Foucault's Voices

I want to listen to the voices in Foucault’s texts: to the voices of history, and the faint voices of the historians. I want to listen also to Foucault’s own changing voices: the way his voice changes from one work to another. ¹ I am concerned with the modalities of speaking, not with the messages. I want to know who is speaking, on whose behalf, on what authority, to what public, and I want to find out whether the voice speaks in a descriptive, prescriptive, or conditional mode. I want to know how Foucault adopts, accommodates, appropriates, modifies, and rejects the foreign voices in his text.

This will be the subject of the first two sections of my paper. In the third section, I move beyond Foucault’s writing to look at the first literary histories written in Europe around 1800, and the institutionalization of literature in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The topic is Foucauldian because the literary histories were conceived in an organicist paradigm that corresponds to the new discourse of biology, as represented by him; however, I shall argue, the discourse of literature was conditioned by its institutional situation—a dimension that Foucault’s Order of Things deliberately dismisses.

I

In The Order of Things (OT) knowledge is organized in terms of cohesive and transsubjective discursive spaces called “epistemes,” which are among the most controversial features of the book. One of their most recent critiques is a broadly historical and theoretical paper given by Ian Maclean at last year’s post-Foucault conference, now published in Arcadia. ² My approach here will focus on a single discourse in a single episteme, biology, which in Foucault’s scheme of things emerges, together with labor and historical linguistics, around 1800.

Since Foucault detached discourse from speaking subjects, it is rather surprising that he should have given as a heading to all three discourses a proper name—to wit, Ricardo, Cuvier, and Bopp (OT, pp. 253, 263, 280). Cuvier’s discourse is dominated by comparative anatomy: characters are no longer classified, they acquire a new, organic function; interest shifts from the comparison and classification of individual characters to the internal structure of organisms and the comparison of their totality. According to Foucault,

Cuvier freed the subordination of characters from its taxonomic function in order to introduce it, prior to any classification that might occur, into the various organic structural plans of living beings. . . . It is this displacement and this inversion that Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire expressed when he said: “Organic structure is becoming an abstract being . . . capable of assuming numerous forms.”

(OT, pp. 263–264) ³

The passage is puzzling. Why does Geoffroy speak for a discourse that Foucault labeled as the property of Cuvier? Is Geoffroy just a spokesman of Cuvier, or does he define here his own position? I tried to find an answer to this question, but did not get very far: Foucault quotes Geoffroy from a study by Théophile Cahn that provides no documentation for the quotes. ⁴ I still do not know where in Geoffroy’s vast oeuvre the passage may be found.

This is no petty pedantry. Geoffroy, who seems to speak for Cuvier’s epistemic discourse here, was Cuvier’s elder and among the first professors who were appointed when the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle was founded in 1793. He helped Cuvier obtain an appointment at the Muséum, collaborated with him for several decades, and finally clashed with him in the great Académie debate of 1830 that, according to Toby Appel, brought to a head “a fundamental division in the biological sciences: whether animal structure ought to be explained primarily by reference to function or by morphological laws.” ⁵

By making Geoffroy merely a speaker for Cuvier, Foucault suppresses a powerful countervoice; he homogenizes the epistemic discourse by masking the conflict of voices. Once we sharpen our ears to the other voices, we shall start asking from what institutional position and with what authority they speak, and we shall become attentive to the ideological and cultural agendas behind the discourses. An anecdote about Goethe...