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Philosophy
Robert Nola
To cite this article: Robert Nola (1998) Knowledge, discourse, power and genealogy in
Foucault, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1:2, 109-154, DOI:
10.1080/13698239808403240
Suppose that A is a person who knows that p (where 'p' is, say, the
claim that the Earth rotates daily). What does power allegedly cause?
The content of A's knowledge, namely, that p} Or does it cause the
act of A's knowing that p} Neither of these are plausible candidates.
The first is incoherent, while the second is false; at best what causes
A to know, rather than believe, that p is the evidence, or reasons, for
the Earth's rotation (provided by Copernicus, Galileo and others).
Power is not involved in what we might call the product of a process
of coming to know, namely, A's knowledge that p. If power were
involved then that would detract from A's knowing that p. In
contrast, A could get the (true) belief that p by means which had
nothing to do with evidential justification, such as power. This point
is as old as Plato's discussion in the Theaetetus (201 A-C) that true
belief does not become knowledge through persuasion.15
Instances of the P=>K Thesis can, in one guise, be found in Bacon.
Though scientific hypotheses may be confirmed or disconfirmed by
observation, Bacon points out that often observations emerge from
experiments. He argues that experimentation depends on our powers
and abilities; the world often hides its nature and does not readily
reveal itself to us unless we actively intervene in experimental
situations. So there are some (contingent) relations of causal
dependence of certain kinds of scientific knowledge upon power.16 As
an example, consider the nineteenth-century French physicist Jean
Foucault, who suspended a large swinging pendulum from the dome
of the Pantheon in Paris and then noted the change in the axis of
swing. He might well have exercised power in setting up and
performing the experiment; this is part of the process of getting
evidence (the changing axis of swing) which helps support the claim
that A knows that p. But the final product, knowledge that p (as
distinct from the true belief that p) is arrived at by consideration of
the evidence and not by any power relationship. Thus power (to
conduct an experiment) does not yield knowledge as a product; at
best, it sets in motion processes which yield evidence necessary for
knowledge.
Bacon envisaged other kinds of power producing knowledge. In
the Utopian The New Atlantis, Bacon proposed that society should be
so organised that research institutes, not wholly dissimilar to those
now familiar to us, be set up to pursue experimental research in all
KNOWLEDGE, DISCOURSE, POWER AND GENEALOGY 115
modalities of statements in the discourse, (c) the concepts, and (d) the
strategies of a discourse.30 These four sets of rules are to be taken in
conjunction, and not disjunctively, as providing the identity
conditions for discourses. Change any one of these four sets of rules
and a different discourse emerges. With such a strong condition for
the identity of discourses, it follows that the history of human
thought and practices divides into a vast multitude of different
discourses between which there are allegedly decisive breaks. Even
though some of these discourses might be superficially similar in that
they apparently share, say, the same concepts or are about the same
objects, they would count as different discourses if any one of the
four sets of rules were to differ in any way. Clearly, before discussing
the identity conditions of discourse, something needs to be said about
rules of formation; for our purposes, it is necessary only to discuss
rules for the formation of objects.
Foucauldian Nominalistic Anti-Realism and Objects and Kinds
Foucault's notion of rules of formation for objects plays a significant
role in his distinction between connaissance and savoir. But talk of
objects can be unclear. The word 'object' can function as an umbrella
term for not only particular things (for example, the sun) or events
(the sun's setting today), but also kinds of things (for example, stars)
and the properties and relations that things have. Foucault is a
nominalist who claims that the only things which exist are
particulars, for example, events such as the occurrence of speech —
acts of utterance or writing, or things such as particular people,
particular grains of sand and so on. Traditionally, for nominalists only
actual particulars exist; there are no kinds, sorts, properties or
abstracta such as possible objects, numbers, Platonic universals,
essences, and the like. Given that we readily talk of these latter
objects, a task for nominalists is to explain such talk when the objects
do not actually exist. Anti-nominalists, who assert that some of the
latter objects exist, come in a number of varieties: they range from
mild anti-nominalists who would admit kinds while eschewing
universals to extreme anti-nominalists who advocate a profligate
ontology in admitting them all, including Platonic universals.
Foucault is a strong nominalist who countenances no variety of anti-
nominalism, not even kinds.
122 FOUCAULT
Foucault: so, his umbrella term 'object' can at least be taken to stand
for particular actual things. But more often than not, Foucault uses
'object' in an extended way, which can be quite confusing. In
adopting a strongly nominalist stance toward kinds, sorts or
properties, none of these objects (as we might say) exist
independently of our modes of classification as made possible by our
various discourses. That is, when it comes to the existence of
classifications, kinds, sorts and types of thing which underpin our use
of classificatory or predicate expressions of our discourse, Foucault is
strongly anti-realist. But Foucault speaks as if the general terms and
predicates of our language still refer to kinds, properties and
relations, for, as will be seen, he still wishes to speak of the 'objects'
of our discourses. But these are objects only as a matter of courtesy.
