ABSTRACT
In the light of Michel Foucault's objects of study it seems a bit absurd to delimit authors own work to discursive texts. Foucault had argued from early on that the language of the modern sciences has allowed people to reflect upon themselves as objects of knowledge. This chapter suggests that rhetorical consciousness comes into being with the discursive practices of the social and scientific engineers of the eighteenth century. The hostility between rhetorical criticism and the sciences was at the center of a recent row caused by the physicist Alan D. Sokal, who had put some decon-struction, psychoanalysis, and quantum physics in his processor and cooked it up. A biology that conceptualizes cooperation and the importance of individual sexual reproduction offers distinctly different rhetorical and political possibilities. The chapter suggests that any theory which takes the consequences of its critical quality seriously has to consider how and where it can make its mark in practice.
