Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”

Abstract

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.