In 1966, when Michel Foucault published The Order of Things, he devoted himself to the study of the historical conditions that made the development of the human sciences and other disciplines possible. In this work the concept of episteme gets introduced as a way of supporting such analysis.
Def.: Episteme
“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” [1]
Hence, in utilising the concept of the episteme as part of a project of historicising the present system of economic knowledge, it may yet again be laying the foundation to ground future discourse on money and finance on a sound and empirical basis and ultimately unleash economic imaginative power.
Prior to the 19th century there did not exist the discipline of what is currently known as economics (or political economy during the emergence of modernity in that respect) but there did exist various accounts and analyses of the subject of wealth. However fragmentary they amounted to be, they were nonetheless beginning to form themes of a new canon of knowledge. Foucault points in this endavour to the problem of scientificity, e.g. to the fine line of separating supposedly objective from normative research questions, mixing up terminology, etc., that can be exemplified by
“moral problematics of profit and income (theory of the fair price, justification or condemnation of interest), then by a systematic confusion between money and wealth, value and market price”. [2]
All of which is still far from having been treated as attentively, transparently and carefully as present (orthodox) economic theory and modelling might suggest. What Foucault’s archeological work achieved is to acknowledge and consider that
“reflection upon money, trade, and exchange is linked to a practice and to institutions. And though practice and pure speculation may be placed in opposition to one another, they nevertheless rest upon one and the same fundamental ground of knowledge. A money reform, a banking custom, a trade practice can all be rationalized, can all develop, maintain themselves or disappear according to appropriate forms; they are all based upon a certain ground of knowledge: an obscure knowledge that does not manifest itself for its own sake in a discourse, but whose necessities are exactly the same as for abstract theories or speculations without apparent relation to reality.” [3] (own emphasis)
Since the circulation of wealth is an institution constructed over generations by societal practice, it is the grounding of economic knowledge in such a way as to devote time and resources to the development of a clear discourse of wealth towards the practical utilisation of monetary signs, i.e. a re-ordering of empiricity, that may resemble a point of departure. Starting with the attempt to formalise these strains of thought, the below table shows a sequence of the various epistemes identified in The Order of Things. Foucault sees a decline in representative discourse towards one informed by an emancipation of need (see in the sketch shown below).
Monetary signs shall eventually provide the necessary signals within our general economic conduct in order to make possible (again) the controlling of the circulation of wealth to benefit present and future generations as well as to align our economic conduct in turn to the naturally pre-determined planetary boundaries themselves — as the ultimate conditions of human flourishing per se. The latter statement is a normative one, granted it is all the more a political statement deriving from existential polycrisis — making it not less relevant but clearly an essential prospect, as:
“Wealth is a system of signs that are created, multiplied, and modified by men; the theory of wealth is linked throughout to politics.” [4]
As economic, financial and monetary practice are subject to change either from inherent systemic constraints or from without, knowledge is neither free from changing circumstances. It is this hunch of discontinuity in the present moment that begs the question marks in the above table to be come to terms with, if one is serious to develop further the science of wealth:
“How is it that thought detaches itself from the squares it inhabited before – general grammar, natural history, wealth – and allows what less than twenty years before had been posited and affirmed in the luminous space of understanding to topple down into error, into the realm of fantasy, into non-knowledge? What event, what law do they obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way, and that it is no longer wealth, living beings, and discourse that are presented to knowledge in the interstices of words or through their transparency, but beings radically different from them?” [5]
The following thought expressed by Max Planck might give an indication how the production and development of scientific knowledge evolves:
“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [6]
One final note to the above quoted definition of an episteme — Foucault’s thought did not stand still but revolved continuously meaning that he deemed it necessary to:
“define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within […] a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.” [7]
The progression of economic knowledge is comparable with a walk on a tightrope. Progressing without taking into account past and present (real world) developments risks the foundations of that construed knowledge to be exposed and to be challenged due to having reached an impasse. Knowledge is not neutral and hence must be continually subject to scrutiny. Power dynamics may initially prohibit the modification of economic knowledge by denouncing fresh insights as inscientific but will not in themselves preclude the emergence of the need to review previous assumptions and theorems.
Image: The Guardian, 26th July 2009
Sources:
[1] Foucault, M. (2005) [1966] The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge, p. 183.
[2] Ibid., p. 181.
[3] Ibid., p. 182f.
[4] Ibid., p. 223.
[5] Ibid., p. 235f.
[6] Planck, M. (1950) Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, London: Williams & Norgate, p. 33f.
[7] Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, New York, NY: Pantheon, p. 197.