Author-function
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Revision as of 23:47, 10 May 2011
Rather than classifying himself as a post-structuralist, Michel Foucault considered himself rather to be a genealogist. Differing from the structuralist view that one can map the structure of a language and binary thought, Foucault argued that meaning can be derived outside of what culture's discursive system dictates as true or false. Foucault believed that meaning does not come from the evolution of ideas or the misnomer, "the history of thought." He argued that using history as a system to dictate meaning was merely an anthropological attempt that created the need to categorize each thing until the meaning had been completely dispersed. Foucault believed that to rely on the belief that a general history would be able to constitute meaning is counter-intuitive and rejects the idea that differences exist, "a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion." "There is a reason for this. If the history of thought could remain the locus of uninterrupted continuities, if it could endlessly forge connections that no analysis could undo without abstraction, if it could weave, around everything that men say and do, obscure synthesis that anticipate for him, prepare him, and lead him endlessly towards his future, it would provide a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness." Thus, Foucault argues against the history of thought as a discursive system for structure, but argues for history stripped of anthropological justification. "In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures."
Rather, the construction of meaning should be analyzed in the discontinuities, the fractures and fissures, within this history of thought. Meaning is established a-linearly. Foucault believed binary pairs limited the existence for meaning outside of the word's implied opposite.
