Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History

Author(s): Allan Megill

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 451-503
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History

Allan Megill
Australian National Universitv

I
There is no doubt that our century has witnessed a widespread
rebellion against historical consciousness, and that in consequence of
this rebellion history can no longer lay claim to the central intellec-
tual position to which it aspired in the nineteenth century, when
"iorthodox" historiography-by which I mean the tradition of pro-
fessional academic historiography initiated by Ranke-came into
being. If, as is suggested by the work of a multitude of poets and
philosophers and by the reflections of some historians, we are
cun-ently undergoing a crisis of historical consciousness, it is clear
that the crisis has been going on for some time. Already, in the
works of various late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers,
the preoccupations and procedures of professional historians were
being roundly condemned,' while the First World War and the
devastating events that followed, by destroying the intellectual re-
spectability of the idea of progress, knocked the foundations out
from under the historicist assumptions that had dominated
nineteenth-century thought and thus turned the rebellion against
historical consciousness into a general revolt.2 Under the aegis of
the ideas of progress and of organic or dialectical develupment-
under the aegis, that is, of ideas stressing the continuity between
past and present-it was easy to believe that history was a vitally
important discipline; under the reign of discontinuity the inclination
is to turn toward other disciplines more relevant in their subject
matter or more creative in their practice. The characteristic response
of twentieth-century historians to the threat of history's potential
irrelevance has been to attempt to preserve its vitality by extending
' For examples, see Hayden White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory
5 (1966): 111-34.
2
On nineteenth-century historicism and its decline, see Maurice Mandelbaum,
History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore,
1971), pp. 41-138 and 369-70. I use the word "historicism" in Mandelbaum's
sense, to denote the widespread nineteenth-century belief that a thing can be prop-
erly understood only if one views it in terms of the place that it occupies within some
larger process of development.

[Journal of Modern History 51 (September 1979): 451-5031

(?) 1979 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/79/5103-0038$04.03
452 Allan Megill
the range of its subject matter. Meinecke, for example, believed that
historical scholarship could regain its former intellectual impact by
reaching out toward the history of ideas, while the founders of the
Annales school, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, focused their hopes
on the reconstruction of the broad socioeconomic processes of the
past and on a methodological rapprochement with social scientists
interested in the study of the same processes within contemporary
society. But if these extensions in the subject matter of history
meant the modification or abandonment of the mainly political focus
of earlier "orthodox" historians, they did not represent a fundamen-
tal departure from the general assumptions on which orthodox his-
toriography had been founded.
The same cannot be said, however, of the brilliant, speculative,
and in some ways deeply disturbing writings of the contemporary
French historian Michel Foucault (b. 1926), whose historiographical
aims are very different from those animating orthodox historians.
Such historians as Meinecke, Febvre, and Bloch wrote with the
intention of revitalizing a historiographical tradition that they saw as
basically sound, even though, in their view, narrowness and lack of
imagination had prevented historians from realizing the full potential
of their craft. Foucault's aim-or at any rate one of his aims-is the
demolition of that tradition. For Foucault, who since 1970 has been
"professor of history and systems of thought" at the College de
France, is one representative of a radically antihistorical trend in
recent thought-a trend that, under the inadequate labels of "struc-
turalism" and "poststructuralism," has been a highly important part
of the French intellectual scene over the past fifteen or twenty
years. Among other things, many of the writers who are part of this
trend (it is hardly coherent enough to be called a movement) have
vehemently attacked historical modes of apprehension and under-
standing. Most English-speaking historians will have at least a pass-
ing acquaintance with structuralism; that is to say, they will at least
know that something called structuralism exists. They may also
know that the thinker who is in large measure its fountainhead, the
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, advocated, in opposition to the
largely diachronic, historical linguistics that had hitherto predomi-
nated, a synchronic linguistics that would concern itself not with the
evolution of language over time but rather with the structure of
language at a given point in time.3 They may likewise know that an
3 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale (first published, posthu-
mously, 1916), translated as Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and
Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin
(London, 1974).
 Foucault, Struicturalism, and the Ends of History 453
important figure in the structuralism of the 1960s, the ethnologist
Claude Levi-Strauss, contrasted the magical and totemic thought of
savages, which in its refusal to believe that anything really changes
is radically antihistorical, with the thought of modern man, and that
he stressed the richness and power of the former while suggesting
that the benefits of modern or "hot" societies-societies that are
historical, that are always on the move-are hardly worth the price.4
And finally, if they are truly up-to-date they may be aware of the
poststructuralist literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida,
whose best-known work, De la Grammatologie, reads like an ab-
surdist parody of everything that has ever gone under the name of
intellectual history.5 It is via Foucault, however, that orthodox
historians can best come to grips with the antihistorical trend in
recent thought-with those thinkers who, far from regretting a crisis
of historical consciousness, welcome and promote it. For whereas
Saussure is a linguist, Levi-Strauss an ethnologist, and Derrida a
critic and philosopher, Foucault claims emphatically to be a histo-
rian,6 and his enterprise closely approximates, at least in its outward
form, the enterprise of orthodox historians.
Foucault's first historical work, published in 1961, was his His-
toire de la folie, which dealt with the history of madness from the
late Middle Ages to the present day. This was followed by Nais-
sance de la clinique, which discussed the development of medicine in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by Les Most
et les choses, by far Foucault's most substantial and important work
of the 1960s, which presented an account of the history of Western
thought from the Renaissance onward. These three works were
summed up, defended, and modified in a methodological treatise,
L'Arche'ologie du savoir, a work that was little read but that has
nevertheless gained something of a cult following. Then came a
six-year period during which Foucault published no full-length books
at all, a period of relative silence broken in 1975 with the appearance
of Sturveiller et punir,7 a study of modes of punishment and disci-
I See esp.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, translated under the same title by
John and Doreen Weightman (London, 1973), and La Pensee sauvage (1962), trans-
lated anonymously as The Savage Mind (London, 1966). In the final chapter of The
Savage Mind, 'History and Dialectic," Levi-Strauss attacks the idea of historical
process and argues that history is necessarily discontinuous.
s Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), first
published in 1967 as De la Grammnatologie.
6 See, most recently, "Foucault: Non au sexe roi" (Foucault interviewed by
Bernard-Henri Levy), Nouvel Observateur (mars 12-21, 1977), pp. 92+, translated as
"Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault," by David J. Parent, Telos,
no. 32 (Summer 1977), pp. 152-61.
7 Michel Foucault, Folie et
deraison: Histoire de la folie td l'ge classique (Paris,
454 Allan Megill
pline from the eighteenth century to the present. This was quickly
followed by the publication in 1976 of the first volume of an
ambitious Histoire de la sexualite which, when completed, is to
include six studies: La Volonte de savoir, which serves as an
introduction to the whole work; La Chair et le corps; La Croisade
des enfants; La Femme, la mere et l'hysterique; Les Pervers; and
Populations et races. And beyond this we can expect to see yet
another work, entitled Pouvoir de la verite,8 which will deal, pre-
sumably, with the theme of the relationship between knowledge and
power that has become pervasive in Foucault's more recent work. In
short, Foucault is a highly productive writer, whose already sub-
stantial corpus promises to be supplemented by even more works in
the future. Furthermore, the writings that Foucault has produced so
far have been, almost without exception, both original and compel-
ling in nature. It is reasonable to expect that Foucault's prolific
output, combined with the brilliance and topicality of what he
produces, will make him a figure of considerable influence; indeed,
some journalists are calling him "the new Sartre."9 Certainly, if he
can bring his planned works to fruition he will have produced an
imposing corpus.
Yet orthodox historians-at least in the English-speaking world-
have either ignored Foucault, regarding his work as totally irrelevant
to their own, or have summarily dismissed him. For when the
orthodox historian attempts to read Foucault he finds himself con-
fronted by serious difficulties-difficulties of which historically illit-
erate readers will be entirely oblivious. Quite naturally, the historian
turns to Foucault's works, as he turns to more orthodox works of
history, in the hope that they will contribute to this own understand-
ing of the historical past. In practice, this means that he expects
them to add themselves, without creating excessive difficulties,
without behaving in a noisy or unruly fashion, to the mass of
historical knowledge that he already possesses. But typically it will
1961), translated-in an abridged version-as Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason by Richard Howard (New York, 1967); Naissance de
la clinique: Une archeologie du regard medical (Paris, 1963), translated as The Birth
of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception by A. M. Sheridan Smith
(London, 1973); Les Mots et les choses: Une archeologie des sciences humaines
(Paris, 1966), translated anonymously as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (New York, 1970); L'Archeologie du savoir (Paris, 1969), translated
as The Archaeology of Knowledge by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1976);
Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975) translated as Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977).
8 Promised in Michel Foucault, La Volonte de savoir (Paris, 1976), p. 79n.
9 Ferdinando Scianna, "La nuova sessualita: Rivoluzionaria analisi del nuovo
Sartre," L'Europeo (febbraio 18, 1977), pp. 49-53.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 455
take only a few pages of reading to convince him that something is
amiss and to generate in him a feeling of genuine puzzlement. For he
will encounter what from his point of view appear to be three
distinct sorts of statements. He will find, in the first place, state-
ments that he simply cannot understand. Second, he will find state-
ments that strike him as (at worst) plausible descriptions of, or (at
best) brilliant insights into, the historical field in question. And
finally, he will find statements that he is convinced can only be
mistaken. At this point, puzzlement turns to irritation, with the
historian-reader most likely concluding that to read Foucault is a
waste of time. Should the historian-reader persist-and he almost
certainly will not-he may come out of his reading with mixed views
about Foucault, as Keith Michael Baker does in asserting, of Les
Mots et les choses, that "Foucault's analysis of the underlying
epistemological procedures of Enlightenment thought is as brilliantly
suggestive as his characterization of the nature of this episteme is
confusing,"10 or as Roger Hahn does, in pronouncing Foucault's
Naissance de la clinique to be a "terrible book": "Terribly annoy-
ing because of the impressionistic style, the faulty construction, the
willful effort to create new concepts by manipulating traditional
language, and the forced desire continually to transcend the banal";
yet at the same time "terribly perceptive and suggestive, in ways
that are hard to express."" But it is perhaps more likely that he will
come out of his reading uniformly hostile and ready to second the
entirely negative judgments of Foucault that one finds expressed in,
for example, George Huppert's attack on Foucault's reading of the
Renaissance,12 or G. S. Rousseau's attack on Foucault's reading of
the Enlightenment. 13 Indeed, only one English-speaking historian,
Hayden White, has been clearly sympathetic toward Foucault's
work. In a long article published in History and Theory in 1973,
White attempted a wide-ranging interpretation of the rhetorical or
"tropological" substratum of Les Mots et les choses,14 while his
brief review of Surveiller et punir, published in the American Histor-

10 Keith Michael Baker,

Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathemat-
ics (Chicago, 1975), pp. vii-viii.
I Roger Hahn, Review of The Birth of the Clinic, American Journal of Sociology
80 (May 1975): 1503-4.
12 George Huppert, 'Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault," History and
Theory 13 (1974): 191-207.
13 G. S. Rousseau, "Whose Enlightenment? Not Man's: The Case of Michel
Foucault," Eighteenth-Century Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 1972): 238-55.
14 Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground," History and
Theory 12 (1975): 23-54; also available in White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in
Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 230-60.
456 Allan Megill
ical Review in 1977, marked the first appearance of any of
Foucault's books in the review columns of an English-language
historical journal.15
The difficulties that orthodox historians have had in coming to
terms with Foucault suggest that something more far reaching is
involved here than a disagreement, between Foucault and his histo-
rian critics, over individual points of historical interpretation.
Rather, these difficulties suggest that Foucault's enterprise is funda-
mentally different from the enterprise of orthodox historians, and
that simply to condemn Foucault's portrayal of the past as mistaken
or simply to praise that portrayal as insightful represents a mistaken
attempt to assimilate Foucault to the structure of orthodox historiog-
raphy. They suggest, in short, that the historiographical criticism of
Foucault must concern itself with Foucault's general historiographi-
cal presuppositions before it turns to deal with his historical analy-
ses. As White points out, to judge Foucault according to conven-
tional historiographical standards is to commit a "category mis-
take,"16 for Foucault is not engaged in conventional historiography;
on the contrary, he "writes 'history' in order to destroy it, as a
discipline, as a mode of consciousness, and as a mode of (social)
existence."' 7 Hearing this, the orthodox historian might be tempted
to reject any meeting with Foucault as pointless, given the manifest
lack of common ground between Foucault and his orthodox counter-
parts. But such a judgment would be just as misguided as the
attempt to interpret Foucault as if he were simply another orthodox
historian. For besides informing the orthodox historian about a
writer of great potential influence representing an important strand in
contemporary thought, a reflection on Foucault's enterprise will also
serve to highlight the character of orthodox historiography. It is with
these thoughts in mind that I propose in this paper to investigate and
criticize the foundations of Foucault's historiography.

While it would be a mistake to attribute to orthodox historiog-

raphy a paradigmatic unity of the sort that T. S. Kuhn has pointed
to in the natural sciences, it is nevertheless true that orthodox
historians do adhere to what J. H. Hexter has called the "reality
IS Hayden White, Review of Surveiller et punir, American Historical Review 82
(1977): 605-6.
16 Ibid.
17 White, "Foucault Decoded," p. 26. Cf. Edith Kurzweil, "Michel Foucault:
Ending the Era of Man," Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory
4, no. 3 (Fall 1977); 395-420: "In America the historian is a relic, but France's
Michel Foucault, a historian of scientific thought, has become a prophet. Of course
he is not a conventional historian . . . " (p. 395).
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 457
rule," the rule that historians cannot tell just any story about the
past but must rather tell "the best and most likely story that can be
sustained by the relevant extrinsic evidence." The historian seeks,
in short, to render "the best account he can of the past as it really
was. i 18 To be sure, the historian's belief in the objective and
realistic nature of his enterprise is tempered by his recognition that
all accounts of the past contain an irreducible and inexpungeable
element of interpolation-that is, an irreducible and inexpungeable
element of subjectivity; but he holds that it is the explanatory
element in the historical account, not the interpretative element, that
is basic, admitting a legitimate role for interpretation only when it
becomes necessary to fill in the gaps in a fragmentary historical
record or (conversely) to exclude certain facts, or categories of
facts, where the historical record is too copious.19 In short, orthodox
historians adhere to a "discovery" view of the past, holding that the
past is there, a field of real entities and forces waiting for the
historian to find; and they reject the opposing "construction" view
of the past, which holds that, far from discovering and reporting the
past, historians must be regarded as constructing or creating it.20
In accepting an irreducible interpretative element in history, or-
thodox historians recognize that the historical account is in part an
invention of the historian, but they see it as an invention that,
solidly grounded in the facts of history, rightly aspires to portray the
past "as it actually was." The present concerns and commitments of
the historian will enter into the historical account as part of its
necessarily interpretative element. Such concerns may, for example,
be especially important in suggesting problems for historical investi-
gation, as one can see time and time again in the history of modern
historiography. But the origin of a particular historical investigation
is separable, in the orthodox view, from its scholarly validity, the
historian having both the capacity and the duty to distance himself,
in his work, from present concerns. Perhaps the best expression of
this view is to be found in Hexter's essay, "The Historian and His
Day," in which he argues that the historian's commitment to the
accepted procedures of historical study, combined with an immer-
sion in the documents, enables him to attain a contact with the past

