ABSTRACT
In a precision and elaboration of certain key Foucaldian notions, Timothy J. Reiss has argued, in The Discourse of Modernism, that at any given time or in any given place, one discursive model or theory prevails and thus “provides the conceptual tools that make the majority of human practices meaningful” (1982, 11). However, this dominant theoretical model at the same time represses or suppresses an equally potent discursive practice, a practice which gradually works to subvert the theory by revealing its inherent contradictions. At that point, certain forms of the practice itself begin to become tools of analysis. Since the seventeenth century the prevailing theoretical model has been the one variously labelled as “positivist,” “capitalist,” “experimentalist,” “historicist,” or simply “modern.” Reiss calls it by another name: analytico-referential discourse. His reason for choosing this label is that he sees in this model the coincidence of the order of language (and other signifying systems) with
Its suppressed practice is that of “the enunciating subject as discursive activity” (42).
