Postmodern theory, Mike Featherstone says, “argues for the abandonment of longstanding ambitions within modernity to develop foundations for knowledge: in effect the abandonment of the quest for unity, generality and synthesis.” Postmodern theory claims to find greater complexity than other modes of theorizing can encompass, and he complains that “master narratives occlude more complex combinations of differences, local diversities and otherness, the voices which were ignored or suppressed in the unified models.” Massive theoretical frameworks are deconstructed, and postmoderns attend... Read more

JL Austin famously distinguished between “performative” and “constative” utterances, the former of which perform the action to which they refer and the latter of which make assertions that can be judged as true or false. Modern philosophy has treated the constative as the norm, and performatives, if considered at all, as bastards. Austin suggests inverting the hierarchy. It is possible to make a performative utterance without explicitly stating the action you are doing: “I promise to pay you” is no... Read more

How did the linguistic theory of Saussure become a model for anthropologists, sociologists, and analysts of pop culture? Jonathan Culler suggests that this move rests on “two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events iwth meaning, and hence signs; and second, that they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations, both internal and external.” These two insights are inseparable because “in studying signs... Read more

Foucault, in Canguilhem’s summary, argues that an anthropologization of the sciences took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kantian philosophy combined with biology, economics, and linguistics to raise the question What is Man? Foucault argues: “From the moment when life, work, and language ceased to be attributes of a nature and became natures themselves, rooted in their specific history, natures at whose intersection man discovers himself natured, that is, both supported and contained, then empirical sciences... Read more

Georges Canguilhem gives this illuminating description of Foucault’s episteme: “In order to perceive the episteme, it was necessary to exit from a given science and from the history of a given science; it was necessary to defy the specialization of specialists, and to try to become a specialist not of generality, but of interregionality . . . . The archaeologist has to have read a great number of things that others have not read . . . Foucault cites none... Read more