18 J. H. Hexter, "The Rhetoric of History," History and Theory 6 (1967): 3-13;

quotes from pp. 5 and 11.
19 As Hayden White points out, in "Interpretation in History," New Literary
History 4, no. 2 (Winter 1973): 281-314; also available in Tropics of Discourse, pp.
5 1-80.
20 On the distinction between these two views, see Jack W. Meiland, Scepticism
and Historical Knowledge (New York, 1965), pp. 3-4.
458 Allan Megill
that, in its immediacy, particularity, and vividness, rivals his contact
with the present.21
The orthodox historian is strongly committed, furthermore, to the
view that there is a clear distinction between getting things right and
getting things wrong. In his elementary concern with getting things
right, the orthodox historian signals his adherence to a view that has
dominated the historical profession since its birth in the nineteenth
century-namely, the view that history is at bottom a science,
capable of realistically apprehending the world and of discovering a
truth that is more than relative. Admittedly, historians are today less
confident about the scientific status of history than they were at the
end of the nineteenth century, but there still remains a basic com-
mitment to the ideal of scientific history. Indeed, one of the most
striking features of recent historiography has been its increasing
scientization as historians have come more and more to draw on the
concepts and methods of the social sciences.22 It is true that some
historians, most notably Hayden White, have argued that history is
founded on a poetic apprehension of the world that is entirely
prescientific in nature.23 But this is very much a minority position
which, in its assertion that the historical fact is really a poetic
factum, is in contradiction to the ingrained realism of the vast
majority of historians. For the orthodox historian, the evidence that
he has so laboriously discovered and assessed has a reality of its
own reflecting the reality of the past itself, and he sees his task as
the construction of a historical account that will explain and inter-
pret this actual past.
Foucault does not conform to the rough consensus on the nature
of historical investigation that I have just sketched out. On the
contrary, he stands in radical opposition to it. But the nature and
bearing of this opposition only become clear when one perceives the
connections between Foucault's view of history and his reading of
Nietzsche, who is undoubtedly the most severe critic that the
enterprise of orthodox historiography has ever encountered. I do not
mean to suggest that Foucault is nothing more than a follower of
Nietzsche; I do not wish to reduce the Foucaultian enterprise to the
earlier Nietzschean enterprise. Nevertheless, it is clear that

21 J. H. Hexter, "The Historian and His Day," in Reappraisals in History

(Lon-
don, 1961), pp. 1-13.
22 For insight into recent developments in historiography, see esp. Felix Gilbert and
Stephen R. Graubard (eds.), Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), and Georg
G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, Conn., 1975).
23 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore, 1973).
 Foucatult, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 459
Nietzsche has been the single most important influence on
Foucault's work, and Foucault himself makes no secret of the debt,
telling us in Les Mots et les choses, for example, that Nietzsche
"'marks the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can
begin thinking again; and he will no doubt continue for a long while
to dominate its advance.' '24 Yet Foucault's discovery of Nietzsche
was slow and halting. Though the mark of his reading of Nietzsche
is already present in his first book, Maladie mentale et psychologie,
published in 1954, it was to take almost twenty years more for him
to arrive at a conception of historical investigation that was
genuinely and thoroughly Nietzschean. Foucault began his historical
work with the intention of carrying out what he referred to as an
"'archaeology," using this word in the allegedly Kantian sense of
"the history of that which renders necessary a certain form of
thought. "25 Foucault's archaeology was, in essence, a hybrid and
unstable combination of conventionally historiographical concerns
with certain structuralist themes and preoccupations. The history of
Foucault's career as a historian has been the history of his move-
ment from a "Kantian" archaeology to a Nietzschean genealogy.
But the passage from archaeology to genealogy was delayed, I shall
argue, by his traversal of structuralism-a traversal that obscured,
both for him and for us, the true nature of his historical vocation.
The conflict, in the interior of the Foucaultian text, between struc-
ttiralism and antistructuralism, between Apollo and Dionysos,
even-if one will-between Plato and Nietzsche, has from all points
of view been the most interesting and most revealing theme in
Foucault's work to date. It is, furthermore, a theme that we must
grasp if we are to understand the changing presuppositions that have
underlain Foucault' s various historical writings.

Foucault himself has vehemently denied ever having been a struc-

turalist. For example, in the foreword to the English edition of Les
Mots et les choses Foucault tells us that "in France, certain half-
witted 'commentators' persist in labelling me a 'structuralist.' I have
been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of
the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural
analysis.' '26 It is entirely true that Foucault was never a structuralist

24 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 342.

25 Michel Foucault, "Monstrosities in Criticism," Diacritics: A Review of Contem-
porarv Criticism 1 (Fall 1971): 57-60; quote from p. 60.
26 The Order of Things, p. xiv; see also his "Monstrosities in Criticism," p. 58,
and the dialogue in The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 199-203.
460 Allan Megill
in any narrow construction of the term, but in a broader sense he
certainly was a structuralist-even though, as we shall see, there
was always a fundamentally antistructuralist element in his thought
as well. Foucault's vehement denial of structuralism comes down
ultimately to questions of terminology. For "structuralism" is a
word with so many meanings that it can hardly be said to have any
meaning at all,27 and its broad connotative penumbra has often been
permitted to substitute for the rigors of definition. Certainly, the
vaguely perceived contents of this shadowy world of meaning might
tend to suggest that the word "structuralism" fits, without further
qualification, the Foucaultian enterprise. Thus, it is well known that
structuralism is intimately tied up with language, and when one
looks at the Foucaultian text one will see that Foucault, too, is
deeply concerned with language. Indeed, Foucault's reflections on
language form the underlying theme of Les Mots et les choses. It is
well known that structuralism, in its search for a stable object of
investigation, concentrates on language, or langue, rather than on
the human speaker-a concentration that seems to be paralleled by
Foucault's attack on subjectivism and anthropologism. It is well
known that structuralism is synchronic rather than diachronic in
orientation, an orientation that is apparently paralleled by Foucault's
preference for discontinuity in history and by his refusal to explain
the transitions or "mutations" leading from one episteme to the
next. It is well known that structuralist analyses are articulated in
terms of "binary opposition"; and when one looks at Foucault one
finds-or seems to find-a massive and all-embracing opposition
between "the Same," dealt with in Les Mots et les choses, and "the
Other," dealt with in Histoire de la folie, Naissance de la clinique,
and Surveiller et punir. And finally, it is well known that struc-
turalism focuses on the concept of the sign, and when one looks at
the Foucaultian text one finds a pervasive interest in signs and their
permutations. Witness, for example, the chapter on "Signs and
Cases" in Naissance de la clinique ;28 witness also the close rela-
tionship between significatory change and epistemic change in Les
Mots et les choses.29
But these parallels, which in the wake of the publication of Les
Mots et les choses became journalistic commonplaces, betray a
27
As FranSois Wahl puts it: "Let's say it frankly: when people ask us about
structuralism, most of the time we don't know what they want to talk with us about"
(Oswald Ducrot et al., Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? [Paris, 1968], p. 9).
28 The Birth of the Clinic, pp. 88-106.
29
See, most important, The Order of Things, pp. 42-43. Note that, in a rare
blunder, the translator has rendered signifiant as "significant" rather than as "sig-
nifier. "
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 461
gross failure to attend to the subtleties of the Foucaultian text, and it
is little wonder that Foucault, confronted in the late 1960s by a
concerted attempt to confine him in a box marked "structuralism,"
should have reacted with angry repudiations of a term that he
himself had used to characterize his work. In arguing that there is a
structuralist element in the Foucaultian text I have, however, some-
thing more specific in mind than the almost meaningless parallels
mentioned above; when I say that Foucault was a structuralist in a
broad construction of the term, I do not mean to say that he was a
structuralist in a vague and intellectually sloppy construction of the
term. But what I do mean will become clear only through a careful
examination of the meanings of structuralism. There are, of course,
a variety of ways of "slicing" almost any synthetic concept, for
articulate general concepts tend to be articulated at more than one
point. But for our present purposes-and without denying the possi-
bility of other analyses-I wish to distinguish between a narrower
"'structuralism of the sign" and a broader "structuralism of struc-
ture," each of which may in turn be construed in both a strict and a
loose sense. The structuralism of the sign has its conceptual origins
in Saussure's Cours de linguistique ge'ne'rale and more specifically in
the Saussurean definition of the sign as the union of signifiant and
signifie. But the import of Saussurean structuralism can be variously
interpreted. Some analysts of the concept of structuralism adhere to
a relatively strict, ""linguistic" definition of the term, restricting it to
intellectual enterprises conforming rather closely to the outlines of
Saussurean and post-Saussurean linguistics. Other analysts adhere to
a looser, "'semiological" definition of the term, linking it not to
linguistics but to Saussure's proposal for a science of semiology that
would concern itself with the study of ""thelife of signs within social
life. " 30
Perhaps the most rigorous attempt to see structuralism in a strict,
linguistic sense is to be found in Philip Pettit's book, The Concept of
Structuralism: A Critical Analysis. 31 Structuralism, Pettit asserts,
and here all analysts of the structuralism of the sign would agree,
involves an attempt to extend certain Saussurean and post-
Saussurean analytical procedures beyond linguistics, applying them
to such areas as literary criticism, art criticism, social psychology,
social anthropology, and the analysis of "'cutomary arts" like fash-
ion and cuisine. But Pettit interprets the structuralist model of
language very narrowly, arguing that anyone who is extending this

30 de Saussure (n. 3 above), Introduction, chap. 3, sec. 3, p. 33.

3' Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Berkeley, 1975).
462 Allan Megill
model beyond linguistics may think of doing so in terms of three,
and only three, analogies: structural phonology (as in Jakobson),
generative syntax (as in Chomsky), and differential semantics (as
proposed by Pettit himself).32 Each of these analogies, Pettit argues,
requires that the rionlinguistic object being analyzed contain some
element that corresponds to the sentence in language. But since
none of the nonlinguistic objects upon which structural analysis has
been attempted in fact contains such an element, Pettit concludes
that the structuralist model, though it may have some heuristic value
in fields outside linguistics, does not in any proper sense "fit" any of
those fields.
Though Pettit mentions Foucault only in passing,33 preferring to
concentrate his attentions on Levi-Strauss, there is never any doubt
that Foucault does not conform to the kind of strict Saussurean
model that Pettit articulates. And indeed, the vaguely Saussurean
parallels, mentioned above, between the structuralism of Saussure
and the Foucaultian text turn out on further examination to be
almost entirely specious. True, Foucault's reflection on language is
an extremely important part of his work, but this reflection owes far
mnore to Mallarme (mediated through Blanchot and other French
literary critics) than it does to Saussure.34 It is true that Foucault
attacks subjectivism and anthropologism, but this is bound up with
his strong reaction against the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology
and of Sartrean existentialism and indicates a debt to Nietzsche, not
to Saussure.35 It is true that Foucault has tended to emphasize the
discontinuous in history, and that this has sometimes made it
appear-particularly in Les Mots et les choses-that he is engaged in
something that resembles, in its temporal orientation, Saussure's
synchronic linguistics. But once again the appearance is entirely
deceptive, for Foucault's emphasis on discontinuity is part of his
attack on subjectivism, "continuous history" being, in his view,
32 Ibid. p. 29.
3 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
34 For the Mallarmean theme in Foucault, see The Order of Things. esp. pp. 43-44,
81, 305-6, 382-84. On the importance of Blanchot for Foucault, see Raymond
Bellour, '-Deuxieme entretien avec Michel Foucault: Sur les faSons d'ecrire ['his-
toire," Les Lettres fran(aises, no. 1187 (juin 15-21, 1967), pp. 6-9: 'C'est Blanchot
qui a rendu possible tout discours sur la litterature" (p. 8). Foucault also tells us here
that 'I differ from those who are called structuralists in that I am not greatly
interested in the formal possibilities presented by a system such as language. Person-
ally, I am haunted rather by the existence of discourses, by the fact that utterances
have taken place.
35 Thus, Foucault sees Nietzsche as having been the first to awaken us from "the
anthropological sleep," the first to tear us free from 'the anthropological field" (The
Order of Things, pp. 340-43; see also pp. 306-7 and 322).
 Foicaiilt, Struicturalism, and the Ends of History 463
"the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the sub-
ject. '36 As for Foucault's alleged interest in binary opposition, the
fact is that though at a certain moment in his career Foucault was
attracted by the idea of constructing "a whole series of binary
divisions which in their own way would have re-minted the great
division 'reason-unreason' that I had tried to reconstitute with regard
to madness,"37 this idea was never really worked out, remaining an
entirely subsidiary theme in his oeuvre as a whole.
We are left, then, with our final parallel, the fact that the concept
of the sign, which is centrally important for Saussure and on whose
basis he wanted to construct semiology, also functions as an impor-
tant concept within the Foucaultian text. At this point we move from
the strict, linguistic reading of the structuralism of the sign to the
looser semiological reading. For, in fact, many of those who have
called themselves structuralists are far more interested in the science
whose outlines Saussure did not articulate than in the science whose
outlines he actually did articulate. Indeed, in recognition of this,
Pettit admits the rough interchangeability of the terms "semiology"
and "structuralism,"38 even though he goes on to discuss struc-
turalism in terms of a strictly linguistic model. But other analysts, in
their attempts to define the limits of structuralism, take Saussure's
semiological intentions more seriously. One such commentator is
Francois Wahl, whose essay, "La Philosophie entre l'avant et
l'apres du structuralisme" (included in the volume Qu'est-ce que le
structuralisme?), is an important attempt to come to grips with the
nature of the structuralist phenomenon. Like Pettit, Wahl identifies
structuralism and semiology, asserting that "under the name of
structuralism are grouped the sciences of the sign, of systems of
signs."'39 But unlike Pettit, he does not go on to assert that the
practice of a science of signs requires a strict conformity between
the structure of the object being analyzed and the structure of
language. On the contrary, Wahl is willing to allow the possibility of
structural analysis wherever the object being analyzed passes
through a structuring linguistic grid. For example, Wahl tells us that
"the most diverse facts of anthropology" can be the object of
structuralist analysis, "but only insofar as they pass through the
facts of language-that they are caught within the institution of a

