Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

Foucault attempts the formidable task of presenting a history of thought within which the role of
individual thinkers over some four hundred and fifty years of discourse is entirely subordinate to
impersonal forces. 1 The determinism that Foucault promulgates is, superficially at least, akin to
Marxist critique in that it is periodised into self-regulating historical structures. The statements, the
texts, the philosophical systems and sciences of any given era will obey a prediscursive network
of coherencies and rules of formation which constitutes the most fundamental level of knowledge.
The similarities which we perceive in the discourses of a particular era, and which we rather
vaguely interpret as the spirit or common purpose of an age, are, for Foucault, emanations of a
strict, rigid, epistemological substrate. This substrate is not to be confused with zeitgeist or
weltanschauung, which are simply its visible emanations, in the form of the atmosphere in which
thought is conducted, or the community of moral, ethical and metaphysical perspectives at a
particular time. So far from being a paradigm that has been superimposed upon an era, or an
analytic reduction of the mass of discourse, the epistemological arrangement is the ground and
possibility of thought itself, the potency of which the discourse of the age is an actualisation. To
this system of relations Foucault gave the name episteme; to the science of its recovery,
'archaeology'.
It is not the surface structures of history that are the object of archaeological research, but the
epistemological foundations upon which the great spectacle of Western discourse has been
constructed. At this level, the role of individual authors is no more than that of epistemic
functionaries. Once again Foucault's approach shows affinities with Marxist critique in that it sees
ideas as the product rather than the motivation for historical change. But whilst many Marxists
allow for a certain interplay between impersonal forces and immanent subjectivity, Foucauldian
archaeology presents the work of individual thinkers as entirely determined by the epistemic
configuration. As Foucault writes of the Classical episteme:
it was the sign system that linked all knowledge to a language, and sought to replace all
languages with a system of artificial symbols and operations of a logical nature. At the level of the
history of opinions, all this would appear, no doubt, as a tangled network of influences in which
the individual parts played by Hobbes, Berkeley, Leibniz, Condillac, and the 'Ideologues' would be
revealed. But if we question Classical thought at the level of what, archaeologically, made it
possible, we perceive that the dissociation of the sign and resemblance in the early seventeenth
century caused these new forms—probability, analysis, combination, and universal language
system—to emerge, not as successive themes engendering one another or driving one another
out, but as a single network of necessities. And it was this network that made possible the
individuals we term Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac. (63)
Like Foucault's first work, Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things accepts the
conventional demarcation of post-Medieval history into the Renaissance, the Classical age, and
the modern age. 2 Nor, of itself, is Foucault's determination of the essential structures of
knowledge in these eras particularly radical. The Renaissance is seen to be constructed around
the scholastic theory of resemblances; the Classical age around the theory of representation and
the system of signs; the modern age to be compassed by the ethic of subjectivity. What
distinguishes Foucault's treatment is the absolute and reciprocal impenetrability he assumes
between these eras, his refusal of the possibility of any significant influence carrying over from
one episteme to another. The epistemi are fully coherent within themselves, and yet entirely
discontinuous with each other. The homogeneity of the episteme is therefore a factor of the
heterogeneity of the epistemi, and vice versa. There can be no thought of man in the Classical
era, as equally there can be no thought within the modern age which is not, at base, thinking of
man.3 Likewise, the episterne of the Renaissance is constituted by the impossibility of thinking
within the categories of representation, just as the Classical era is formed by the complete
disappearance of the theory of resemblances from its horizons.
Consequently, just as the epistemic arrangement exercises absolute determinative power during
the era which it undergirds, so too, when it disappears, it disappears entirely, leaving no residue
but the remotest nostalgia for a lost order. It is here that The Order of Things swerves signally
from dialectical histories in that such models imply some conservation of the forms of the
superseded era through the synthesis of its contradictions, or the negation of the negation. For
Foucault, however, the hiatus is absolute, irresolvable, acausal. Each episteme is the complete
cancellation of the previous episteme. This point is axial, and all the more so in that it forms the