Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE.

, PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II In The Order of Things, Foucault
excavates the principal ‘epistemic’
politics (e.g., the Vietnamese ‘boat people’), Foucault was forever at the sites of Western systems of
knowledge from the Renaissance to
forefront of public controversy up to his death in 1984. the present day. He does not
unearth ‘facts’ but the theoretical
Foucault’s bestselling book, Les Mots Et Les Chose (1966, archives which tell us how the
translated into English as The Order of Things, 1973), did more perhaps ‘facts’ were interpreted in a specific
epoch. In other words he is less
than any other work — with the possible exception of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes preoccupied with the ‘things’ of a
particular cultural period than with
Tropiques — to introduce structuralism to the public. It is certain that the ‘words’ which were used to
Foucault’s contributions to the structuralist debate were more wide ranging signify these things, i.e., the ways in
which these things were perceived,
and electric than those of his predecessors. For while the latter had tended expressed and thereby known.
The episteme of Renaissance:
to confine their ‘structuralist’ analysis to one specific discipline of the
things were seen as words. The
human sciences — e.g., Saussure to linguistics, Lévi-Strauss to world was deemed to be a Divine
Spirit authored by God Himself
anthropology, Lacan to psychoanalysis and so on — Foucault energetically for man to read. Things were
thought to ‘resemble’ each other
embraced a ‘multidisciplinary’ approach. His structural investigations
as signs of the Creator’s
ranged from psychopathology (Madness and Civilization: A History of revelatory text. The episteme of
the Renaissance could be summed
Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1961) and medicine (The Birth of the Clinic: up as a system of resemblance.
An Archaeology Of Medical Perception, 1963), to criminology (Discipline Here words resembled things and
things resembled words.
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1976) and a final three volume History The episteme of Classical Age
(17th & 18th century): the
of Sexuality (Only two of which were completed by the time of his death). structural relation between words
One would be entirely incorrect to interpret the diversity of and things shifts from an episteme
of ‘resemblance’ to an episteme of
Foucault’s works as a symptom of divided intellectual allegiance or of ‘representation’. A gap or
‘difference’ now emerges between
overall lack of purpose; because there is a basic continuity or purpose: the words and things. Words come to
concern to establish an epistemological critique of the strategic practices or function as representational ideas
whose purpose it is to classify,
structures of knowledge on the basis of a new understanding of the measure, and compute the things
of the world. One can no longer
dominant discourses of Western culture. assume that words are naturally
In The Order of Things, subtitled An Archaeology of the Human like things. Objective things are
no longer presumed to be identical
Sciences, Foucault provides a compelling critique of the post-Renaissance with the language or thought of
man. It is the business of the
history of ‘discourse’ as it moves or ‘mutates’ through a series of epistemic human enquirer to try to get to
jumps. He demonstrates how one period’s ‘code of knowledge’ (episteme) know these things by means of his
own subjective representations.
replaces another not in terms of a continuous progression but in terms of All this means that man is no
longer able to read the world
discontinuous ruptures. Rejecting the Enlightenment notion of linear
directly as if things were quasi-
progress, epitomised by the philosophy of humanist rationalism, Foucault mystical symbols orchestrated and
guaranteed by an Omnipotent
focuses his critical lens on those pre-rational structures of the ‘Classical Deity omnipresent in all of his
works. God becomes an absent
period’ of modern Western civilisation which he defines as the ‘positive
God, a Deus Absconditus. And
unconscious’ of our cultural knowledge. In this seminal work he appears the world in turn becomes an
autonomous material universe
to endorse the structuralist premiss that traditional concepts like ‘meaning’, which man tries to master by
‘intention’, ‘will’, ‘reason’ or indeed, the ‘individualized subject’ are but means of his conceptual acts of
representation. In this manner, the
superficial items in the play of underlying systems of signification. Renaissance model of language as
a system of revelatory symbols is
Developing this vocabulary of the structuralists, Foucault affirms that the replaced by the Classical model of
language as a system of
© 2013, Dr. J.S.R.S 61 representational signs.
Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai Foucault then goes on to analyse
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II how this Classical Age of
‘representation’ is replaced by the
overall system discourse in any given period must be properly understood Modern Age of ‘self-reference’.
Words and things are no longer
as a structured ensemble of correlations which functions independently of simply different; they are now bereft
the individual counters which it keeps in play. He defines the structural of any correlation whatsoever, be it
one of resemblance or
ensemble of the Classical period as a concealed order which predetermines representation. In the Modern Age
of the 19th century, words function
the apparent orders of rational consciousness operating in a variety of new
neither as symbols which reveal
scientific discourses, linguistic (language), biological (life), and economic things directly to us, nor as signs
which represent things indirectly to
(labour). The task of his archaeological analysis is to ‘decode’ these us, but simply as a self-referential
discourse of a transcendental human
epochal forms of knowledge so as to discover the subjacent structural laws
subject with itself i.e., words now
which govern them. reflect the human subject to himself.
Foucault defines this modern
Perhaps the most startling feature of Foucault’s analysis was the episteme as ‘anthropologism’: the
claim that the revered Western notion of ‘man’ is itself a conditioned anthropological formation of man as
a self-sufficient autonomous subject
‘product’ of a specific ‘epistemic epoch’ (i.e., the modern) which is now requiring no external support for his
knowledge—either in God or in
beginning to disappear. Far from being the creator of the scientific codes of nature. What occurs here is that
discourse, as humanism held, ‘man’ is now revealed as no more than a man becomes both the subject and
object of his own knowledge.
category created by these codes. We do not produce science, it produces us. Foucault argues, however, that the
story of knowledge does not stop
And if it is true that science once served to objectively legitimate the here. The modern humanist
construct of the human subject as an autonomous substance or individual preoccupation with the knowledge
of man is gradually giving way, he
consciousness, it is now in the process of dismantling this construct. And maintains, to a new ‘post-modern’
and basically anti-humanist
so Foucault announces that the famous era of the death of God, ushered in conviction that the human subject is
by Nietzsche and the existentialists, is now being superceded by a new era itself a limited consciousness subject
to laws which are not of his own
whose signal achievement is the death of Man. This epochal ‘death of man’ choice or making. Foucault
concludes that the ultimate episteme
dramatically alters one’s whole understanding of the human sciences. of the post-modern era of
The primary aim of Foucault’s archaeology is to uncover the structuralism is characterised by the
historical a priori of the ‘demise of
unconscious laws of language and thought which precondition the cultural man’.
transformations within knowledge. Whereas most human sciences concern
themselves with particular isolated institutions or ideologies which arise
within their period of inquiry (e.g. utilitarianism in the 18th century),
Foucault’s science of the human sciences takes a step back from such But one would be wrong to think of
the episteme of an historical period as
immediate identifications and uncovers those infra-structures which made merely the sum of its knowledge or
such institutions or ideologies possible in the first place. These latent the general style of its research. It
may be more properly understood as
structures are what Foucault calls epistemes. An episteme represents a the total configuration of structural
relations which regulates the manner
general field of knowledge which functions as the ‘historical a priori’ of in which a multiplicity of scientific
the given epoch. It serves as a sort of ‘intellectual underground’ which all discourses emerge, predominate, and
interact in any period. It is, in short,
of the scientific minds of that epoch unconsciously tap or presuppose. what ultimately determines what can
be said and what cannot be said.
Foucault argues that as we enter the new structural epoch of Foucault defines the episteme
contemporary history, we come to realise that it is not us, qua individual accordingly as a hidden ‘archive’
which comprises ‘a general system of
subjects, who invent the episteme of our time. The episteme pre-exists the the formation and transformation of
statements’.
© 2013, Dr. J.S.R.S 62
Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II