36 The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 12.

37 Lucette Finas, 'Entretien avec Michel Foucault: 'Les rapports de pouvoir
passent a l'interieur des corps,' - Quinzaine litteraire 247 (janvier 1-15, 1977): 4-5;
quote from p. 5.
38 Pettit, p. 33.
39 Ducrot et al., p. 10.
464 Allan Megill
system of the type Signifiantlsignifie and lend themselves to a
communicative network-and that they receive from this their struc-
ture. "40 In short, structuralism, for Wahl, deals with structures; but
it deals with structures only insofar as they have acquired their
structure from their passage through a system of signs.
For Wahl, then, the sign is the absolutely critical defining element
in structuralism: where the sign is, there also is structuralism,
regardless of the absence of such linguistic elements as the sentence.
Thus, in attempting to distinguish what is "not yet" structuralism
from what is "no longer" structuralism, Wahl tells us that "wher-
ever the sign is not yet conceived as being in an absolutely funda-
mental position, thought has not yet taken note of structuralism.
Wherever the primacy of the sign is disputed, wherever the sign is
destroyed or deconstructed, thought is no longer in the orbit of
structuralism.' '14 On this reading of structuralism, where does
Foucault stand? Since Wahl's account of Foucault's relationship to
structuralism is based on a reading of Les Mots et les choses, a brief
summary of the general thesis of that work is here in order. The
book is set within the context, and between the limits, of an event
that is stunning in its gratuitousness, namely, the presence, retreat,
and return of language.42 The central protagonist of Les Mots et les
choses is "language"-by which Foucault means, not language in
the ordinary sense of the word, but rather language in a very
Mallarmean sense: that is, language insofar as it has an autonomous
and self-referring existence, freed from subjection to anything out-
side language. The mirror image of language, which appears when
language disappears and disappears when language appears, is dis-
course. Again, Foucault employs the word "discourse" in a special
sense, derived from the epistemological and linguistic writings of the
Ideologues, Condillac, and ultimately Locke. Discourse, for
Foucault, is language from which all self-reference, all inner play, all
metaphorical distortion are eliminated. The sole function of dis-
course is to serve as a transparent representation of things and ideas
standing outside it.43 Hence, language and discourse are totally

40 Ibid., pp. 10-11.

4' Ibid., p. 304.
42 For the outlines of this theme, see The Order of Things, pp. 42-44, 303-7,
382-87.
43 For references to discourse, see ibid., pp. 81, 236, 304, 311, 385-86. It should be
noted that in L'Archeologie du savoir Foucault uses the word 'discourse" much
more broadly, to include-it would seem-virtually every systematic use of language.
See esp. The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 80: " . . . instead of gradually reducing
the rather fluctuating meaning of the word 'discourse,' I believe that I have in fact
added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements,
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 465
antithetical: in language, the "direction of meaning" is entirely
inward; in discourse, it is entirely outward.44 Where "language"
disappears, as Foucault argues it did at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, all that remains of language is "its function as
representation: its nature and its virtues as discourse. '45 Con-
versely, when language returns-and Foucault asserts that it re-
turned at the end of the eighteenth century, though it has not yet
regained its unity-then discourse disappears.46
Foucault's account of the disappearance and return of language is
closely connected with an account of signs and signification. This is
especially true of his account of the disappearance of language,
which he relates to a fundamental change, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, in the structure of the sign. From the Stoics to
the Renaissance, the system of signs in the Western world was,
Foucault asserts, a "ternary" one, signifiant and signifie being
linked together by a "conjuncture," that is, by a relationship of
resemblance of one sort or another. But at the beginning of the
seventeenth century the system of signs became "binary," with a
purely arbitrary relationship between signifiant and signifie. It was
this change, Foucault asserts, that signaled the disappearance of
language from the world and its replacement by a supposedly trans-
parent discourse.47 Unfortunately, quite apart from the question of
the historical accuracy of what Foucault here argues-and as I said
at the beginning of this paper I am not concerned here with whether
Foucault is right or wrong in what he says about the past-his
account of signs and signification remains unclear, even after one
has gone to the considerable effort of learning his somewhat idiosyn-
cratic terminology and of grasping the architectonics of his work.
The locus of the problem is to be found in Foucault's failure to
explain clearly his distinction between representation and significa-

sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated

practice that accounts for a certain number of statements; and have I not allowed this
same word 'discourse,' which should have served as a boundary around the term
'statement,' to vary as I shifted my analysis or its point of application, as the
statement itself faded from view?" See also ibid., pp. 107, 117, 169.
44 I borrow the expression "direction of meaning" from Northrop Frye, Anatomy
of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 73-74.
45 The Order of Things, p. 81.
46 Ibid., pp. 303-4, 385-86. For more on this theme, see Michel Foucault, Lan-
guage, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F.
Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), esp.
the four essays-"A Preface to Transgression," "Language to Infinity," "The
Father's 'No,' " and "Fantasia of the Library"-that the editor has classified under
the general rubric of "Language and the Birth of 'Literature.'
4 The Order of Things, pp. 42-43, 27-30.
466 Allan Megill
tion. Representation, he argues, is characteristic of the Classical
episteme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; signification is
characteristic of the modern episteme that began in the late
eighteenth century and that is now, he suggests, on the verge of its
demise. Yet Foucault never makes it fully clear what the distinction
between representation and signification is; nor does he make it fully
clear what the implications of this distinction are for the concept of
the sign, which remains binary in structure throughout both the
classical and the modern epistemes. The drift of Foucault's account
suggests that he sees the two concepts as variants of each other,
since both exist under the aegis of the binary sign and in an
economy in which language either does not exist (representation) or
exists in a fragmentary state only (signification).48 They are, how-
ever, incompatible variants, for if Foucault does not tell us precisely
what it is that distinguishes the two, he does tell us that the
"'universal extension of the sign within the field of representation
precludes even the possibility of a theory of signification."49
In considering the question of whether Foucault is a structuralist,
Wahl concentrates on what he sees as the inadequacies in Foucault's
account of representation and signification. In the first place, Wahl
distinguishes-and distinguishes clearly-between the two, holding
that whereas representation involves a "doubling," within the order
of language, of what is outside language, signification involves not
doubling but difference, with the meaning of the sign being
determined-in classic Saussurean terms-by the difference between
it and all other signs.50 With signification, then, language constitutes
a genuine and autonomous structure in which an alteration in one
signifying element will necessarily alter, through the play of differ-
ence, every other signifying element, whereas with representation
the "'structure" of language is only a doubling of what is not
language. Laying great stress on a passage in which Foucault sug-
gests that ""thebinary theory of the sign'" and "'a general theory of
representation" are linked together in an inextricable relation that
"'probably extends up to our own time,'"5' Wahl condemns Foucault
for failing to see that representation and signification are mutually
exclusive, and especially for failing to grasp the fundamentally
differential nature of the sign. Because Foucault had failed to grasp
48
On representation, signification, and their mutual relations, see ibid., esp. pp.
63-67, 208-11, 303-4.
49 Ibid., p. 65.
50 Saussure (n. 3 above), pt. 2, chap. 4, sec. 4: "Dans la langue il n'y a que des
differences."
5' The Order of Things, p. 67.
 Fouicault, Structuiralism, and the Ends of History 467
the fundamentally differential nature of the sign he had also failed,
according to Wahl, to grasp the fundamentally systematic structure
of language: "To persist in thinking of the sign within representation
is not only to forbid oneself the means of reinstating the formal
organization that constitutes the semiological edifice as such: . . . it
is in truth to resist this organization, in practice to contradict it and
from that point on to deny the sign, at the very moment that one
seems ready to accord to it its founding place. . . The 'primacy of
representation, the structure of language. Furthermore, elsewhere in
entails the denunciation of representation.''52 In consequence,
Foucault remains, according to Wahl, "on this side of the sign, on
this side of discourse, on this side of structure.''53 Foucault is to be
counted among those who have "not yet" arrived at structuralism.
There is, I think, ample reason for agreeing with Wahl that
Foucault is not a structuralist in Wahl's definition of the term. But
the problem is not that Foucault is not yet a structuralist in this
sense; it is rather that Foucault is "no longer" a structuralist-that
he lies beyond, and not short of, the structuralism of the sign. For
Wahl's treatment of Foucault fails to recognize that Foucault did
indeed hold representation and signification to be incompatible; and
while Foucault never raises the issue of difference, his assertions of
the post-Classical fragmentation of language are a clear indication of
his belief that the structure of things no longer establishes, as in
representation, the structure of language. Furthermore, elsewhere in
his discussion of Foucault Wahl gives a reading of Les Mots et les
choses that, if it were correct, could certainly be taken as placing
Foucault under the rubric of the structuralism of the sign; a reading
that suggests not that Foucault was not yet a structuralist but that he
was a structuralist without knowing it. According to Wahl, Foucault
leaves the concept of the sign-which Wahl defines, following
Barthes, who follows Saussure, as a relatio between two relata-
''curiously in the shadows," even though this concept is, over the
length of Les Mots et les choses, shown to be the element that
governs the epistemic mutations.54 The configuration of knowledge
that makes up any given epistemne necessarily implies, Wahl argues,
a whole series of interrelations. Each figure within the grid of a
configuration, he asserts, functions as the representative of other
elements and at the same time as the representative of the
configuration in general. On account of these mutual relations, "'the

52 Ducrot et al.. p. 339.

S3 Ibid., p. 349.
14
Ibid., p. 306.
468 Allan Megill
episteme, like every order, envelops a semiology."55 Within any
given epistemne the relations, and hence the signs, are of a given
type. As long as the relationes between the relata retain the same
nature, the episteme remains the same. Thus, Marx remains within
the same episteme as Ricardo because, however much he attacks
Ricardo's bourgeois presuppositions, he maintains the same relation-
ship between "the surface circulation of values" represented by the
movement of commodities and of their values and "the profound,
un-representable fact of the activity that produces them: labor.' '56
But when the nature of the relationship between the relata changes,
then the episteme changes: "The edifices of knowledge topple . . .
and there is a change of episteme . . . when the assigned relation of
the sign to what it signifies changes: when 'to signify' no longer
signifies the same thing.'"57
It seems to me that if we were to accept this reading of Foucault
we would have to acknowledge that he indeed conforms to the
structuralism of the sign in its loose sense; for here the sign does
appear to be in "an absolutely fundamental position," even though
Wahl is right in pointing out that Foucault makes no use of the
Saussurean conception of difference. But this reading is in my view
an incorrect one, for it falls prey to a misleading metaphorics of
depth, of which I shall have more to say below. It is only because
Wahl sees the concept of the episteme in terms of depth, order, and
firm foundations, and not in terms of dispersion and exteriority, that
he is able to give a semiological reading of Foucault, that he is able
to assert that the episteme "envelops" a semiology. I here touch on
the Dionysian antistructuralist element in Foucault, and more spe-
cifically on the fact that for Foucault there are no firm foundations,
no original, transcendental signifij to which all signifiants can ulti-
mately refer. And given the absence of a signifie there can be no
sign. The episteme stands, in short, beyond the firmly founded world
presupposed by the Saussurean conception of the sign.

But structuralism need not be confined to a linguistic or to a

semiological sense. For one can detach structuralism from any
indenture to the sign, taking structure itself to be the defining feature
of structuralism. Both Pettit and Wahl recognize the possibility of a
"istructuralism of structure," even though they reject such a
definition for the purposes of their own analyses. Thus, Pettit tells

" Ibid., p. 307.

56 Ibid., pp. 308-9.
57 Ibid., p. 309.
 Fouicault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 469
us that "I give quite a specific sense to 'structuralism': unlike some
commentators, I do not take it to embrace every science . . . which
claims to investigate 'structures.' "58 Wahl, for his part, evokes
Levi-Strauss, who would take as the object of the structural sciences
"whatever 'has the character of a system,' that is, any ensemble in
which one element cannot be modified without bringing about a
modification of all the others....' As Wahl points out, such a
definition would mean that "everything that touches on the idea of
structure . . . would fall under the rubric of structuralism...."59
Where does Foucault stand in relation to structuralism when we
broaden the idea of structuralism to take in "everything that touches
on the idea of structure?"
The answer to this question depends, of course, on how this
structuralism of structure is defined, for the structuralism of struc-
ture, like the structuralism of the sign, can be taken in both a strict
and a loose sense. Perhaps the best known example of a strict
construal of the structuralism of structure is provided by Jean Piaget
in Le Structuralisme.60 Whereas Pettit and Wahl base their analyses
of structuralism on linguistics and semiology, respectively, Piaget
bases his analysis on a congeries of sciences, including not only
linguistics but also mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, and
anthropology. The effect of this broadening of the field is to rob the
concept of the sign of any decisive role within the concept of
structuralism. In contrast to Pettit and Wahl, Piaget makes no
reference to the sign in his definition of structuralism. For Piaget,
structuralism is concerned with structure, and a structure is a
"system of transformations." Implicit within the Piagetian definition
of structure are three ideas. In the first place, a structure, for Piaget,
is not a mere aggregate; it is not an accidental collection of elements
and their properties. On the contrary, it is a whole, whose elements
are subordinate to laws, in terms of which the structure qua whole
or system is defined. In the second place, a structure, for Piaget, is
subject to transformations, brought about by the play of its govern-
ing laws. And finally, a structure, for Piaget, is self-regulating, that
is, the transformational laws of the structure "never yield results
external to the system nor employ elements that are external to
it. "61 In short, a structure necessarily entails self-maintenance and
closure: it operates according to its own inner system of laws, a

