Foucault's Ontology for Inquiry After the Human Sciences

• In Event: Ontology and Becoming: The Challenge of New Theory to Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Theory
In his archaeological analysis in The Order of Things (1966/1970), Foucault described how a shift from the Classical to the Modern episteme enabled the human sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) with their description of living being, man, an “empirico-transcendental doublet” (p. 319), a conscious, psychological subject with depths to be known. One might argue that that particular order of things—that epistemological arrangement, that episteme—is also an ontological arrangement in which categories of being are created using “dividing practices” in which words and things, including man, become possible and able to be known using modes of inquiry also invented by the human sciences.
Yet Foucault wrote that the human sciences aren’t sciences at all and exist in a “cloudy distribution” in relation to the exact and the empirical sciences as well as to philosophy. In particular, he noted the “endless controversy between philosophy, which objects to the naïveté with which the human sciences try to provide their own foundation, and those same human sciences which claim as their rightful object what would formerly have constituted the domain of philosophy” (p. 345).
Recent social science inquiry attempts to engage the posthuman, nonhuman, inhuman, and more-than-human, which require a different description of living being—not the man of the human sciences. Foucault suggested at the end of The Order of Things that some event would cause the fundamental arrangement of knowledge (the episteme) that grounds the human sciences and its man to crumble. Perhaps this “new” ethico-onto-epistemological work that calls into question the ethics of the man of the human sciences in the Anthropocence, for example, is, indeed, that event.
This new work that does not begin with man is difficult to think but enables important questions like the following. First, what descriptions of living being are imagined in this new work that are different from the man of the human sciences invented by the Modern episteme? Second, would “posthuman science,” if such a thing were to be thought, also not be science at all? Third, in what domain would this new work exist if not in science: in philosophy, in another “cloudy distribution,” in a new domain? Fourth, what might the “order” of this new inquiry, in whatever domain it exists, be; that is, how would it exist? Fifth, how would one inquire without the “methods” of the human sciences? Finally, what might this new work do?
This paper brings Foucault’s 50 year-old work to bear on critical and significant issues of current educational inquiry.

Methods or Modes of Inquiry
Philosophical Analysis

Significance
The necessity of rethinking human science inquiry in posthumanism.

Foucault, Michel. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. (A.M. Sheridan Smith, Trans. ) New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1966)

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia