Abstract

Michel Foucault was a kaleidoscopic thinker. He gathered the received opinions, established norms and major facts of our cultural heritage and shifted the ensemble ever so slightly. The results were startlingly new configurations. What had been perceived as necessary relationships, inviolable limits, pivotal events, emerged in this altered perspective as contingencies that supported quite different descriptions. This might simply be subsumed by some narrativist theory as evidence that a variety of stories can incorporate the same facts. But Foucault shifts the perspective on narrative as well. The chain of influences, the temporal continuities, the sustaining consciousness, the totalizing dialectic—these dissolve or are relativized by the method he employs. In sum, Foucault is an historian, but suo modo. Unlike that of the old or even the “new” French historians, his is a self-declared history of the present, an objective, he argues, fully in accord with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Enlightenment. I shall try to illuminate the nature and implications of that original approach to history by focusing on one of his most striking kaleidoscopic moves, the shift from time to space as the paradigm guiding his approach to historical topics. Of course, the kaleidoscope itself is a spatial, and indeed an atemporal instrument.