58 Pettit (n. 31 above), p. 33.

59 Ducrot et al. (n. 27 above), p. 10.

60 Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Mischler (London, 1971).
61 Ibid., p. 5.
470 Allan Megill
system of laws that never transforms the system into something
other than what it is.
In the course of what is, after all, a quite brief book, Piaget
pursues the theme of structuralism through a wide array of sciences,
showing that his definition of structure is applicable to "groups" and
"parent structures" in mathematics, to organisms in biology, to
perceptual totalities in psychology, to kinship groups in anthropol-
ogy, and so on. In each of the fields he examines Piaget is able to
find, without much difficulty, investigators who have adhered to a
basically "structuralist" methodology. But when-at the end of the
book-he finally turns to Foucault, he is unable to find structuralism
in the sense in which he defines it. Piaget tells us that Foucault's
concept of the episteme seems at first glance to be a promisingly
structuralist notion, for it suggests the discovery of "strictly epis-
temological structures that would show how the fundamental princi-
ples of the science of a given period are connected with one another.
. . .''62 But unfortunately Foucault is simply not scientific enough in
his approach to carry out this program; instead of developing an
appropriate methodology for his enterprise-instead of inquiring, for
example, into the criteria for determining when a new episteme can
be said to have come into existence or for judging the validity or
invalidity of alternative interpretations in the history of science-
Foucault relies on "intuition and . . . speculative improvisation."63
Foucault's epistemes, according to Piaget, turn out to be idiosyn-
cratic inventions rather than a genuine attempt to discover the
epistemological foundations of the history of science-for Foucault
has "no canon for the selection of an episteme's characteristics;
important ones are omitted and the choice between alternative ones
is arbitrary."64 Foucault's epistemes, in consequence, are not sys-
tems of transformation at all, and his structuralism, which in Piaget's
view retains all of the negative features of structuralism-such as the
devaluation of history and genesis and contempt for functional
considerations-without its positive features, can justly be called a
"'structuralism without structures."65
There is absolutely no doubt that if we take structuralism, as
Piaget does, to be essentially a form of scientific methodology, then
Foucault is not a structuralist. But the structuralism of structure can
be defined in a much looser sense, a sense that is at bottom
metaphysical rather than scientific. It can be defined, that is, in the
62 Ibid., p. 132.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., pp. 132-33.
65 Ibid., pp. 134-35.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 471
sense proposed by Derrida, as the Apollonian element in the
Nietzschean conflict between Apollo and Dionysos. As is well
known, Nietzsche argued, in The Birth of Tragedy, that Greek
culture at its height was the product of a peculiar and delicate union
of the calm, clear, lucent spirit of Apollo and the frenzied, extrava-
gant, esctatic spirit of Dionysos. The Apollonian spirit is the spirit of
temperance, moderation, and justice, a spirit that demands the strict
observance of the limits of the individual, of the principium indi-
viduationis; the Dionysian spirit is the spirit of hubris, of mystical
jubilation, of the shattering of the principium individuationis in a
savage and ritual unity. As might be supposed, the Apollonian and
Dionysian spirits differ radically in their attitude toward forms: the
Apollonian spirit teaches the acceptance and retention of forms,
while the Dionysian spirit teaches their destruction and re-creation.
Each spirit is equally necessary to the existence of a living culture.
As Nietzsche puts it, "It is Apollo who tranquillizes the individual
by drawing boundary lines, and who, by enjoining again and again
the practice of self-knowledge, reminds him of the holy universal
norms. But lest the Apollonian tendency freeze all form into Egyp-
tian rigidity, . . . the Dionysian flood tide periodically destroys all
the little circles in which the Apollonian would confine Hel-
lenism. 66
All primitive peoples, Nietzsche asserts, are amply endowed with
Dionysian forces, but the Greeks had, in addition to Dionysos, "the
proud, imposing image of Apollo, who in holding up the head of
Gorgon to those brutal and grotesque Dionysian forces subdued
them."67 The result was the sublimation of these forces into art and
culture, the highest expression of which was the tragedy of Sopho-
cles and Aeschylus. But with Socrates this vital collaboration be-
tween the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Nietzsche argues, was
broken. For Socrates-the bearer, according to Nietzsche, of a
degenerate Apollonianism, of an Apollonianism appearing in the
guise of "logical schematism' '68 -was the great exemplar of what
Nietzsche calls "theoretical man" -the man who believes in logic,
in science, and in conscious knowledge, the man who believes that
"thought, guided by the thread of causation, might plumb the
farthest abysses of being....`69 Theoretical man is deeply suspici-
66
Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy" and "The Genealogy of Morals,"
trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), sec. 9, p. 65; see also sec. 21, p.
128, and sec. 25, p. 145.
67 Ibid., sec. 2, p. 26.
68
Ibid., sec. 14, p. 88.
69 Ibid., sec. 15, p. 93.
472 Allan Megill
ous of the irrational sources of being, of knowledge, and of creativ-
ity, holding that culture must be based on conscious intelligence
rather than on instinct. Hence, he has a great faith in science, in
"the god of engines and crucibles," in "the forces of nature put in
the service of a higher form of egotism."70 Hence, too, he opposes
the irrational powers of Dionysian art, believing as he does that the
beautiful and the reasonable should be made to coincide. The whole
of Western culture is caught, Nietzsche argues, within the net of this
theoreticism, this rationalism, this scientism; from the time of Soc-
rates onward, the man of theory has been the ideal of Western
thought.
But if Nietzsche holds that ever since the great age of Greek
tragedy the logic of Socrates has dominated Western culture he also
holds that this logic is always on the brink of its own collapse. For
logic has its outer limits, its periphery beyond which it cannot move,
and it also has an inner core that it cannot grasp. Logic does not
extend itself indefinitely but rather "curls about itself and bites its
own tail," and even within the circle we have "no way of knowing"
how the area "is ever to be fully charted.''71 But the man of theory,
because he believes that "a culture built on scientific principles must
perish once it admits illogic,"72 refuses to recognize the necessarily
illogical accompaniment of logic. Nietzsche and, even more, Derrida
see their task as that of alerting their fellows to what they allege to
be the ultimate illogicality of Western culture. Indeed, Derrida's
works, taken together, constitute a single, concerted attack on
"logocentrism," on what he regards as the blindly logical orientation
of Western thought.
I cannot here deal with Derrida's variations on this Nietzschean
theme. Suffice it to say that for Derrida structuralism, in the sense
of Apollonian formalism, is intimately tied up with the whole of
logocentric culture. The most obvious indication of this relationship
is to be found, in Derrida's view, in the metaphorical biases and
determinations of structuralism. In the first place, structuralism in
the Derridian sense is biased toward-or determined by-a
metaphorics of light. Indeed, it is this metaphorics of light that links
Apollo-the sun god; the god of light; "the 'lucent' one," as
Nietzsche calls him;73 the god who stands over "the plastic, Apol-
lonian arts," as opposed to "the non-visual art of music inspired by

70 Ibid., sec. 17, p. 108.

7
Ibid., sec. 15, p. 95.
72 Ibid., sec. 18, p. 112.
7 Ibid., sec. 1, p. 21.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 473
Dionysos' '74-with what Nietzsche refers to as "the great Cyclo-
pean eye of Socrates.'"75 It is in Plato, Nietzsche tells us, that we
see most clearly the "gigantic driving wheel of logical Socratism" ;76
and it is no accident, Derrida holds, that the whole of Platonic
philosophy is based on the opposition of light and dark, of which the
myth of the cave is only the most obvious indication. Nor, Derrida
maintains, is it any accident that nearly all our expressions for
thought are connected with visual metaphors: thus, "theory" comes
from the word theoria, meaning a looking at, a comtemplation; while
the word "idea" comes from eidein, meaning "to see." Indeed,
Derrida goes so far as to maintain that "this metaphor of shadow
and of light (of showing-oneself and of hiding-oneself)" is "the
founding metaphor of western philosophy as metaphysics. '77 From
Plato onward, Derrida argues, Western philosophy has been inden-
tured to a heliocentric metaphysics that has subjected Dionysian
force to Apollonian form. Force, according to Derrida, cannot be
thought in terms of eidos, that is, in terms of "form visible to the
metaphorical eye,' for to grasp "the structure of a becoming, the
form of a force," is already to destroy their quality as becoming and
as force.78 Indeed, for Derrida the whole project of understanding,
of searching for meaning (sens), is thoroughly Apollonian in nature,
for understanding requires "the repose of the beginning and of the
end, the peace of a spectacle, a horizon, or a face.' 79 And the entity
that Derrida calls "modern structuralism" is, he maintains, an
integral part of this larger Apollonian project. Modem structuralism
grew up in the shadow of phenomenology, which lacks, according to
Derrida, any concept that would permit it to conceive of intensity or
of force. This inability to conceive of force has been carried over
into modern structuralism, which is biased toward-or determined
by-a force-excluding metaphorics of space that in its form and in its
implications is closely connected to the central philosophical
metaphor of light. As Derrida points out, the notion of structure
"'refers only to space, morphological or geometrical space, an order
of forms and of places.''80 The very idea of a center or of an end,
without which structure cannot be thought, is an exclusion of
Dionysian revel; for, he argues, ""the concept of centered structure
74 Ibid., sec. 1, p. 19.
75 Ibid., sec. 14, p. 86.
76 Ibid., sec. 13, p. 85.
" Jacques Derrida, 'Force et signification," in L'Ecriture et la difference (Paris,
1967), p. 45.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., pp. 44-45.
80 Ibid., p. 28.
474 Allan Megill
is . . . the concept of a founded play, constituted on the basis of a
founded immobility and of a reassuring certitude, itself out of the
game."'81 Modern structuralism, then, is only the most recent man-
ifestation of the persistent Apollonianism of Western philosophy.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Derrida's thesis (if it is a
thesis) or his position (if it is a position) deserves a considerable
effort of exegesis and of criticism. Indeed, the distinction between
the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and Derrida's elaborations upon
that distinction, cry out for exegesis and criticism. Nevertheless, I
do not wish at this point to investigate, or even to comment on, the
validity of Derrida's conception of structuralism or the validity of
the broader Nietzschean assertions that underpin it. I am quite
aware of the ragged and illogical opening which this omission leaves
in my argument. But my concern here is with the text of Foucault,
not with the text of Derrida. I do not wish to ask the potentially
destructive question, "Is there any logical basis for the distinction
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian?" I wish rather to ask, in
an entirely heuristic spirit, the potentially illuminating question, "Is
Foucault a structuralist in the metaphysical, or antimetaphysical,
sense proposed by Derrida?"
The answer to this question is to be found in an examination of
the metaphorics of the Foucaultian text, for when we look at
Foucault's works-and more specifically at the works that I would
consider to be the most structuralist in nature, namely, Naissance de
la clinique and Les Mots et les choses-we find precisely the sort of
metaphorics that Derrida has identified as central to the "adventure
of the look"'82 that in his account constitutes structuralism. For both
works are dominated by the theme of looking at space, with the
inevitable admixture of a visual and a spatial metaphorics that such a
theme implies. Thus, Naissance de la clinique bears the subtitle
"'une archeologie du regard medical" and begins with the
announcement that "this book is about space, about language, and
about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze,' '83 a statement
that is amply confirmed in the rest of the book, in which vision,
visibility, invisibility, and space are obsessively recurring motifs. I
cite, for example, the following passage from the conclusion, in
which Foucault looks back upon the book as a whole: "This book
. . . concems one of those periods that mark an ineradicable chronolog-
ical threshold: the period in which illness, counter-nature, death, in
81 "La structure, le signe et le jeu
dans le discours des sciences humaines," in
L'Ecriture et la difference, p. 410.
82 "Force et signification," p. 3.
83
The Birth of the Clinic, p. 31.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 475
short, the whole dark underside of disease came to light, at the same
time illuminating and eliminating itself like night, in the deep, visible,
solid, enclosed, but accessible space of the human body. What was
fundamentally invisible is suddenly offered to the brightness of the
gaze, . . . doctors . . . approach the subject of their experience with
the purity of an unprejudiced gaze . . . the forms of visibility . . .
have changed . . . the abyss beneath illness has . . . emerged into
the light of language . . . the patient . . . enveloped in a collective
homogeneous space."84
In Les Mots et les choses the metaphorics, though it tends, as in
"Las Meninas," to shift from the gaze observing to the space ob-
served, is just as obsessive as in Naissance de la clinique. To enter
into the world of Les Mots et les choses is to enter into a world
whose fundamental metaphor is the metaphor of arrangement in
space; it is to enter into a world that is strangely silent and
unmoving, into a frozen world of penetrating glances and arrested
gestures. A cursory examination of the prefatory matter of Les Mots
et les choses is enough to impress upon the reader the prominence
of this metaphorics. Foucault tells us, for example, that in the
"Classical age" the "space of knowledge" was "arranged in a
totally different way from that systematized in the nineteenth cen-
tury by Comte or Spencer" (p. xi). He tells us that he had taken a
risk in "having wished to describe not so much the genesis of our
sciences as an epistemological space specific to a particular period"
(p. xi). He asks us where the strange typologies given in Borges's
Chinese encyclopedia could be juxtaposed, except in the "non-space
of language," in the "unthinkable space that language spreads before
us" (p. xvii). He talks about "the table upon which . . . language
has intersected space" (p. xvii); about the "space of order" within
which knowledge was constituted (p. xxii); about "configurations
within the space of knowledge" (p. xxii); not to mention the evoca-
tion of such spatial and visual figures as the "relation of contained to
container" (p. xvii); and "common ground" (p. xvi); and "sites"
(p. xvii) and "the already 'encoded' eye," that is forcibly confined
by "linguistic perceptual, and practical grids" (pp. xx-xxi). This
metaphorics, with its visual and spatial bias, dominates the whole of
Les Mots et les choses, from the initial analysis of "Las Meninas"
to the terminal evocation of the erasure of man.
Thus, in Naissance de la clinique, and above all in Les Mots et les
choses, Foucault portrays for us-without, I would argue, being
fully conscious of what he is doing-a lucent, Apollonian world. In
84
Ibid., pp. 195-96.
476 Allan Megill
short, Foucault conforms in these works to structuralism in the
Derridian sense; he is, in Derridian terms, in complicity-albeit a
complicity that is entirely unintended-with the very "logocentric"
culture whose claim to absolute validity he wishes to contest.
Derrida himself has been less than explicit in applying his critique of
logocentrism to the works of Foucault. True, in a critique of Histoire
de la folie written in 1963 and entitled "Cogito et histoire de la
folie," Derrida did hold that Foucault was in complicity with
logocentrism, arguing that though Foucault claimed to have written a
history of "madness itself . . . before any capture by knowledge"
his claim was erroneous, for Foucault was no more able than anyone
else to escape from the language of reason: "All our European
language, the language of all that has participated . . . in the
adventure of western reason, is the immense delegation of the
project that Foucault defines under the species of the capture or the
objectification of madness. Nothing in this language and no one
among those who speak it can escape from the historical culpability
. . . that Foucault seems to want to bring to trial.' '85 In the same
essay, Derrida claimed to detect in Foucault a "structuralist to-
talitarianism" that had carried out "an act of enclosure of the Cogito
. . . of the same type as that of the violences of the classical age.''86
But Derrida does not seem to have engaged in any formal and
explicit critique of Foucault's more obviously structuralist works,
confining himself, in a 1966 essay on the structuralism of Levi-
Strauss, to the observation that "the movement of all archaeologies"
is in complicity with the attempt to "center" structure, with the
attempt to place structure upon a foundation that is itself out of
play.87 Nevertheless, despite the lack of explicit connection, the
applicability of the Derridian critique of structuralism to the struc-
turalist enterprise of Foucault is beyond question. Wahl was right in
observing in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? that "the schema of
structuralism that Derrida attacks is more or less the same as the
one to which Foucault adheres . . . "88 for Foucault's metaphorical
bias-his privileging of sight over sound and of stasis over
movement-clearly links him at the most basic level to Apollonian
formalism and to all the logocentric themes, the themes of origin and
end, of arche and telos, that Apollonian formalism implies.
85 "Cogito et histoire de la folie," in L'Ecriture et la difference, p. 58.
86 Ibid., p. 88.
87 "La structure, le signe et le jeu," in L'Ecriture et la difference, p. 410. See also

Derfida's brief comments on the "general theory of epistemes' in 'L'Arch6ologie du

ffivole," in Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l'origine des connaissances
humaines, precede de -L'Archeologie du frivole" (Paris, 1973), pp. 26-28.
88 Ducrot et al., p. 419.
 Foucault, Structluralism, and the Ends of History 477

II
But is Apollonian formalism the fundamental element in Foucault's
work? Can it be said unequivocally that Foucault adheres to struc-
turalism in the sense defined by Derrida? I think not. For Foucault
has always been fascinated by Nietzsche, and he has been fascinated
by precisely those elements in Nietzsche that tell against the appar-
ent Apollonianism of his visual and spatial metaphorics. But, as I
have already said, Foucault's discovery of Nietzsche was slow and
halting, and it is only in his later work that his Nietzscheanism
comes to the fore.
At least insofar as his approach to the historical world is con-
cerned, Foucault's encounter with Nietzsche has been, I would
assert, threefold. The early Foucault tended to see Nietzsche as an
exemplar of what Foucault has called "the experience of mad-
ness. "89 Foucault's early training was in philosophy and in psychol-
ogy, and he quickly developed an interest in psychopathology. His
first book, Maladie mentale et psychologie (1954), was an attempt to
rescue insanity from the allegedly dismissive category of "mental
illness." In Foucault's view, reason cannot fully know itself unless it
engages in a "great tragic confrontation"90 with its opposite, unrea-
son. Hence, unreason is both the mirror image and the furthest
extent of reason. But modern culture has done its best to confine
and exclude madness-to deny the reality of its existence-thus
making the tragic confrontation impossible. A few great spirits,
however, including Holderlin, Nerval, Roussel, Artaud, and
Nietzsche, have had the true "experience of madness," and these
spirits hold the promise that homo psychologicus will one day
disappear and that the tragic confrontation with madness will once
more take place.
Maladie mentale et psychologie already contains a historical
thesis, namely, that madness was once free and that its confinement
is only a recent development.91 the Histoire de la folie is an attempt
to work out this thesis in detail and thereby to come to grips with
the true reality of madness. In it Foucault proposes to return to
"that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an
undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division