human subject and conditions the specific form of its every thought and
action. In particular, it decides the fundamental relation which exists
between things (les choses) and our own understanding —that is, our
conceptual representations — of these things in and through language (les
mots). This relation between ‘things’ and ‘words’ differs from one epoch to
the next depending on the episteme which informs this relation.
While Foucault’s analysis in The Order of Things (1966) and The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) focused on the general epistemic
structures of historical periods, in other works he turned his attention to
more concrete instances of how knowledge functions as a social power.
Foucault did not believe that knowledge was innocent or neutral.
Behind the conventional veneer of the knower as a disinterested
transcendental spectator, Foucault identified ways in which truth was often
monopolised by certain repressive institutions. This resulted in attempts to
circumscribe knowledge in such a manner that whatever surpassed its
official limits was categorised as a form of ‘deviancy’. Thus in Madness
and Civilisation, Foucault examines the historical presuppositions of the
emergence of different categories of the ‘insane’. In The Birth of the Clinic
he applies a similar critique to the strategies concealed behind the clinical
categorisations of the ‘sick’. In Discipline and Punish he investigates the
conceptual underpinnings of the institutional confinement of the ‘criminal’
in enclosed spaces subject to surveillance. And in his final work on the
History of Sexuality, Foucault analyses the ‘confessional’ rationale behind
the rise of the scientia sexualis in the West which produces classifications
of (psychiatric and legal) sexual abnormality or ‘perversion’. Foucault’s
respective studies of psychology, medicine, law, and sexuality express his
resolve to ascertain the covert epistemological codes by means of which
society contrives to legitimate certain formal practices of knowledge by
outlawing others.
Michel Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era, instead of
reflecting preexisting entities and orders, brings into being the concepts,
oppositions, and hierarchies of which it speaks; that these elements are both
products and propagators of “power,” or social forces; and that as a result,
the particular discursive formations of an era determine what is at the time
accounted “knowledge” and “truth,” as well as what is considered to be
humanly normal as against what is considered to be criminal, or insane, or
sexually deviant.

