Foucault, Modernity, and the Cultural Study of Science

But what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? ¹

A generation after the publication of Foucault’s early works, the history of science remains among the most conservative of the human sciences. As a discipline, it often pays lip service to new theoretical approaches to “history” and “science,” yet still looks back lasciviously to internalist models of an objective science, rising and maturing during “the Enlightenment.” Any attempt to assess the significance of Foucault’s work both for and within the history of science thus encounters a crucial difficulty from the start. As in other fields, Foucault is treated either as an icon, more invoked than studied seriously, or as a Rorschach test: for historians, to ignore his work is to fortify trenches abandoned by colleagues in other disciplines; to cite him is still to be accused of status seeking in the up-tempo fields of literary and cultural theory.

Paradoxically, however, both the studied avoidance and the unconsidered canonization of Foucault work to similar ends: implicitly and explicitly, these strategies reinscribe the assumptions and values of a traditional historiography of science that, in a variety of ways, he challenged throughout his career. This deradicalizing of Foucault, I want to suggest, makes it difficult to assess or explain the continuing significance of his work for cultural critics of science. In what follows, I shall argue that his surprising bestseller of the 1960s, The Order of Things, anticipates and to some extent makes possible the revisionist critiques that define science studies in 1999—critiques that call into question the ideology of modernity that still dominates the historiography of science.

In a 1975 interview, Foucault suggested that his books “are little toolboxes. . . . If people are willing to open them and make use of such and such a sentence or idea, of one analysis or another, as they would a screwdriver or monkey wrench, in order to short circuit or disqualify systems of power, including even possibly the ones my books come out of, well, all the better.” ² In the first section of this article, I extend Foucault’s notion of disqualification to argue that The Order of Things—often misread as a neutral description of the very epistemic system that it “short circuit[s]”—dismantles from within traditional conceptions of “science” and “history.” In the process, his account of the transformations in the discourses of representation, biological classification, and economics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries challenges the ideological construction of modernity itself. In some ways, Foucault anticipates Bruno Latour’s argument that “we have never been modern” because he is intent on demystifying the discursive, scientific, technological, and economic practices that often are taken to be avatars of a disembodied modernity. Foucault’s characterization of the “Enlightenment” as the era of “mathesis,” in this respect, is an effort to register the material complexities that underlie and inform developing sciences of order and calculation. Starting from his observation that Leibniz is the crucial figure for this ideology of order, I examine the material forms that mathesis assumes in Leibniz’s account of the theology and culture of China.

By using Foucault to rethink the relationships among sociopolitical forms of organization, mathematics, theology, and economics, I want to counter the obsession with referentiality that marks much of the criticism of his work. To transmute such seventeenth-century practices into episodes in a progressivist history is to distort Foucault’s emphasis on the material effects, strategies, and components of general systems of order: the forces—economic, and, in the broadest sense, ecological—that too often are blackboxed by intellectual historians and historians of science. For cultural critics of science, then, The Order of Things offers a means to interrogate the assumptions and values that underlie both seventeenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of humankind’s relationship to the natural world.

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