89 On 'the experience of madness," see Histoire de la folie, pp. i, v, vi-vii, ix,

34-35, 44, 47, 51, 57, 135, 166, 411, 424-25, 459.
90 Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology [Maladie mentale et psycho-
logie], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1976), p. 75.
91 See esp. ibid., chap. 5, "The Historical Constitution of Mental Illness."
478 Allan Megill
itself"; and starting from this zero point he proposes to write a
history, "not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in its vivacity,
before any capture by knowledge.' '92 In short, Foucault's concern
with the experience of madness leads him to see his historical task in
much the same way as do orthodox historians, that is, as an attempt
to come as close as possible to the reality of the past. To be sure,
Foucault holds that orthodox historians have failed to come to grips
with the stammering and inarticulate reality of madness, for they
have written of madness in the language of that very psychiatry that
has attempted, through capture and exclusion, to deny madness. But
to hold that orthodox historians have in fact failed in their project is
not to deny that the Foucaultian project and the orthodox historical
project are here essentially the same. It might further be objected
that Foucault's project is much more than the uncovering of the
historical reality of madness, for his ultimate concern is with the
revaluation of madness in the present. But the project of the or-
thodox historian also exceeds, through interpretation, the representa-
tive project. To take another tack, it might be held that it is in fact
Foucault who has failed to come to grips with the historical reality
of madness. Thus, we have already seen Derrida's objection to
Histoire de la folie, while to the Anglo-American reader the work
has the highly artificial flavor of a Hegelian Geistesgeschichte, with
the pecularity that Foucault, influenced by Bachelard and Can-
guilhem, is careful to reject the idea that the events of his history are
arranged in any progressive order.93 But whether Foucault succeeds
in coming to grips with the experience of madness is here irrelevant;
what is important is that this is what Foucault claims to do, and in
so claiming he aligns himself with the classic project of orthodox
historiography, which has always asserted that its primary concern is
with the provision of a record of objective events and structures.
But by the early 1960s Foucault came to see something else in
Nietzsche at least equal in significance to the experience of madness,
and this new element led him to abandon the view that the histo-
rian's project is that of seeking out the solidity of a past reality.
What Foucault now saw in Nietzsche is revealed most clearly in his
essay, "Nietzsche, Marx, Freud," delivered as a lecture in 1964 but
published only in 1967 after the publication of Les Mots et les
choses. At least until recently it was customary to read Nietzsche,
Marx, and Freud on the model of "depth" interpretation; that is, on

92 Histoire de la folie, pp. i, vii.

93On this point, see J. J. Brochier, "Prison Talk: An Interview with Michel
Foucault," trans. Colin Gordon, Radical Philosophy 16 (Spring 1977): 10-15.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 479
the model of a search for "deep structures." It was customary, in
short, to read these thinkers as being engaged in an attempt to find
the will to power underlying the moral idea, the social force underly-
ing the ideological fetish, the latent wish underlying the manifest
dream. But this is not the way that Foucault comes to read these
thinkers: he does not see them as having found a system of interpre-
tation that would link a deceptive superstructure to the firm and
comforting reality of a "base." True, he does assert that Nietzsche,
Marx, and Freud added the dimension of depth to the field of
interpretation. But this depth must be understood, Foucault main-
tains, not in the comforting terms of "interiority" but rather in the
disturbing terms of "exteriority."94 For in pursuing their descending
course, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud had discovered, according to
Foucault, that there is no solid and objective truth that can serve as
a point of termination, no final signifie in which all signifiants find
their culmination. On the contrary, they had discovered that every
interpretandum is already an interpretans-that interpretation does
not illuminate some "thing" which passively allows itself to be
interpreted, but rather seizes upon an interpretation already in place,
"'which it must upset, overturn, shatter with hammer blows.' "95
Thus, Foucault asserts, Marx interpreted not relations of production
but rather the interpretation of relations of production. Freud dis-
covered, under the symptoms that his patients exhibited, not the
concrete, historical reality of traumas but rather anxiety-charged
phantasms, which were already interpretations of historical reality.
And finally, above all, Nietzsche demonstrated, through his analysis
of language, that there is no signife originel; for words, which are
always invented by the higher classes, do not indicate a signifie but
rather impose an interpretation. In consequence, depth itself, now
reconstituted as "an absolutely superficial secret,' '96 is shown to be
a deception, and the task of interpretation, which would otherwise
have ended in the discovery of a foundation, becomes an infinite
task of self-reflection.
One would expect this rejection of depth interpretation-a rejec-
tion which, despite Foucault's attempts to introduce Marx and Freud
into the equation, owes much more to Nietzsche than to the other
two thinkers97-to have an immediate and profound effect on
94 Foucault, "Nietzsche, Marx, Freud," in Nietzsche, Cahiers de Royaumont,
Philosophie no. 6 (Paris, 1967), pp. 183-200. Foucault's use of the term "exteriority"
has much to do with his reading of Blanchot (see Bellour [n. 34 above], pp. 7-8, and
Foucault, "La pensee du dehors," Critique [Paris], no. 229 [Juin 1966], pp. 23-46).
95 Ibid., p. 189.
96 Ibid., p. 187.
97 And, though I cannot pursue the matter here, I feel compelled to point out that
 480 Allan Megill
Foucault's historiography. For the principle of exteriority, in its
assimilation of interpretandum to interpretans, of signifie to sig-
nifiant, is necessarily antithetical to any attempt to come to grips
with the brute reality of the past, with the past "wie es eigentlich
gewesen ist." And indeed, Foucault's adoption of the principle of
exteriority separates his later works from Histoire de la folie. Thus,
in L'Archeologie du savoir he singles out for criticism his use, in
Histoire de la folie, of the concept of "experience," which, he
asserts, had kept him "close to admitting an anonymous and general
subject of history"98-which had kept him close, that is, to the
orthodox conviction that the historian stands in some sense outside
the movement and uncertainty of history and hence is able to view,
with an objective eye, the actual reality of the past. In what is
clearly a decisive modification of his earlier project, Foucault tells
us, in L'Archeologie du savoir, that "in the descriptions for which I
have attempted to provide a theory, there can be no question of
interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the refer-
ent.... We are not trying to reconstitute what madness itself might
be....99 In short, the later Foucault repudiates the project of
Histoire de la folie, arguing that "the stage of 'things themselves' "
must be suppressed and that "for the enigmatic treasure of 'things'
anterior to discourse" there must be substituted "the regular forma-
-'tion of objects that emerge only in discourse."100

Nietzsche's position on these fundamental issues of truth and interpretation is not as

clear cut as Foucault suggests. Jean Granier, in his Probleme de la verite dans la
philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris, 1966), and John T. Wilcox, in his Truth and Value in
Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1974),
both investigate the complex problem of whether, and in what ways, Nietzsche
believed in truth-which, to use our present terminology, is equivalent to the problem
of whether Nietzsche believed in an interpretandum, in a signifie'. For a convenient
sampling of much of the recent "radical" Nietzsche literature, some of which inclines
toward Foucault's view of Nietzsche, see David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche:
Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York, 1977). For what is perhaps
Nietzsche's clearest expression of the theme of the absence of foundations, see
Beyond Good and Evil, ed. and trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago, 1955), paragraph
289, p. 230: "[The anchorite] will suspect behind each cave a deeper cave, a more
extensive cave, a more extensive, more exotic, rich world beyond the surface, a
bottomless abyss beyond every bottom, beneath every 'foundation.' Every philosophy
is a foreground-philosophy: this is an anchorite's judgment. There is something
arbitrary in the fact that the philosopher stopped here, that he looked back and looked
around, that here he refrained from digging deeper, that he laid aside his spade. There
is, in fact, something that arouses suspicion! Each philosophy also conceals a
philosophy; each opinion is also a hiding place; each word is also a mask."
98 The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 16. The translator renders the French experi-

ence as 'experiment," which is not what Foucault means here.

99 Ibid., p. 47.
100 Ibid., pp. 47-48.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 481
Foucault already acknowledges this modification in his project-
this turning away from discourse as a system of signs pointing
outward or downward to a signifle, to a discourse that would
systematically form the objects of which it speaks-in the work that
immediately followed Histoire de la folie, namely, Naissance de la
clinique. In the preface to the latter book he rejects the classic
conception of depth interpretation, which he here refers to under the
name of "commentary." As Foucault defines it, commentary "ques-
tions discourse as to what it says and intended to say; it tries to
uncover the deeper meaning of speech that enables it to achieve an
identity with itself, supposedly nearer to its essential truth...."101
Foucault goes on to assert that this activity conceals a strange
attitude toward language-an attitude that admits, by definition, an
excess of the signifie over the signifiant, holding that it is possible,
through a depth analysis, to read the signifle within the signifiant's
gaps. To speak about the thought of others, he asserts, has tradi-
tionally been to analyze and bring to light the signifie. But, Foucault
asks, "must the things said . . . be treated exclusively in accordance
with the play of significant and signifie, as a series of themes present
more or less implicitly to one another?" And is it not possible, he
asks, "to make a structural analysis of discourses that would evade
the fate of commentary by supposing no remainder, nothing in
excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its historical
appearance?' '102 As early as Naissance de la clinique, then, one
finds evidence of the (Nietzschean) principle of exteriority-a prin-
ciple whose tendency is to turn Foucault away from the reality of
the past-within his work. There is thus a fair element of truth in
G. S. Rousseau's observation, in "Whose Enlightenment? Not Man's:
The Case of Michel Foucault," that Foucault "has evolved a long
way from the Foucault of Histoire de la folie, in which he was tied
to solid facts and still concerned with historical accuracy' '103
though Rousseau does not perceive that this evolution means that
Foucault ultimately requires a different type of criticism than the
sort he undertakes, one that concerns itself with the theoretical
foundations of Foucault's enterprise as a whole.
Nevertheless, the first work of Foucault's to be written under the
systematic influence of the principle of exteriority was not Nais-
sance de la clinique, which still remains largely within the historio-
graphical orbit of Histoire de la folie, but rather Les Mots et les

101 The Birth of the Clinic, p. xvi.

102 Ibid., p. xvii.
103 Rousseau (n. 13 above), p. 239.
482 Allan Megill
choses, published three years later. But if in Les Mots et les choses
Foucault now came to do history under the aegis of the principle of
exteriority, seeing his task as the analysis of discourse and not as an
attempt to get down to the reality of the past, his employment of
that principle remained inconsistent, largely because he continued to
conceive his work in terms of the visual and spatial metaphorics that
we evoked above. Time and time again Foucault's metaphorics of
space involves images of depth and firm foundation that suggest,
with great insistence, that despite his apparent adherence to the
principle of exteriority he is still involved in depth interpretation in
the classic sense, still involved in the attempt to move from what is
visible and superficial to what is invisible, profound, and certain.
Thus, Foucault speaks, in Les Mots et les choses, of "the funda-
mental codes of a culture" and of an "order that manifests itself in
depth" (p. xx). He tells us that "it is on the basis of this order,
taken as a firmfoundation, that general theories as to the ordering of
things . . . are constructed" (p. xxi). He tells us that a culture
"finds itself faced with the fact that there exists, below the level of
its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of
being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order" (p. xx). He
tells us that "what I am attempting to bring to light is the epis-
temological field, the episteme in which knowledge . . . grounds its
positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its
growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility"
(p. xxii; my italics in all quotations). And finally, Foucault's pre-
dilection for a metaphorics of depth is revealed by his use, through-
out the work, of geological metaphors; for although Foucault is
ostensibly engaged in an "archaeological" investigation, the ar-
chaeological metaphor, with its distant and ambiguous connotations
of depth, tends to give way to geological metaphors, with their
unequivocal connotations of depth; thus, we find Foucault speaking
of erosion (p. 50), of shocks (p. 217), of strata (p. 221), and of "our
silent and naively immobile ground . . . that is once more stirring
under our feet" (p. xxiv).
If we are to read Foucaultian archaeology according to this
metaphorics of depth, then the task of the historian, for Foucault,
must be seen as an attempt to approach the past through the strategy
of a "symptomatic" reading. The historian attempts, that is, to
discover what the manifest discourse of men "really" means, a task
that is accomplished by finding, in its gaps and silences, symptoms
of the latent discourse underlying and determining it. Of course, one
must be careful to note that since Foucault rejects, as subjectivist,
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 483

the unities of the book, the oeuvre, and the author,104 one is con-
cerned here not with the discourse of individuals but with the
discourse of entire periods-not with what Ricardo, or Lamarck, or
Bopp really meant or intended but with the underlying meaning of
the episteme itself. On this reading of Foucault, the task of the
historian-archaeologist as the grounding of the signifiant in the
signifie is reconstituted, for the historian-archaeologist is now seen
as attempting to bring "a plethora of elements signifiants" into
relation with a "single signifi'." In this way, "one substitutes for
the diversity of the thing said a sort of great uniform text, which has
never before been articulated, and which reveals for the first time
what men 'really meant.' "105 This "uniform text," this "single
signifie," this latent, underlying meaning to which all superficial
discourse is linked, is nothing other than the episteme.
Yet such a reading of Les Mots et les choses, however convincing
it might seem at first glance, clearly does not conform to Foucault's
own reading of the work. For Foucault asserts in L'Archeologie du
savoir, which he implies was written partly in order to repair "the
absence of methodological sign-posting" 106 in Les Mots et les
choses, that it was not his intention that the episteme should be
taken as a "basic" or "fundamental" category underlying the intel-
lectual productions of a given historical period. He argues that his
procedure in Les Mots et les choses was not "totalitarian"; he was
not trying to show that "from a certain moment and for a certain
time" everyone thought in the same way; he was not trying to show
that beneath surface oppositions "everyone accepted a number of
fundamental theses. " 107 Most of Foucault's readers had seen the
classical episteme, for example, as an attempt to characterize the
whole of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, and there is a
great deal in the text of Les Mots et les choses to support such an
interpretation. 108 But Foucault now asserts that the classical epis-
teme of Les Mots et les choses was "closely confined to the triad
being studied" -that is, to natural history, general grammar, and the
analysis of wealth-and is valid "only in the domain specified.''109

104
See "What Is an Author?" in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,
pp. 113-38, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 21-27, 92-96, 122.
105 The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 95.
106 Ibid., p. 16.
107 Ibid., pp. 148-51.
108
See, e.g., The Order of Things, p. 168: "In any given culture and at any given
moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of
all knowledge.
109
Ibid., p. 158.
484 Allan Megill
Other areas of analysis-and this triad, he states, is "only one
of many describable groups"110-would yield other epistemes. In
fact, Foucault no longer uses the term episteme at all, preferring
such expressions as "discursive formation" and "discursive regular-
ity," expressions that give no suggestion of a distinction of depth.
For Foucault's rejection of a metaphorics of depth is now, in
L'Archeologie du savoir, unequivocal. Thus, he tells us that "we do
not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another
discourse," that it is not a question of finding "a secret discourse,
animating the manifest discourse from within.""11 Indeed, Foucault
now distinguishes between analysis and interpretation, telling us that
the "analysis of statements avoids all interpretation"';112 that is, it
avoids all attempts to move from the exterior to the interior, from
the manifest to the latent, from the statement to the intention. And
in thus refusing to repeat in the opposite direction the work of
expression, discursive analysis finally escapes, according to
Foucault, from the domination of the subject, of the cogito.