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Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II

IV. a. What is an Author? By Michel Foucault

Foucault begins the essay by dealing with the relationship between
text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this
“figure”—that is outside it and antecedes it. The indifference to the speaker
or the writer is viewed as the appearance of one of the ethical principles of
contemporary writing (écriture) which could be illustrated by tracing two
major themes:
1. Today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression.
(This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according
to its signified content than according to the very nature of the
signifier. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of
writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a
The relationship between writing
question of creating a space into which the writing subject and death is also manifested in the
constantly disappears.) effacement of the writing subject’s
individual characteristics. Using all
2. Writing’s relationship with death. (The work, which once had the the contrivances that he sets up
between himself and what he writes,
duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be the writing subject cancels out the
its author’s murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and signs of his particular individuality.
As a result, the mark of the writer is
Kafka.) reduced to nothing more than the
singularity of his absence; he must
Foucault claims that notions that intended to replace the privileged assume the role of the dead man in
position of the author actually seems to preserve that privilege and the game of writing.

suppress the real meaning of the disappearance of the author and he

examines two of these notions:
1. The idea of work: The task of criticism is to analyze the work
through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play
of its internal relationships. Even when an individual has been
accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he
wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both It is not enough to declare that we
should do without the writer (the
theoretical and technical. How can one define a work amid the
author) and study the work itself. The
millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the word work and the unity that it
designates are probably as problematic
work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively as the status of the author’s
undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a individuality.

theory.
2. The notion of writing (écriture): Because this notion not only
allows one to circumvent references to the author, but also to situate
his recent absence. Therefore the notion of writing seems to
transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a

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Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II

transcendental anonymity. Furthermore, he characterizes writing

into critical and religious approaches.
Then Foucault discusses briefly the problems arising from the use
of the author’s name, and then he says that:
1. The author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse
2. The author’s name performs a certain role regard to narrative
discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits
one to group together a certain number of texts, define them,
differentiate them from and contrast them to others.
3. The author’s name establishes a relationship among texts.
4. The author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from
the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who
produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking
off the edges of the texts, revealing, or at least characterizing, its
mode of being.
5. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive
set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a
culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the
work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain
discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a
result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a
certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author
function,” while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well
have a signer—it does not have an author; a contract may well have
a guarantor—it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted
on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author.
The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence,
circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.
Foucault limits himself to the four most visible and most important
author function:
(1) the author function is linked to the juridical and
institutional system that encompasses, determines, and
articulates the universe of discourses; [Discourses are
objects of appropriation. Discourse was not originally a
product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act—
an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the

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Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II
In order to “rediscover” an author in a
work, modern criticism uses methods
profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the
similar to those that Christian exegesis
blasphemous] employed when trying to prove the
value of a text by its author’s
(2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times saintliness. In De Viris Illustribus,
Saint Jerome explains that homonymy
and in all types of civilization;
is not sufficient to identify
(3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a legitimately authors of more than one
work: different individuals could have
discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific had the same name, or one man could
and complex operations; [The third characteristic of this have, illegitimately, borrowed
another’s patronymic. The name as an
author function is that it does no develop spontaneously as individual trademark is not enough
when one works within a textual
the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is rather, tradition. Saint Jerome proposes four
the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain criteria for determining if one is
dealing with one or several
rational being that we call “author.” Critics doubtless try to individuals: (1) if among several
books attributed one is inferior to the
give this intelligible being a realistic status, by discerning, others, it must be withdrawn from the
in the individual, a “deep” motive, a “creative” power, or a list of the author’s works (the author is
therefore defined as a constant level of
“design,” the milieu in which writing originates.] value); (2) the same should be done if
certain texts contradict the doctrine
(4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, expounded in the author’s other works
since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to (the author is thus defined as a field of
conceptual or theoretical coherence);
several subjects—positions that can be occupied by (3) one must also exclude works that
are written in a different style,
different classes of individuals. [The text always contains a containing words and expressions not
certain number of signs referring to the author. These ordinarily found in the writer’s
production (the author is here
signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, conceived as a stylistic unity); (4)
finally, passages quoting statements
adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such
that were made or mentioning events
elements do not play the same role in discourses provided that occurred after the author’s death
must be regarded as interpolated texts
with the author function as in those lacking it. In the latter, (the author is here seen as a historical
such “shifters” refer to the real speaker and to the figure at the crossroads of a certain
number of events).
spatiotemporal coordinates of his discourse. In the former, Modern literary criticism, even
when—as is now customary—it is not
however, their role is more complex and variable. concerned with questions of
Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, authentication, still defines the author
the same way: (1) the author provides
neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative the basis for explaining not only the
presence of certain events in a work,
refers exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which but also their transformations,
he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the distortions, and diverse modifications.
(2) The author is also the principle of
author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It a certain unity of writing—all
differences having to be resolved, at
would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real least in part, by the principles of
writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the evolution, maturation, or influence.
The author also serves to neutralize
author function is carried out and operates in the scission the contradictions that may emerge in
a series of texts. (3) Finally the author
itself, in this division and this distance. is a particular source of expression
One might object that this is a characteristic peculiar to novelistic or poetic that, in more or less completed forms,
is manifested equally well, and with
discourse, a “game” in which only “quasi-discourses” participate. The first similar validity, in works, sketches,
letters, fragments, and so on.
© 2013, Dr. J.S.R.S 66
Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II