It is as if the general terms and predicates of our discourses are fitted
out with objects, but these objects are not to be understood in any
realist sense as somehow being part of the furniture of the world;
instead, they are artefacts, or constructs, of our discourse. (In the
section entitled 'Foucault on SDI and the "Being of Madness"', these
objects will be distinguished by calling them 'ersatz'.)
No better evidence for his anti-realist nominalism can be found
than in the often-cited passage from the Preface to The Order of
Things in which Foucault discusses Borges' story about the
classification of a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which our
normal animal classifications are challenged by a totally different set
of classifications such as:
animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b)
embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous (g)
stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camelhair brush, (1) et
cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a
long way off look like flies.35
What could be the point behind such a seemingly bizarre
classification of animals? Foucault recognises that we use
resemblance relations in making 'a considered classification, when we
say that a cat and a dog resemble each other less than two greyhounds
do'.36 But he does not pursue the theoretical grounds on which such
classifications are made, for example, those in texts on cladistics;37
KNOWLEDGE, DISCOURSE, POWER AND GENEALOGY 125
before time t or blue after' and 'blue before time t or green after'.
One of the issues raised by our standard blue/green talk when
contrasted with the grue/bleen talk, is the role played by these terms
in our inductive inferences. From a number of emeralds observed
before t to be green, we standardly infer that the next emerald to be
observed after t is green, but we could equally as well infer that the
next emerald to be observed after t is grue, and thus blue. The same
evidence of observed green emeralds leads to contrary predictions
about future observations. Inductive inference has been troubled not
only by Hume's critique that there is no justification for the
conclusions drawn, but also by Goodman's 'new riddle of induction'.
Those not of a nominalist persuasion have looked to the role that
kinds can play in justifying our inferential practices and in
overcoming Goodman's riddle.40
Lastly, the bizarre, to us, Foucault/Borges classification cannot be
made without supposing that there are relatively stable classifications,
such as, in (d) and (1), the kinds pig, water and pitcher, or the
properties sucking or being broken. Such relatively stable
classifications are necessary for even expressing the bizarre
classifications themselves; without such stability, the bizarre
classifications could not be described. What this shows is that, given
the classificatory expressions we already have in our language, we can
make any other classifications in the fashion of Foucault and Borges.
However, as Nelson Goodman shows us, this point cannot be pushed
too far. It can easily be shown that our standard green/blue talk can
be translated into grue/bleen talk and vice versa. So neither mode of
talk is logically privileged in any way; it is just that one is more
traditional to us, or more 'entrenched' as Goodman would say.
In The Order of Things, what brings about our classifications? In
this work (first published in French in 1966), Foucault appeals to the
'fundamental codes of culture - those governing its language, its
schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the
hierarchy of its practices'.41 The task of scientific and philosophical
theories is to provide explanations of the classifications the codes
make. But Foucault's interest is in an 'intermediate region' in which
'codes of culture' impose a new 'grid' on language, or new schemes
of perception and so on. In particular, the book discusses the
changing kaleidoscope of classifications in language, biology and
KNOWLEDGE, DISCOURSE, POWER AND GENEALOGY 127
or how false some of their scientific claims may be in early, and even
later, phases of their science (as the Kripke/Putnam theory of
reference allows)?
The case of madness is controversial, as many of the Foucault- and
non-Foucault-inspired recent accounts of its history and our dealings
with madness reveal. However, Foucault's talk of the 'being of
madness' here can be misleading in a number of ways. As Freundlieb
puts it: 'even from a realist rather than Foucault's nominalist
perspective, madness is not considered a natural kind, as it were, but
a family of illnesses that often manifest themselves in different forms,
depending at least in part on their cultural context'.47 Because of the
motley of things that have been called 'madness', even for a realist
there is not 'the being of madness itself. There is no single kind,
genus or family of thing to be spoken of in the case of madness;
instead, madness names a family of illnesses the boundaries of which
are indeterminate and have been variable over time. Even some
central members of the family might lack a single 'being', for
example, extreme persistent depression or schizophrenia. But for yet
other members, there might be a being to be investigated; such is the
case for Huntington's disease (HD).