We thus move from Les Mots et les choses to L'Archeologie du

sai'oir, the work in which Foucault sets out to examine "the
problems of method raised by . . . 'archaeology.' "113 Foucault's
essential concern in this extremely complex, difficult, and-I shall
argue-self-contradictory work is with the problem of accommodat-
ing the project of an archaeology, which goes back to the beginning
of his career as a historian, to the principle of exteriority, which
entered into his work only after the publication of Histoire de la
folie. There is a clear contradiction between the two: the concept of
an archaeology, with its implication of a search for origins, is hardly
consistent with a principle that denies the existence of origins.
Foucault therefore attempts, in L'Archeologie du savoir, a mod-
ification of the concept of archaeology. The essence of this mod-
ification is to be found in his altered view of the relationship
between past and present: indeed, for a time the working title of
L'Archeologie du savoir was Le Passe' et le present: Une autre
archeologie des sciences humaines.1 1 The concept of the episteme,
as presented in Les Mots et les choses, had suggested that Foucault
was engaged in the project of constructing a "portrait" of the past.
And since (leaving aside some of the inconsistencies in his account)
'IO Ibid., p. 159.
''I Ibid., pp. 28, 29.
112 Ibid., p. 109.
113 The Order of Things, p. xxii n.
114
Foucault, Reponse a une question," Esprit 36 (1968): 85-74.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 485
he more or less completely denies that there is any relationship
between one episteme and the next, he manages more or less
completely to divide the past from the present. Thus, the Renais-
sance and classical epistemes are presumably entirely foreign to
those of us who live under the aegis of the modem episteme. In
L'Archeologie du savoir, however, the governing concept is not the
episteme but rather an entity that Foucault calls the "archive." The
archive, for Foucault, is not, as one might immediately suppose, the
totality of the texts that happen to have been preserved by a
civilization, as a kind of accidental detritus lying passively in librar-
ies and other repositories. It is rather "the first law of what can be
said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique
events"; it is "the general system of the formation and transforma-
tion of statements"; or, as Foucault puts it in an article published
while he was working on L'Archeologie du savoir, it is "the play of
rules which determines in a culture the appearance and disappear-
ance of statements (enonces), their remaining (remanence) and their
erasure, their paradoxical existence as event and as thing."'115 There
is clearly much that one could say about this concept and about the
role that it plays within L'Archeologie du savoir. But given that our
concern is centered on the presuppositions of Foucault's historio-
graphical enterprise, there is only one point that it is essential to
make here, namely, that whereas the concept of the episteme, at
least as Foucault presented it in Les Mots et les choses, seemed to
be a concept that referred to specific historical periods, the archive
is something that remains a more or less permanent determinant of
any given culture. It is, in short, a kind of transtemporal constant-a
constant whose "never completed, never wholly achieved uncover-
ing . . . forms the general horizon to which the description of
discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of the
enunciative field belong." 16 And as a transtemporal constant it
provides a linkage between the present and the past-a linkage that
reveals Foucault's enterprise to be the portrayal not of the past but
rather of the complicities between past and present created by a
common discourse. 17
115 The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 129, 130; "Reponse au cercle d'epi-
stemologie," Cahiers pour l'analvse, no. 9 (et6 1968), pp. 9-40; quote from p. 19.
116 The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 105.
117 I take Foucault's use of the term archiv,e in L'Archeologie du sav,oir to be
fundamentally different from his use of the term in his 1966 interview with Raymond
Bellour, where he speaks of "the general archive of an epoch at a given moment." In
the 1967 intervieW with Bellour, the archive becomes "the accumulated existence of
discourse" (see Raymond Bellour, 'Entretien avec Michel Foucault," Les lettres
franc aises, no. 1125 [mars 31-avril 6, 1966], pp. 3-4; quote from p. 3).
486 Allan Megill
It is interesting to note that a few commentators saw
L'Archeologie du savoir as a work of the utmost importance, one of
its American reviewers going so far as to call it "the most note-
worthy effort at a theory of history of the last 50 years . . . truly a
work of great magnitude."'118 But the more general reaction toward
the work has been one of puzzlement rather than of enthusiasm. It is
easy to see why this should be so, for it is an excruciatingly difficult
book to make sense of. Admittedly, Les Mots et les choses is also a
difficult book. But once one has grasped its remarkably simple
architecture, and once one has taken account of the fact that
Foucault uses some deceptively ordinary words (such as "language"
and "discourse") in senses that are highly specialized, then-
assuming that one has some background in the subjects of which
Foucault speaks-things begin to fall into place. But with
L'Archeologie du savoir this never really happens. To be sure,
Foucault puts forward some interesting and provocative ideas, par-
ticularly when in part 4 (esp. pp. 135-77) he compares the "ar-
chaeology of knowledge" with the conventional history of ideas.
Nonetheless, the book never seems to form, as Les Mots et les
choses most assuredly does, a coherent whole. In consequence, the
reader who manages to puzzle his way through it is apt to come out
of his reading with a feeling of dissatisfaction or even of overt
discontent; for having gone to the book because he believed that this
work, at least, would let him know what Foucault is up to, he finds
that he knows no more about the foundations and motivations of
Foucault's enterprise than he did before.
The manifest failure of the work to form a coherent whole is in
part the consequence of Foucault's own deliberate ironism-an
ironism that is ironically compounded by his exclusion (pp. 109-10)
of the polysemia that is irony's precondition. Notwithstanding this
exclusion, Foucault makes it clear at various points in the text that
he is writing in an ironic mode-saying one thing but meaning
another, making apparently definitive statements that he knows he
will contradict tomorrow. In a revealing passage at the end of the
introduction to L'Archeologie du savoir, an invented reader asks
Foucault whether, after so many changes of position in the past, he
is going to change his position yet again: "Are you already preparing
the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up
somewhere else and declare as you are now doing: no, no, I am not
where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?"
118 Mark Poster, Review of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Librarv Journal 97

(1972): 2736. On the French side, and at greater length, see Gilles Deleuze, "Un
nouvel archiviste," Critique (Paris), no. 274 (mars 1970) pp. 195-209.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends qf History 487
To this, Foucault replies that he would not take so much trouble and
pleasure in writing if he were not preparing a labyrinth within which
he might lose himself: "Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me
to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see
that our papers are in order" (p. 17). Similarly, soon after informing
us of a mode of analysis that will be concerned neither with
signifiants nor with signifies, neither with words nor with things, he
asserts that "words and things," besides being "the entirely serious
title of a problem," is also the "ironic title of a labor that modifies
its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the
day, a quite different task" (p. 49).
The ironism of L'Archeologie du savoir resides most especially in
the fact that whereas it appears to be a rigorously objective attempt
to articulate a new scientific methodology it is actually an attempt to
demolish everything that has hitherto gone under the name of
science. On an overt level, the book has all the trappings of a
discourse on method. In the first place, it explicitly and repeatedly
advertises itself as a methodological treatise, as a work concerned
not with mere "questions of procedure" (which are to be relegated
to later empirical studies) but rather with "theoretical problems"
(see, e.g., pp. 10-11, 13, 15, 16, 21, 38, 79). In the second place, it
begins with a methodical doubt, with an apparent refusal to accept
as true anything that is not known to be so; more specifically, it
begins with a refusal to accept as valid the various sorts of unity and
continuity to which historians usually accede unquestioningly (see
esp. pp. 21, 31, 79). In the third place, it proceeds by the formula-
tion of definitions, by the throwing up of hypotheses, by the sugges-
tion of possible directions of research, by the pointing out of
consequences, and by the discovery of rules (as can be seen by
examining any page in parts 2 and 3 of the book). Fourth and last, it
ends by turning to "possible domains of application," within which
the "general theory" of archaeology can be put to use and against
which the "descriptive efficacy" of "the notions that I have tried to
define" can be measured (p. 135).
But when one looks more closely at the book, its supposed
"'method" and "theory" turn out to be disturbingly elusive. Most
importantly, one finds that it is extremely difficult to give any real
and determinate content to the major concepts of archaeology,
whose apparently rigorous definitions turn out to be almost infinitely
elastic. This applies above all to the concept of discourse (see n. 43
above), which defines the framework within which the "archaeology
of knowledge" operates, but also to the various other concepts that
litter its pages-such as the discursive formation, the rules of forma-
488 Allan Megill
tion, the statement (enonce), the historical a priori, and the archive.
Closely connected with this difficulty is the astonishing frequency
with which Foucault uses "neither/nor" constructions at crucial
points in his argument (see, e.g., pp. 55, 63, 70, 75; but several
hundred instances could be listed). Insofar as L'Archeologie du
savoir can be said to have a general thesis, I take it to be that the
uncovering of the archive can be carried out only by an analysis of
"discursive practice" that is concerned neither with the internal play
of signifiants, as are the practitioners of (Mallarmean) literature, nor
with the external reference of signifies, as are the practitioners of
(orthodox) historiography (for relevant discussions, see pp. 47-49,
62-63, 99, 109, 111), but what the uncovering of the archive is
concerned with-since it is concerned neither with words nor with
things-is never made clear.
To be sure, some commentators have managed to ignore the
disturbingly "unmethodical aspects of L'Arche'ologie du saivoir and
have instead insisted on treating it as if it were the discourse on
method that it appears to be. But those who take it at face value are
usually forced to acknowledge that the Foucaultian method is
strangely defective. This is the case, for example, with a French
commentator, Francois Russo, who looks at the book from "a
purely positive point of view,' treating it as if it were an objective,
technical attempt to contribute to the methodology of the history of
science."19 Not surprisingly, Russo manages to find a multitude of
contradictions in Foucault's proposed methodology, and he is forced
to conclude that though the work "has furnished analyses and
opened perspectives of the greatest interest," as a systematic meth-
odology it is a failure.120 In a certain sense, however, by taking
Foucault seriously Russo fails to take him seriously enough. Admit-
tedly, Russo perceives that L'Archeologie du sav'oir, far from being
the neutral, objective work that it claims to be, proceeds from a
clear "parti pris," in that it is intended to serve the Foucaultian
thesis of the "death of man."'121 But-like most commentators on
the book-he fails to see that in the Foucaultian scheme of things
the death of man also means the death of history, of science, of
theory, and of method. For Foucault, as I have already asserted, is

119
FranVois Russo, -L'Archeologie du savoir de Michel Foucault," Archives de
philosophie: Recherches et documentation 36 (1973): 69-105, esp. 105.
120 Ibid., p. 105. For Russo's detailed and systematic exposure of the contradictions

and insufficiencies of Foucault's proposed methodology, see pp. 91-105. For an

earlier attempt to view Foucault as a (failed) "positivist," see Sylvie Le Bon, "Un
positiviste desespere: Michel Foucault," Temps modernes 22 (1967): 1299-1319.
121 Ibid., p. 105.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 489
concerned with the promotion of cultural crisis; he is concerned with
fostering the mutation whose intimations he claims, in Les Mots et
les choses, already to perceive. He is concerned, in short, with an
essentially Dionysian project-that is, with the breaking of the
Apollonian forms of science, "the little circles in which the Apollo-
nian would confine Hellenism." And L'Archeologie du savoir, in its
grotesque explication of the procedures of Apollonian science-in
its "cautious" and "stumbling" affectation of scientific humility, in
its articulation of principles "so obscure that it has taken hundreds
of pages to elucidate them," in its creation of a "bizarre machinery"
and its development of a "strange arsenal," in its determined pursuit
of a thesis that is "difficult . . . to sustain" (pp. 17, 135, 109)-is
more than ironical; it is, in fact, a parodistic imitation of what it
seeks to destroy, an attempt to out-methodologize Descartes him-
self. Most of the book's contradictions and obscurities can be linked
to its ironical and parodistic intentions.
But a further contradiction, devolving not from these intentions
but rather from the utter impossibility of the reconciliation that the
book seeks to bring about, remains. For the opposition between
archaeology and exteriority is not an opposition that can be over-
come by the deft reworking of concepts; on the contrary, it is
absolutely definitive in nature. However much Foucault might
struggle to prove otherwise, archaeology is not the science of the
archive but rather the science of the arche-that is, of the ancient,
the primitive; and in its implications of a search for the firm reality
of the past it sets out to find something whose existence the
principle of exteriority denies. Once more, the substance of
Foucault's work lags behind th cutting edge of its irrational inten-
tion. In a review written soon after its initial appearance, an Althus-
serian commentator hailed L'Archeologie dii savoir as "a decisive
turning-point in Foucault's work.' 122 But in its retention of archeol-
ogy it was not so much a turning point as an ifmpasse.
In fact, the "decisive turning point" in Foucault's work came
after L'Archeologie du savoir, and it involved the abandonment of
the entire "bizarre machinery" of that work-an abandonment so
complete that Foucault was able to say of his next full-length work,
Surveiller et punir, "C'est mon premier livre. "123 The transition in
Foucault's work, which can be situated in the years from 1970 to

122
Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and
Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971), p. 189.
123 Franqois Ewald, 'Anatomie et corps politiques," Critique (Paris), no. 343
(decembre 1975), pp. 1228-65.
490 Allan Megill
1972, has implications going far beyond the realm of historiography,
and I cannot deal in detail here either with the transition itself or
with the posttransition writings. Suffice it to say that according to
Foucault's own account-an account confirmed by his most recent
works-the transition involved an alteration in his conception of
power. From the beginning of his intellectual career, Foucault had
been concerned with the problem of social controls, as his writings
on psychiatry, on madness, and on somatic medicine amply demon-
strate. But the conception of power on which those writings were
based was a purely negative conception: power, for the archaeologi-
cal Foucault, was an entity whose importance was to be found in the
fact that it "excludes," "represses," "censors," "abstracts,"
"'masks," and "conceals.'"124 This conception of power had served
Foucault-and had apparently served him well-in his investigations
of the mental asylum and of the hospital. But after the publication of
L'Archeologie du savoir Foucault turned to the study of the prison;
and here he found-or claimed to find-phenomena that a purely
negative conception of power could not accommodate. Most impor-
tantly, the institution of the prison had ostensibly been founded in
order to repress delinquency; but almost from its very foundation
there had been unceasing complaints that, far from repressing delin-
quency, it was only serving to encourage it. How, Foucault asks,
can one account for the fact that for nearly 150 years criminologists
have talked of the "failure" of the prison and yet the prison still
exists? The answer to this question, he asserts, is that the prison has
not failed. For the ostensible aim of the prison was not its real aim;
the prison was in fact founded in order to encourage delinquency,
and thus to provide a rationale for the construction of the vast
apparatus of control and discipline without which the alleged free-
doms of bourgeois society could not exist. In other words, power is
here seen to be not a negative but a positive phenomenon: "Power
produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth.'"125The new attitude toward power of which Surveil-
ler et punir gives such eloquent testimony is even more firmly
embodied in the more recent Volonte de sav'oir, which Foucault has
lately designated as the first book in which he really liberates himself
from the search for "things themselves in their primitive vivacity,"
the first book in which he fully frees himself from the idea that
power is "bad, ugly, poor, sterile, monotonous, and dead.' '126

