It’s also odd how people fixate on these general claims Foucault occasionally made about ‘truth’. In his later work, his main claim was that power often *creates* the phenomena we normally think of it as *repressing* (a thread - sorry!): https://twitter.com/lastpositivist/status/1340277620915748867

Many of the quotations about ‘truth’ come from the start of the History of Sexuality, where Foucault is making the point that the Victorians, in ‘repressing’ sexuality, were not repressing something given but rather creating the thing they appeared to repress.

In Madness and Civilisation, it’s the same with madness: first the theology and then the medicalisation of madness weren’t responses to some pre-existing phenomenon. Again, they created the thing they were responding to.

Same thing with criminality, in Discipline and Punish.

The conservatives who go to Foucault looking for ‘woke culture’ tropes about structural oppression, racism, sexism, etc. - are just barking up the wrong tree. That’s not what Foucault is interested in at all.

Nor is there some big ‘postmodernist’ point about ‘objective truth’.

The Order of Things is a different story. There you find this notion of ‘episteme’, which people interpret as everything from Kuhnian paradigms to the ‘sceptical meta-induction’ (as here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/19/liz-truss-foucault-rightwing-zombie-postmodernism)

But the point is much more subtle and philosophical than either of those. Foucault was interested in models of how thought relates to reality. In the Renaissance the model was *resemblance*. In the Classical period it was *representation*.

After Kant, it got complicated. Ideas were no longer taken as inherently representative. Instead they were the expression of a transcendental subjectivity, and then...

I won’t go on. I hope it’s clear at least that it’s just missing the point to ask if this is a rejection of ‘objective truth’, or to try to identify it with some position in analytic philosophy of science.

Tweets like this make me worry that, in arguing for reading Foucault in terms of what he wants to talk about, rather than what we’re interested in, I might get accused of ‘endorsing’ he claims. https://twitter.com/jtasioulas/status/1339717928762138624

Well I don’t. He tells interesting historical stories, but his claims are founded on archival evidence, and there’s a lot to criticise there.

I’m just saying that if you want to have debates about ‘objective truth’ and oppressive power-structures, find an author who’s actually interested in those topics.