One kind of madness is a form of dementia now known as
Huntington's disease, which involves a progressive growth in
uncontrollable twitching of the body, especially of the arms, legs and
mouth, and a progressive degeneration of cognition and emotion
accompanied by violent outbursts. The classic symptomatic
description of this variety of 'insanity', as Huntington calls it, is to be
found in his classic 1872 paper. Before Huntington, it was included
under a collection of diseases variously known as 'chorea' (from the
Greek for dance), 'St Vitus's Dance' or 'the dancing mania'.
Paracelsus classified the various kinds of chorea, distinguishing
medieval forms of the dancing mania which were psychosocial in
origin from chorea naturalis, that is, chorea 'coming from the nature'
of the sufferer. Included within this category would be suffers of HD
and other kinds of dementia, but not demonic possession. From the
1830s, Elliotson and Waters had noted its occurrence in families, as
did Huntington in his 1872 paper, but it was not until 1908 that its
Mendelian dominant inheritance was properly described. In the
1980s, the gene for HD was located toward of the tip of the short
132 FOUCAULT
objects must be different. We may wish to reject SDI, but not for the
reasons Foucault gives, which entail profligate postulation of objects.
Discourse Difference, the Contextualist Theory of Meaning/Reference
and 'Ersatz' Objects in Foucault
Let us move from the quite general matter of what gives our
discourses their unity and focus on one consequence of his view,
namely, the constructivist stance in which discourses are said to
constitute their objects and the contextualist theory of
meaning/reference that accompanies it. By focusing on his
contextualism, various doctrines mentioned above, especially his
appeal to ersatz objects and his stance with respect to realism and
constructivist idealism, are bought together. Foucault's
constructivism is not of the sort that denies there is any reality
independent of our discourses; rather, what reality there is plays little
role in shaping our discourses. As he puts it: 'there can be no question
of interpreting a discourse with a view to writing a history of the
referent'. He continues:
we are not trying to find out who was mad at a particular
period, or in what his madness consisted, or whether his
disturbances were identical with those known to us today. ...
We are not trying to reconstitute what madness itself might be,
in the form in which it first presented itself to some primitive,
fundamental, deaf, scarcely articulated experience and in the
form in which it was later organised... by discourses.... Such a
history of the referent is no doubt possible; and I have no wish
at the outset to exclude any effort to uncover and free these
'prediscursive' experiences from the tyranny of the text.55
Passages such as this indicate that Foucault is willing to admit that
there is such an object as madness, which is independent of our
discourses. But such a discourse-independent madness, as Foucault
goes on to claim, plays neither any role in determining what
Foucauldian discourses are like nor what they refer to. What
determines these are the rules of formation of our discourses. But
what makes the rules the way they are?
One answer that the realist would favour is that it is madness itself
that plays (or, better, each member of the family of illnesses falling
136 FOUCAULT
under the umbrella term 'madness', with all their properties and
relations plays) some role in helping fix many, but not all, of the
aspects of our theories about madness. Realists could take on board
much of what Foucault says about the emergence of our theories
about aspects of madness, but not necessarily his special theory of
discourses in which he clothes his account of their emergence.
However, our sciences also involve an engagement, no matter how
imperfect, primitive, incomplete and misleading it might be, with
madness itself (or one of the families of madness, such as HD), and it
is this engagement with madness that helps determine many aspects,
but not necessarily all, of what we say about madness in our sciences.
The realist looks, in part, to the semantics, the word-world
connections made in our theories, to help determine why we have the
discourses we do. Of course, the realist will have to be aware of the
impact of ideology, interests and whatever else that help shape both
our theories and our acceptance or rejection of them. But,
importantly, it is the engagement with aspects of the world (in this
case madness) that helps explain some (but not all) of the central
features our discourses possess.
Because he emphasises the idea of rule-following in which
semantic word-world relations hardly figure, the realist answer just
given is not readily available to Foucault. If what the discourse is
about does not have some role in determining aspects of that
discourse, what does? For the Foucault of the 1969 The Archaeology
of Knowledge, what shapes the rules governing discourse is not a
question given much attention; for the post-1968 Foucault, the
determining factor is power.