124 Discipline and Punish, p. 194.

125 Ibid.
126 "Foucault: Non au sexe roi," p. 113 (English trans., Telos, no 32, p. 158).
 Foucaiilt, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 491
Foucault is saying nothing new here; for commitment to the
productivity of power is the supremely Dionysian insight, well
known to "that Dionysian monster, Zarathustra."127 In asserting
power to be a creative force Foucault has now distanced himself
from the Apollonian structuralism of his earlier work in which the
excluded, the suppressed, the censored, the abstracted, the masked,
the hidden, was alone en jeu, and power-that is, the center from
which these operations were created-was hors jeu. That is to say,
Foucault has now rejected the Apollonian conception of centered
structure that dominated, willy-nilly, his earlier work.128 He has
acceded, in essence, to the criticisms of Derrida-which is not to
say that he was "influenced" by Derrida (though he may very well
have been), but only that the element criticized by Derrida in the
"'early" Foucault is precisely the element against which the later
Foucault rebels.129
Not surprisingly, this rebellion against structuralism brings with it
an alteration in the metaphorics of the Foucaultian text. Foucault
does not abandon a visual and spatial metaphorics, for at least in
Surveiller et punir this metaphorics still plays a prominent role. But
the movement beyond structuralism as Derrida defines it does not
entail the dropping of visual and spatial metaphors; indeed, without
these metaphors coherent discourse would be impossible. Rather, it
requires a consciousness of both the existence and the implications
of structuralist metaphors; it requires that in employing metaphors of
space, of foundation, or of structure one recognize that these are
indeed metaphors and nothing more. This recognition is a prominent
feature of Surveiller et punir. To explain adequately how Foucault
here goes beyond the structuralist metaphorics of his archaeological
period to a consciously antistructuralist metaphorics would take us
far beyond the limits of this paper. But some indication of the
alteration can be gained through a brief comparison of this book with
Naissance de la clinique, the archaeological work with which it is
most closely linked. As we have already seen, the latter is replete
127 Nietzsche (n. 66 above), The Birth of Tragedv, preface to 1886 edition, p. 15.
128
On the theme of decentering in Foucault, see The Archaeology of Knowledge,
pp. 12-13, and esp. "Theatrum Philosophicum," first published in 1970 and conve-
niently available in translation in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, pp.
165-96. This essay is an important early manifestation of the 'later" Foucault.
129
Imight further add that there are important differences between Foucault and
Derfida. In the "nouvelle edition" of Histoire de la folie (Paris, 1972), p. 602,
Foucault attacks Derfida for reducing "discursive practices" to "textual traces," and
for teaching that there is "nothing outside the text"'-which amounts to an attack on
Derrida for his tendency to consign himself to an aesthetic realm that is "above," and
in large measure indifferent to, history. But fundamentally Foucault inhabits the same
aesthetically inventive and irrealistic territory as Derrida.
492 Allan Megill
with visual and spatial metaphors; indeed, the work is constructed
around the concept of the regard medical-the "medical gaze." But
Foucault here took the concept of "regard" in an entirely negative
sense, as if the "regard" were a passive observer gazing from a
fixed point of view upon an objective field of knowledge, and he saw
his task as that of reconstituting the space that this gaze had
surveyed. In Surveiller et punir, metaphors of vision and of space
are employed in an entirely different way.130 Here these metaphors
do not describe a rigid and unmoving field existing at some time in
the past; they describe, rather, an active field of conflict in which,
Foucault maintains, we are all engaged. Foucault's concern in Sur-
veiller et punir is with the disciplinary systems-the systems of
micro-pouvoirs -which, he asserts, exist beneath the surface of
bourgeois society and control our behavior without our knowledge.
These disciplinary systems, Foucault holds, depend upon a regime
of observation, surveillance, and inspection whose model Foucault
finds in the Panopticon of Bentham. The exercise of discipline,
Foucault asserts, "presupposes a mechanism that coerces through
the play of the glance (par le jeu du regard)."131 Furthermore, this
disciplinary power "is exercised through its invisibility; at the same
time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory
visibility."132 In short, the gaze is not a passive entity but an active
force engaged in its own strategy of domination, and Foucault's
counterstrategy in Surveiller et punir is to reverse the game by
depriving the gaze of the invisibility it has so long cultivated. Vision,
which had provided the framework of Foucault's earlier work, is
now to be exposed in all its operations-or so Foucault claims.133
At this point we arrive at the essential core of Foucault's histori-
cal project (insofar as it can be said to have an "essential core");
for, as the reorientation in his metaphonics suggests, he claims now
to be concerned not with the Apollonian portrayal of dead past-a
past that, as far as we are concerned, exists in a state of "Egyptian
rigidity"-but rather with the active play of forces in the present.'34
130 In L'Archeologie du savoir, Foucault had already
expressed his dissatisfaction
with the concept of the "regard m6dical" (see The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.
54n, and Deleuze, p. 202 [n. 118 above]).
131 Discipline and Punish, p. 170 (translation altered).
132 Ibid., p. 187.
133 The most recent ultra criticism of Foucault denies
the radicality of Foucault's
critique (see Jean Baudfillard's brief essay, Oublier Foucault [Paris, 1977], where
Foucault's conception of power is held still to be a "structural notion" p. 53). I, too,
deny the radicality of Foucault's critique-but not for the reasons that Baudrillard
adduces.
134 A claim likewise denied by
Baudrillard, who accuses Foucault of "nostalgia"
(ibid., p. 87) and thus reveals the unbridgeable gulf that separates his critique of
Foucault from the critique toward which I am here aiming.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 493
Indeed, I would argue that despite the antiquarian suggestions of
archaeology Foucault never at bottom had the orthodox historian's
passion for the objective apprehension of the past, even in Histoire
de la folie. But I would also argue that there was a sense in which
he did not know that his concern was not ultimately with the past at
all, and that it was only with the reorientation in his conception of
power that he came to see this. Certainly, only in his more recent
writings and utterances can one find unequivocal expressions of an
(allegedly) presentist concern. 1 35 Thus, in an interview given in
1971, Foucault informs us that "it is a question, basically, of
presenting a critique of our own time, based upon retrospective
analyses"; and he goes on to explain that "what I am trying to do is
grasp the implicit systems which determine our own most familiar
behavior without our knowing it. I am trying to find their origin, to
show their formation, the constraint they impose upon us; I am
therefore trying to place myself at a distance from them and to show
how one could escape." For Foucault, it is now explicitly a question
of shaking things up, of putting into play-en jeu- 'the systems that
quietly order us about. 136 In a more recent interview, given in
'

1975, Foucault emphasizes even more strongly the total insertion of

his works into the context of the present: "Writing interests me only
insofar as it enlists itself into the reality of a contest, as an instru-
ment of tactics, of illumination. I would like my books to be, as it
were, lancets, or Molotov cocktails, or minefields; I would like them
to self-destruct after use, like fireworks." It is necessary, Foucault
asserts, for historical analysis to be a real part of "political
struggle" -not that it attempts to give such struggles a "guiding
thread" or a "theoretical apparatus," but rather that it "consti-
tutes" their "possible strategies." 137 It is in Surveiller et punir that
this concern first comes fully into play. Foucault tells us in this work
that "I have learnt not so much from history as from the present"
that "punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a
political technology of the body"; and he goes on to say that it is of
the prison in its actuality "that I would like to write the history," an
enterprise which he characterizes, not as "writing a history of the

135 Admittedly, in the 1966 interview with Bellour he asserts that "it is
inot a fault
when these retrospective disciplines find their point of departure in our present
situation"; but this is hardly different from the orthodox historian's belief in the
problem-generating capacity of the present (see Bellour, 'Entretien avec Michel
Foucault," p. 3).
136 John K. Simon, "A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Partisan Review 38
(1971): 192-201.
137 Jean-Louis Ezine, -[Entretien avec] Michel Foucault,' Nouvelles Litteraires, no.

2477 (mars 17-23 1975), p. 3.

494
past in terms of the present," but rather as "writing the history of
the present. "138
Foucault's claim to be concerned with the present brings us finally
back to Nietzsche, for Foucault identifies this concern with the
Nietzschean conception of genealogy. As far as I know, his first
reference to the affinity between his work and the historico-critical
project of Nietzschean genealogy occurs in his 1967 interview with
Raymond Bellour, where he asserts that archaeology "owes more to
the Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly so
called."139 But it was only when he came to see himself as un-
equivocally a presentist that he stopped characterizing his work as
archaeology and began to characterize it as genealogy instead. Thus,
in Surveiller et punir he tells us that the book is intended as "a
correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge;
a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the
power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from
which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant
singularity.'"140 And in a 1975 interview in which he comments on
Surveiller et punir he tells us that "if I wanted to be pretentious, I
would give 'the genealogy of morals' as the general title of what I
am doing." 141 With this transition from archaeology to genealogy-a
transition that some of Foucault's reviewers seem intent on
obscuring'142 -Foucault has finally acknowledged his own lack of
interest in the past.

But what does Foucault's genealogy entail besides a radical rejec-

tion of the past? Let us proceed by indirection; let us proceed, that
is, historically. Nietzsche's presentist, genealogical view of history
was articulated within the context of a culture whose dominant mode
of intellectual apprehension was historical. In the form of two
complementary but nevertheless distinct historicisms, historical
modes of thought played a central role in nineteenth-century intellec-
tual life. One of these historicisms, which found its archetypal
manifestations in the work of Hegel and of Comte-so different and
yet in their underlying approaches to history so similar-was cen-
138 Discipline and Punish,
pp. 30-31. See, more recently, "Foucault: Non au sexe
roi," p. 113: "C'est la que commence le vrai travail, celui de i'historien du present"
(English trans., Telos, no. 32, p. 159).
139 Bellour (n. 34
above), p. 9.
140 Discipline and Punish, p. 23.
141 "Prison
Talk: An Interview with Michel Foucault," p. 15; see n. 93.
142
Thus, in Gilles Anquetil, "Le Nouveau Pacte de Faust" (review of La Volonte de
saioir), Nouvelles Litteraires, no. 2564 (23-30 decembre 1976), p. 9, the reviewer
refers to Foucault's studies of madness and of the clinic as "genealogies'; see also
"Prison Talk," p. 10.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 495
tered on the idea of development, on the idea of an ordered, lawful
movement from stage to stage in the historical process. The funda-
mental assumption of this type of historicism, namely, that "an
adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an
adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through consider-
ing it in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it
played within a process of development,''l43 was the most nearly
universal element in nineteenth-century thought, coming closer to
giving a unity to the intellectual history of that century than any
other theme. The other form of historicism, which was associated
with the emergence of the modern academic discipline of history,
was much less pervasive, but its impact on the academic milieu
within which Nietzsche worked was nevertheless immense. This
second form of historicism was centered on the idea that every
historical entity possesses its own unique and incomparable value,
an idea that, divested of its idealist origins, came to underpin the
view that history must be scientific and objective in nature. The
historicism of development and the historicism of individuality
worked together to raise the value of a specifically historical con-
sciousness. Though the elements of historicism had certainly been
present in Western thought before the nineteenth century, it was
only in that century that historical modes of thought moved to the
center of the intellectual stage-that history became, as it were,
essential to knowledge, essential to intellectual life in general.
Nietzsche reacted strongly against this rise in the value of the
historical, and in his Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, an
essay written soon after The Birth of Tragedy and serving as a kind
of coda to it, he sharply attacked what he conceived to be the
hypertrophy of historical culture in his own time. Since we are
concerned in this essay not with Nietzsche but with Foucault, I can
deal with Nietzsche's views on history only very briefly. Suffice it to
say that the essential theme of The Birth of Tragedy-namely, the
theme of the incessant struggle between Apollo and Dionysos-was
carried over into The Use and Disadvantage of History; for
Nietzsche associates the historical culture of his own time with
Socratic theoreticism which, with its bias toward science and logical
understanding, had destroyed myth and displaced poetry from its
native soil. This is not to say that Nietzsche opts for a historical
barbarism that would reject all knowledge of the past. For he
believed that culture in the higher sense cannot exist without mem-
ory; but if that culture is to be a living culture it must know when to
143
Mandelbaum (n. 2 above), p. 42.
496 Allan Megill
forget the past, when to strike out on its own: "This is the point that
the reader is asked to consider; that the unhistorical and the histori-
cal are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a commu-
nity, and a system of culture.''l44 Nietzsche's complaint against his
own time was thus not that it was historical, but rather that it was
too historical; it suffered not from history but from an excess of
history. Time and time again Nietzsche complained that the study of
history had become an end in itself, detached from the real needs of
men. Historical knowledge, he asserts, streams in upon us from
inexhaustible sources, but we have failed to digest this knowledge,
we have failed to impose upon it our own self-created, life-endowing
form. Against the reigning historicisms, which seemed to preach,
respectively, subordination to the general process of history and
subordination to the objective reality of the past, Nietzsche articu-
lated a new, relativistic historicism that claimed to subordinate the
past to the needs of the present and the future. This new historicism
would attempt to restore "the clarity, naturalness, and purity of the
connection between life and history.'. . It would recognize that
we need history "for the service of the future and the present," that
we need it "for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life
and action."''46 It would likewise recognize that the true understand-
ing of history is vouchsafed, not to those who passively observe
history, but rather to those who actively use it, linking it instinc-
tively to their own needs and actions in the continuing present. For
in Nietzsche's view, "You can only explain the past by what is
highest in the present. . . Only he who is engaged in building up
the future has a right to judge the past."'147
What are the consequences of seeing history in these radically
presentistic terms? Most obviously, presentistic history must neces-
sarily be perspectival in nature; it must give us, not the truth of the
past, but a point of view on the past. And indeed, in The Genealogy
of Morals Nietzsche rejects the claim of "our modem writers on
history" to be "a mirror of events," 1 48 attacking their scientific
pretentions as nothing more than a fearful attempt to deny, through
the assertion of a single truth, the multiple truths of things. In the

