1926-84), like Barthes, made a transition from initially structuralist to eventually poststructuralist ideas. Throughout, he was exclusively concerned with historical investigations, centring on the changing nature of knowledge and the creation of categories of outsiders in society. His studies counter the regular accusation that structuralism cannot comprehend history and change. In this first section we consider his first four major books, which together make up what might-and against his objectionsbe called his structuralist phase: Madness and Civilisation (1967), TheBirth of the Clinic (1973), The Order of Things (1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). They form a kind of quartet centred mainly upon fundamental changes in the nature of thought in Western Europe in the period leading up to present times. They deal with the way the order of the world is conceived and how thought makes connections between the things in the world. However, a note of caution: it is possible to exaggerate the continuity between these studies. It is worth noting that Foucault’s own attempts at linking them were made retrospectively and in a manner that suggests this unification was somewhat sardonic rather than fully serious. In the fourth, methodology volume, The Archaeology of Knowledge, the systematic formulation is something of a self-caricature; perhaps it is an at least partially parodic exercise in the vein of systematic, abstract theorising, an approach eschewed in the other three volumes. Ostensibly, the three preceding historical studies depend on certain key concepts, particularly ‘archaeology’, ‘episteme’ and ‘discursive formation’, but these ideas enter into the historical analysis progressively, and the notion of discursive formation in particular is only developed in any thorough way in the retrospective Archaeology. None the less, for ease of presentation, we will begin with the last book of the four and consider the set of abstract concepts presented there. The central question concerns their relationship to Foucault’s largely debunking purposes, which mainly aim to provide a new, structuralist way of writing the history of ideas.