In rejecting the priority of objects over discourse, Foucault
advocates a priority of discourse over objects in which rules of
formation not only give identity to a discourse, but make or
constitute the very objects the discourse is about. In effect, what we
are investigating is no longer purely syntactical aspects, or mixed
syntactical/pragmatic aspects, of our discourse, but rather discourse-
object relations. But to call this 'Foucault's semantics' would be
deeply misleading because Foucault has no semantics of the sort
which sets out discourse-world relationships. It is his lack of a
semantics that underpins his anti-realism, his evocation of
power/knowledge and his resort to genealogical explanation of
KNOWLEDGE, DISCOURSE, POWER AND GENEALOGY 137
tells us on the following page that in the case of, say, the translation of
a scientific text from French to English, there are not two statements,
one in French and one in English, but rather one statement in different
linguistic forms. This brings the notion of a statement quite close to
the idea of a common propositional content which remains the same
despite the differing speech acts involved (one being an inscription in
French the other in English). So we are to understand that statements
can contain a common propositional content of the sort expressed by
the English sentence 'the Earth is round' that remains invariant for
even non-English speakers before and after Copernicus. But how does
the idea that there is a common propositional content, that the Earth
is round, sit with the idea that much of the total context of a statement
determines that content, where the total context includes such items
as experience, possible verifications, problems to be resolved, and
whatever else? Not very well.
While there are important contextual features that determine
what a person states, or reveal that two tokens of the same sentence
are ambiguous, none of these should undermine the many cases in
which there is a common propositional content when tokens of the
same sentence type (say, 'dreams fulfil desires') are uttered. Since
Freud would say things that Plato would not (such as talk of Oedipus
complexes or the role of a censor in letting things out of the
subconscious) and Plato would say things that Freud would not (such
as elaborate upon his theory of Forms), it does not follow that the
sentence 'dreams fulfil desires' has different propositional content
when used by Plato and Freud. Just as in the scientific text example
in which there can be something in common which survives
translation from French to English, so in this case there is something
in common which survives not only translation (this time to and from
ancient Greek and German), but also survives transplantation from
one context of utterance to another, one body of surrounding beliefs
to another, one sequence of experiences to another (Freud and Plato
would have had quite distinct sequences of experiences), and one
possibility of verification to another possibility. Moreover, there must
be something in common surviving Plato's agreeing with, or denying,
what Freud asserted, namely, the claim that dreams fulfil desires,
otherwise each would say something totally different and their
statements would be like ships passing in the night.
140 FOUCAULT
In the case of the 'affirmation that the Earth is round', the very
same propositional content is affirmed both by the ancient Greeks
and Copernicus. We should not deny that there are aspects of our
speech acts (some of which Foucault mentions) which can differ so
that two sentence tokens of the same type can be used to make
different statements (an obvious example is 'I have a headache' said
by two different people). However, what needs to be corrected are
excessive claims in which it is insisted that two sentence tokens of the
same type must be used to make different statements where the
contexts of the two tokenings differ in ways Foucault mentions. In
correcting the excesses, a case can then be made for continuity of
meaning and reference for many statements, such as 'the Earth is
round', made in different contexts.
rather his theory does not address its issues even though it
presupposes solutions to them. In fact, Foucault can be placed in the
long tradition of conventionalist epistemology that has been common
in French philosophy this century, but he has added to it a
constructivist strand.
Genealogy
For Foucault, there are links of power to both knowledge and
discourse. Given the peculiarities of Foucault's theory of discourse,
let us focus only on the power/knowledge doctrine and consider in
what way it presupposes traditional epistemology. In the first section,
'The Power/Knowledge Nexus', two theses were associated with this
doctrine, only one of which will be considered here, namely, the
P=>K Thesis, in which knowledge causally depends on power; this, it
will emerge, also expresses Foucault's thesis about the 'genealogy of
knowledge'.
The P=>K Thesis immediately raises a number of questions
familiar to those working in traditional epistemology. (1) Since it is a
strong generalisation, what evidence supports it? A few examples to
its credit will not suffice to confirm it, while a few central
counterexamples will overthrow it. (2) In making claims of causal
dependence, what tests have been performed to show not mere
correlation between power relations and bodies of knowledge, but
genuine causal dependence? Here Mill's methods of causal test, or
more sophisticated methods in statistics, would have to be employed.
(3) Is power the only cause of knowledge? Though very little is said
in Foucault's writings about cognitive factors, it is evident in many
cases that thought processes play a direct role in the formation of our
knowledge, while power plays none. We would have to attribute to
Newton a great deal of self-deception if, when he replied to a
question about how he discovered the law of universal gravitation
with 'By thinking on it continually', we were to insist that instead
power relations played a dominant role. (4) The previous question
raises problems concerning the possibility of rival theories
concerning the causes of our knowledge claims, and how one might
test between the rivals. There are very few places where Foucault
mentions this matter, the following being a rare instance:
146 FOUCAULT
NOTES
22. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.12.
23. Ibid., p.183.
24. Ibid., p.15, n.2.
25. Dieter Freundlieb, 'Foucault's Theory of Discourse and Human Agency', in Colin
Jones and Roy Porter (ed.) Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body
(London: Routledge, 1994), p.153.
26. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.27.
