25 years on: Remembering Foucault
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault in 1984. Foucault Across the Disciplines provides a forum for assessing and reassessing the impact of Michel Foucault’s thought across the disciplines over 25 years. Hayden White's paper re-assessing Foucault's impact on historical studies is particularly interesting. Foucault's work has had far reaching implications for the way we perceive visual studies and the study of history itself. For Foucault, writing in the late 1960s, disciplinary licensing had its origins in the 18th Century Enlightenment, yet it still remains a salient feature of contemporary 21st Century Western society. One may argue that disciplinary formation both establishes group identity and set groups apart from each other. Foucault argued that the formation of disciplines such as the sciences or the humanities involved the "disciplining" of language itself. Each discipline has a particular language and particular codes of conduc...