144
Friednich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, in Complete Works, ed.
Oscar Levy (Edinburgh, 1909), 2: 10. It should be noted that the Levy edition does
not accurately render the German title of this work, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der
Historie fur das Leben.
145 Ibid., p. 30.
146 Ibid., pp. 30, 3.
147
Ibid., pp. 55, 56.
148
Nietzsche (n. 66 above), The Genealogy of Morals, 3d essay, sec. 26, p. 293.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 497
same work, Nietzsche vehemently condemns "the hallowed philoso-
phers' myth of a 'pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower' "; for
the concept of such a knower presupposes "an eye such as no living
being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate
its active and interpretative powers-precisely those powers that
alone make of seeing, seeing something. All seeing is essentially
perspective, and so is all knowing.''l49 Foucault, too, recognizes the
perspectivism of a presentistic historiography, as he indicates in an
essay that is extremely important for an understanding of his
genealogical apprehension of history, "Nietzsche, la genealogie,
l'histoire," first published in 1971. In this essay he contrasts or-
thodox historiography with Nietzschean genealogy. "The history of
the historians," Foucault declares, "gives itself a point of support
outside of time; it claims to judge everything according to an
objectivity of the apocalypse; but it can do this only because it
presupposes an eternal truth, a soul that does not die, a conscious-
ness always identical with itself." In opposition to the "regard de fin
du monde" cultivated by orthodox historiography, Nietzschean
genealogy, according to Foucault, "does not fear to be a perspecti-
val knowledge. . . The historical sense, as Nietzsche understands
it, knows itself to be perspective, and does not refuse the system of
its own injustice. . . . Rather than feigning a discreet effacement in
the face of what it is looking at, rather than seeking therein its law
and subordinating each of its movements to it, it is a gaze that
knows from where it looks as well as what it is looking at."''50
But the nature of Nietzsche's perspectivism must be carefully
attented to, for despite Foucault's account of "the history of the
historians" few practising historians would deny the perspectival
nature of their own work. On the contrary, orthodox historiography
attributes to interpretation-that is, to the subjective viewpoint of
the historian-a legitimate and indeed a necessary role in the histori-
cal account. It is not perspectivism as such, in which differing and
apparently contradictory perspectives are taken to be simply the
varying profiles of a single invariant reality, that distinguishes
Foucault's version of Nietzschean genealogy from orthodox his-
toriography but something much more radical, namely, a rejection of
the conception of historical reality itself. For, at least in one of his
modes,15' Nietzsche is doing far more than asserting the legitimacy

149 Ibid., sec. 12, p. 255.

150 "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, pp. 152, 157 (my translation, however).
151 Which is not, I would argue, his only mode of apprehending history. But a

thorough exploration of the Nietzschean apprehension of history-an issue that is

498 Allan Megill
of looking upon the hard reality of the past from a variety of angles.
He is asserting that the past is not a hard reality-he is asserting that
every supposed historical reality is merely a foregound, a mask, an
arbitrary stopping point, covering up an infinitude of other
"realities." In short, genealogy denies the existence of a res gestae
that would be the object of the historical account, holding rather that
each historical reality is only an excuse for our stopping at one point
and not at some other point in the vast and unending play of
interpretation. Thus, the genealogical answer to the burden of his-
tory is to be found not in a perspectival reinterpretation of historical
reality in the hope of accommodating that reality to the needs and
interests of the continuing present; it is to be found in the denial of
historical reality, in the assertion that "historical reality" is a mere
projection of present needs and interests.
History has always been taken to be a "representative" or "de-
scriptive" verbal activity, an activity whose "final direction of
meaning" is necessarily outward. In this sense it has been con-
trasted with myth, poetry, and literature in general, in which-at
least if we accept the aesthetic views of Mallarme, Northrop Frye,
and Foucault himself-the final direction of meaning is inward: for
while history is normally intended to represent things external to it
and, as history, has been valued in terms of the accuracy with which
it does represent those things, in literature "questions of fact or
truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a
structure of words for its own sake...."152 In rejecting the concept
of a historical reality separable from the needs and interests of the
historian himself-the concept of a res gestae that the historia rerum
gestarum seeks to double-one necessarily rejects the view that
history is a representative activity. I cannot deal here with the full
implications of such a reordering. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche's
rejection of representation in history, which is of a piece with his
rejection of the stilo rappresentativo in music,'53 his rejection of
naturalism in the drama,'54 and his rejection of the truth-conveying
function of language,'55 means the rejection of history as history and
its recreation as literature, as poetry, as myth. Hayden White
quite as complicated as, and closely related to, the issue of the Nietzschean ap-
prehension of truth (see n. 97 above)-is beyond the resources of the present essay,
where I am giving an incomplete and in some respects one-sided account of his
attitude toward history.
152 Frye (n. 44 above), p. 74.
153
The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 19, pp. 113-21.
154 Ibid., sec. 11, pp. 69-75.
155
See "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," excerpted in The Portable
Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), pp. 42-47.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 499
conveys the nature of this alteration well when he asserts that
Nietzsche's "metaphorical" historiography is "the means by which
the conventional rules of historical explanation and emplotment are
abolished. Only the lexical elements of the field remain, to be done
with as the historian, now governed by 'the spirit of music,' desires.
. . . The historian is liberated from having to say anything about the
past; the past is only an occasion for his invention of ingenious
'melodies.' Historical representation becomes once more all story,
no plot, no explanation, no ideological implication . . . that is to say,
'myth' in its original meaning. 156
Foucault is, I believe, fully aware of these wider implications of
the genealogical history that he has now adopted as his own; he is
fully aware of the fact that his history is essentially fabulation and
myth. Even in 1967, when he was still claiming to be an ar-
chaeologist, he was able to tell Raymond Bellour that Les Mots et
les choses "is purely and simply a 'fiction."' But this insight, which
conflicted so radically with Foucault's scientific pretentions of that
period-pretentions that attained, in L'Archeologie du savoir, an
almost baroque intensity-was not followed up; indeed, the insight
was immediately vitiated by Foucault's assertion that the fiction had
not been invented by Foucault, but was an expression of the
relationship between the epistemological configuration of our own
epoch and the "whole mass of statements" emanating from the
past.'57 With Foucault's transition from archaeology to genealogy,
however, which finally liberated him-if that is the word-from the
"'structuralism" of his earlier work, he has been able to achieve a
more consistent conception of what his enterprise involves. Thus, a
recent interviewer, asking him about the "fictional character" of La
Volonte de savoir, evoked the following response: "As for the
problem of fiction, it is, for me, a very important problem: I am fully
aware of the fact that I have never written anything but fictions. I do
not mean to go so far as to say that fictions are beyond truth (hors
verite). It seems to me that it is possible to make fiction work inside
of truth, to induce truthful effects with a fictional discourse, and to
operate in such a manner that the discourse of truth gives rise to,
'constructs,' something that does not yet exist, and thus 'fictionizes.'
One 'fictionizes' a history from the basis of a political reality that
makes it true, one 'fictionizes' a not yet existing politics from the
basis of historical truth.''158 Foucault's history, then, is a fiction.

156 White, Metahistory, p. 372.

157 Bellour (n. 34 above), p. 7.
158 Finas (n. 37 above), p. 6.
500 Allan Megill
But it is not intended to be a frivolous fiction. Rather, it is
intended-in an almost Sorelian sense-as a weapon in contempo-
rary social and political struggles. For as Foucault stated in another
interview, dating from 1974, "Memory is actually a very important
factor in struggle . . . if one controls the memory of the people, one
controls their dynamism. . . . It is vital to have possession of this
memory, to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain."'159
It should be noted that Foucault is here speaking against what he
sees as the surreptitiously conservative propagandizing of the recent
mode retro in the French cinema. Nevertheless, these observations
well convey, if in a negative fashion, what Foucault takes to be the
central justification for his historical enterprise.

It is not given to us to view Foucault definitively-to view him

with a regard de fin du monde; we must rather view him from the
elusive and shifting standpoint of our own historical situation, which
happens also to be the historical situation within which Foucault,
our contemporary, lives and works. Nietzsche's genealogy was ar-
ticulated within the context of, and as a reaction against, the
nineteenth-century passion for the historical. More specifically, it
was a protest against "the modern historical education" that in his
view accounted for "the premature grayness of our present youth"
and for the impairment of the plastic, creative power of life.'60 It
was an attempt to counteract the simultaneous rigidity and confusion
that nineteenth-century historical consciousness had allegedly in-
duced and thus to free once more the springs of creativity. It was an
attempt to use the "unhistorical" and the "suprahistorical" as
antidotes to the "historical": the unhistorical being the power "of
forgetting, and of drawing a limited horizon round one's self'"; the
suprahistorical being the power "that turns the eyes . . . to that
which gives existence an eternal and stable character, to art and
religion."''6' If we are to determine the value of Foucault's elabora-
tion of Nietzschean genealogy for our own time and place we must
do so at least in part in terms of the balance, within our culture, of
the historical, the unhistorical, and the suprahistorical. Nietzsche
was able, in The Use and Abuse of History, to refer to history as "a
Western prejudice"''62 and to complain of the burdens of a historical
education. Does history still constitute a burden? I think not; for one
1'59 "Film and Popular Memory: An Interview with Michel Foucault," trans. Martin

Jordin, Radical Philosophy, no. 11 (Summer 1975), pp. 24-29; quotes from pp. 25 and
26. The original appeared in Cahiers du cinema.
160
Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, pp. 89-90.
161 Ibid., p. 95.
162
Ibid., p. 15.
 Fouicaiilt, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 501
of the most striking features of the intellectual history of the West in
our century has been the turning aside from history and from
historical modes of thought. The historical experience of the West
has worked to make our culture less "historical," perhaps, than at
any other point since the beginning of the Renaissance. The major
intellectual movements and fashions of the twentieth century have
all been nonhistorical in their orientation while there has been a
dramatic shrinkage in the historical branches of disciplines, such as
philosophy and literary criticism, that have traditionally had an
important historical component. Even among persons of great intel-
lectual attainment history has tended to become an irrelevancy; it
has tended to become a storehouse from which to draw examples at
will, abstracted from the actual contexts of their creation.
It is easy to suggest reasons for this devaluation of the historical,
though more difficult to assess their relative weights and to deter-
mine the complicities between them. First of all, our experience of
glut, our experience of the sheer weight of the historically given, has
tended to turn us against history. In the late eighteenth century,
within the framework of an ideology that emphasized the universal-
ity of reason, Individualitat seemed marvelously liberating; by the
late nineteenth century it was already beginning to seem oppressive.
In the second place, our experience of cultural multiplicity, by which
I mean not only the widely publicized work of ethnologists but also
the infamous "knowledge explosion" with its tendency to infinite
scholarly fragmentation, has destroyed the conception of a common
humanistic culture, which was often adduced by traditionalists as the
primary reason for the study of history.'63 In the third place, our
experience of sheer destructiveness, on a more massive scale than
has ever been seen before-the decimation of entire generations and
of entire races, for example-has destroyed the conception of histor-
ical progress that underpinned so much of nineteenth-century his-
toricism. And finally, there is our experience of the cumulative
technological revolution of the last seventy years or so-a revolution
that has altered our environment and our conditions of life in a
radical and historically discontinuous way.
But whatever the reasons, historical culture no longer occupies an
important place within the literate culture of our time. There is, to
be sure, some evidence of a popular hunger for history and for the
sense of reality that history can bring. 164 This hunger proceeds,
163
See, now, the traditionalist at bay: "Troy will always be, in the foreseeable
future, an integral part of the Western cultural heritage" (Frye, p. 102; my italics).
164 On this point, see John Lukacs, "The Future of Historical Thinking," Sal-
magundi 30 (Summer 1975): 93-106.
502 Allan Megill
however, not from the addictive craving diagnosed by Nietzsche, but
from a more elemental sense of lack. Foucault is wrong-or, perhaps
better, no longer right-when he tells us that "in our culture, at least
for the last few centuries, discourses hang together (s'enchainent) on
the mode of history" and that "in a culture such as ours, all
discourse appears against the background of history (apparait sur un
fond d'histoire).'' 65 In arguing for a mythical, presentistic, genealog-
ical view of history, Nietzsche was taking upon himself the task of
thinking "thoughts out of season"; he was following in the footsetps
of "the great 'fighters against history.' "166 In arguing for a mythi-
cal, presentistic, genealogical view of history, Foucault is thinking
seasonable thoughts, not unseasonable ones, and it is the orthodox
historian who, paradoxically enough, is the fighter against history. I
do not mean here to condemn Foucault, for he is a man of much
brilliance, who frequently illuminates the landscape in unexpected
ways. Nevertheless, in opposing Apollonian culture he is behind the
times. He is engaging in an immense con game. He is trying to set
fire to the ashes of the library at Alexandria. Let us get what
entertainment we can from the spectacle; but let us remember that
that is precisely what it is-a spectacle, a play, a performance.
Do I mean, then, that we should not take Foucault seriously? You
misread me. To be sure, he should not be taken seriously as a
historian. That is to say, we should recognize, and we should inform
others, that Foucault is not interested in the interpretation of the
past. To read Foucault's myths as if they were a portrayal of the
past itself-to read them as if they bear some necessary and com-
prehensible relationship to anything that actually happened in the
past-is to confirm and strengthen the widespread historical illiteracy
of the present day. And yet if Foucault should not be taken seriously
as a historian, he most emphatically should be taken seriously as an
indication of where history now stands. The popular hunger for
history-one might almost say the human hunger for history-is
something to which orthodox academic historiography finds it almost
impossible to respond. For we are faced by a paradox. Even as
orthodox historiography has been expanding the range of its subject
matter and rendering its methodology more and more technical and
sophisticated, two countermovements have been occurring: the
higher intellectual foundations of history have been crumbling, and
its accessibility and immediacy have been declining. It is ominously
significant that many historians have trouble justifying their vocation

165 Bellour (n. 34 above), p. 9.

166 Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, p. 74.
 Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History 503
in terms comprehensible to those who are not themselves
historians-indeed, that such justifications are frequently couched, in
terms that are entirely intra muros and negative, as the defense of
the reality of the past against the misinterpretations of other disci-
plines. Foucault's work is symptomatic of a "higher" culture in
which history as a science can no longer justify itself because the
knowledge of the past as such appears to have no independent
cultural value or purpose, and of a "lower" culture which history as
a science does not reach. Detached from both, the orthodox histo-
rian finds himself unable to justify his analytical vocation -unable to
justify his penchant for subjecting myth to the rule of reality, to the
Apollonian rule of science. The solidity of the past gives way-in
Foucault and in his followers-to the ersatz reality of myth.
And this takes us to the term of our criticism, which lies beyond
history. Admitting for the moment that there is a genuine element of
liberation in Foucault's opting for the free play of the interpretation
of interpretation rather than for the circumscribed work of the
interpretation of things, and admitting that in a culture bent down
under the weight of a historical factuality-if ours were such a
culture-the Foucaultian option might well perform a valuable con-
trapuntal function, is it not true that this option entirely lacks the
radicality it claims? For is it not true that it fails to touch the
roots-that precisely because it is myth it renounces the attempt to
plumb the reality of human social life, which is the realm within
which all change must ultimately be effected? I do not deny that
myth may be an instrumentally useful stimulus to social action; I
merely deny that it is a substantively rational guide for social action.
Those who reject the distinction between myth and science do so at
their peril-and at ours. At best, they confine themselves within a
rhetoric that has no issue upon the real world of social action: at
worst, they reap the whirlwind. Caveat emptor. Foucault's
mythification of the past is also at the same time a mythification of
the present. I hold, with Foucault and with Nietzsche, that the
historian's concern with the reality of the past-if it is nothing more
than that-is trivial. This is why I hold, for reasons now transcend-
ing the historical, that Foucault must not be taken seriously-and at
the same time must be taken very seriously indeed.