27. A theory of speech acts was developed by J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). The similarity between Foucauldian statements and
Austinian speech acts is discussed in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983 second edition), pp.54-9.
28. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.27.
29. Martin Kusch, Foucault's Strata and Fields: An Investigation into Archaeological and
Genealogical Science Studies (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), Ch.5.
30. Each of these is discussed in a separate chapter in Part 2 of Michel Foucault, The
Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon,
1972).
31. The contrast Plato draws in section 265E of Phaedrus (see the translation and
commentary of R. Hackforth, Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1952)) is between classifications that follow the articulations of nature versus
those which cross objective boundaries; in making the latter classifications, we 'hack
off parts like a clumsy butcher'. Sometimes Plato's dictum has been misexpressed and
given nasty overtones when realists are said to 'carve nature at its joints'. But Plato does
not say this; rather, it is those who do not follow the articulations of nature that are
spoken of in the unpleasant metaphor in which classifications arise through the
hacking of a clumsy butcher.
32. The discussion here follows Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991), Ch.2 and Ch.13. However, Devitt is not a strong realist about kinds.
33. The matters raised here about the construction of social reality are more fully discussed
in John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press,
1995), Ch.1-5.
34. Note that extreme anti-realists who strive to remain nominalists, such as Bishop
Berkeley, would not grant even this much about the existence of individual objects.
35. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Tavistock, 1970), p.xv.
36. Ibid., p.xix.
37. For one discussion of how we make classifications in biology, see Elliott Sober,
Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution and Inference (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1988).
38. The example is suggested in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History (Sydney:
Macleay Press, 1996, revised edition), pp.254-5.
39. See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1955), Ch.3 and Ch.4. The definition of 'grue' and 'bleen' given above is one of
several variants.
40. There are many such accounts; one of the more recent is Hilary Kornblith, Inductive
Inference and its Natural Ground (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1993).
41. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Tavistock, 1970), p.xx.
42. Ibid., p.xii-xiii.
KNOWLEDGE, DISCOURSE, POWER AND GENEALOGY 153
43. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.32.
44. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1970), Ch.10; and Paul Feyerabend, 'Explanation, Reduction and
Empiricism', in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (eds.) Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science: Volume III: Scientific Explanation, Space and Time
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).
45. See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), a reprint of lectures
given since the late 1960s and first printed in 1972; and Hilary Putnam, Mind,
Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers Vol.2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975), Ch.8, Ch.11 and Ch.12.
46. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.32. (Italics added.)
47. Dieter Freundlieb, 'Foucault's Theory of Discourse and Human Agency', in Colin
Jones and Roy Porter (ed.) Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body
(London: Routledge, 1994), p.157.
48. For more on the historical background to Huntington's disease see Michael Hayden,
Huntington's Chorea (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1981); or Peter Harper (ed.),
Huntington's Disease (London: W. B. Saunders, 1991).
49. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.32.
50. The terms 'intentional object' and 'intentional inexistent' can be found in Franz
Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1973; first German publication in 1874), p.88. However, they have a much
earlier origin in medieval philosophy.
51. Foucault does discuss empty descriptions such as 'the golden mountain' in The
Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon,
1972), pp.88-96. But the discussion is tortuous. We are invited to consider not only
the referent of statements, but also the correlates of propositions and a statement's
referential, namely, 'rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated or
described within it [the statement], and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in
it' (p.91). But once again, the objects are not given independently, but are constructed.
52. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.32.
53. Loc. cit.
54. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), pp.32-3.
55. Ibid., p.47.
56. Ibid., pp.47-8.
57. Ibid., p.48.
58. Ibid., p.49.
59. Ibid., p.229.
60. Ibid., p.103.
61. Dieter Freundlieb, 'Foucault's Theory of Discourse and Human Agency', in Colin
Jones and Roy Porter (ed.) Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body
(London: Routledge, 1994).
62. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.71.
63. Dieter Freundlieb, 'Foucault's Theory of Discourse and Human Agency', in Colin
Jones and Roy Porter (ed.) Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body
(London: Routledge, 1994), p.159.
64. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.205.
154 FOUCAULT
65. Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-77: Michel Foucault (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p.193.
66. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), p.206.
67. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1970), p.206.
68. Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul),
p.25.
69. Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-77: Michel Foucault (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), pp.86-7.
70. Ibid., p.117.
71. A fuller discussion of these and other matters can be found in Robert Nola, 'Post-
modernism, a French Cultural Chernobyl: Foucault on Power/Knowledge', Inquiry,
Vol.7, (1994), section 5.
72. 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (London:
Penguin Books, 1986).
73. Ibid., pp.76-7 and 80.
74. Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-77: Michel Foucault (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p.132.