person pronoun “I” refers not to the author. In the first case, the “I” refers
to an individual without an equivalent who, in a determined place and time,
completed a certain task; in the second, the “I” indicates an instance and a
level of demonstration which any individual could perform provided that he
accepted the same system of symbols, play of axioms, and set of previous
demonstrations. We could also, in the same treatise, locate a third self, one
that speaks to tell the work’s meaning, the obstacles encountered, the results
obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is situated in the field of
already existing or yet-to-appear mathematical discourses.
Furthermore, Foucault talks about the last kind of author “founders
Here Foucault compares Marx and
of discursivity” who appeared in the 19th century Europe. The founders of Freud with Ann Radcliffe the author
of The Castles of Athlin and
discursivity are unique because they are not just authors of their own works Dunbayne who founded the Gothic
horror novel. Her works open the
but have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the
way for a certain number of
formation of other texts. For example, Freud is not just the author of The resemblances and analogies. But
Marx and Freud as founders of
Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; discursivity made possible not only
Marx is not just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital; a certain number of analogies, but
also a certain number of differences.
they both have established an endless possibility of discourse. A novelist They have created a possibility for
something other than their
cannot belong to this class since it is only Marx and Freud who make discourse, yet something belonging
possible something altogether different from what a novelist makes to what they founded. To say that
Freud founded psychoanalysis does
possible. Foucault also goes on to make the difference between the not mean that we find the concept of
the libido or the technique of dream
founding of scientific endeavour of Galileo, Newton, Cuvier(founder of analysis in the works of Karl
biology), or Saussure (founder of linguistics) and the initiation of discursive Abraham or Melanie Klein; it
means that Freud made possible a
practices, even though they appear to be similar there is a notable certain number of divergences—
with respect to his own texts,
difference. In the case of science, the act that founds it is based on its future concepts, and hypotheses—that all
transformations; this act becomes in some respects part of the set of arise from the psychoanalytic
discourse itself.
modifications that it makes possible. In other words, the founding act of a
science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those
transformations that derive from it. In contrast, the initiation of a discursive
practice is heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations. Freud’s
psychoanalysis for example opens up to a certain number of possible
applications. In other words, unlike the founding of a science, the initiation
of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations. For
example, re-examination of Galileo’s text may well change our knowledge
of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics
itself; but the re-examining of Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself,
juts as a re-examination of Marx’s would modify Marxism.

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Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II

On the reasons attributed to why Foucault has attached certain These are lecture notes
prepared by Prof. Dr.
importance he himself says: 1) the outlined analysis might provide for an J. S. Rohan
Savarimuttu, The
approach to a typology of discourse. 2) reasons for dealing with the Department of
English, Madurai
“ideological” status of the author. The author is the principle of thrift in the Kamaraj University
College, Outpost,
proliferation of meaning, which reverses the traditional idea of the author. Madurai for the
students of III BA
According to Foucault, the author is not an indefinite source of English Literature in
the Year of the Lord
2013.
significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he
is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits,
excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation,
the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and
recomposition of fiction. According to Foucault, we are accustomed to
present the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is
because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion.
One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent
him as the opposite of his historically real function. The author is therefore
the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the
proliferation of meaning.
Foucault is of view that as the society changes, the author function
will disappear in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will
once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of
constraint—one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to
be determined or, perhaps, experienced.
Foucault concludes that we would no longer hear the questions that
have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not
someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his
deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other
questions like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse?
Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for
himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible
subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all
these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an
indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?
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Dr. J. S. Rohan Savarimuttu M.A., M.A. (Religion & Philosophy), M.Sc. (Counselling & Psychotherapy)., M.Phil., Ph.D., CTE., PGDHE., DIM.,
Department of English, Madurai Kamaraj University College, Madurai
Lecture Notes: Elective Subject II Literary Criticism – Paper II

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