Michel Foucault is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. His countercultural and often subversive critiques of power, knowledge, and subjectivity have come to define the intellectual terrain of contemporary poststructuralism. Although Foucault himself was resistant to labels and denied allegiance to any particular school of thought, his work has become foundational to poststructuralist critique. Ironically, the very movement that aims to resist foundationalism now treats Foucault’s insights as quasi canonical. Without his sustained objections to modernist, liberal, and humanist assumptions—particularly those concerning objectivity, impartiality, and the autonomous subject—it is difficult to imagine the rich critical apparatus available to contemporary thinkers seeking to interrogate Western socio cultural institutions.
Whether intentionally or not, Foucault’s oeuvre has been politicized and deployed as a philosophical framework for dismantling and reimagining dominant cultural formations in the West. His skepticism toward anthropological universals and his interrogation of epistemic structures that claim to express inevitable or natural truths have made his thought particularly resonant among activist and academic communities seeking systemic change. In an ironic twist, however, Foucault’s radical genealogical and archaeological methods—designed to disrupt historical continuities and expose the contingency of knowledge—have themselves given rise to what might be called a poststructuralist “archive of sacrosanct knowledge,” one that now saturates much of the social sciences and humanities, and intelligentsia as a whole.
This institutionalization of poststructuralist thought has led to the emergence of what might be termed a poststructuralist regime of truth. In Foucauldian terms, a regime of truth refers to the discursive mechanisms through which certain statements are rendered legitimate, credible, and authoritative, while others are marginalized or excluded. Bodies of knowledge are produced and reign supreme. Truth, in this context, is not an objective correspondence with reality, but a function of power—power that circulates through discourse, institutions, practices, and subjectivities. Foucault famously argued that individuals are not autonomous agents standing outside of power but are constituted by the very discourses and systems of knowledge that purport to describe them.
Yet this raises an uncomfortable question: what happens when poststructuralism itself becomes the unexamined framework under which intellectual life is conducted? What occurs when thinkers take the poststructuralist episteme for granted, allowing it to shape their perceptions, judgments, and scholarly comportment? Are such individuals still operating as poststructuralists, or have they become the very structuralists they once sought to dismantle?
The Paradox of Poststructuralist Dogma
The committed poststructuralist often prides themselves on a heightened awareness of dominant assumptions, biases, and discursive formations. They may regard those who assert truth claims as naïve—bound by a modernist or structuralist worldview. However, the poststructuralist who reflexively dismisses all forms of essentialism or foundationalism on the basis of “knowing better” is arguably just as constrained by a regime of truth as those they critique.
Even Foucault acknowledged that no one stands outside of the discursive and epistemic conditions that shape subjectivity. The poststructuralist who accepts the impossibility of universal truths or stable meanings remains embedded within a discursive framework that governs their assumptions and behaviors. If one’s “natural” response to the world is poststructuralist—if this orientation becomes precognitive, habitual, or axiomatic—then one has arguably internalized a structure no less regulative than those associated with modernism or essentialism.
In this light, poststructuralism risks transforming into a covert foundationalism: a meta‑narrative that denies the legitimacy of meta‑narratives, a dogma that disavows dogma. The rejection of anthropological universals becomes, paradoxically, a universal claim. The denouncement of truth claims becomes, itself, a truth claim. Thus, the poststructuralist who repudiates essentialism on the basis of theoretical conviction may unwittingly replicate the epistemic closures they seek to disrupt.
Foucault’s Epistemes, Archaeology, and the Problematics of Replacement
During his archaeological phase in the 1960s, Foucault introduced the concept of the episteme—a historically contingent system of thought that governs what can be known, said, and considered true within a particular era. An episteme is not merely a body of knowledge; it is the implicit framework that structures cognition, discourse, and perception. According to Foucault, what societies take to be “normal,” “natural,” or “self‑evident” is in fact the product of deeply entrenched discursive formations, often validated by institutional authority—especially the sciences. Foucault’s archaeological method seeks to excavate these underlying rules that are not always manifest, to expose how statements are formed, what is accepted, and what is excluded.
Foucault’s project was not to replace one system of truth with another, nor to elevate subjugated knowledge as more “authentic” or correct. Rather, his eventual transition to a genealogical method sought to problematize the conditions under which certain truths become dominant. To defend alternative truths with equal dogmatism would simply reproduce the structural logic of that which is being contested. Foucault was not offering a counter‑foundationalism, but rather a provocation: a challenge to reimagine how thought and subjectivity might be configured otherwise, without falling back into prescriptive definitions or normative orders.
Power/Knowledge, Technologies of Self, and Confession
In the 1970s, Foucault shifted his focus from epistemes to the interplay of power and knowledge. He reconceptualized power not as a substance possessed by individuals or institutions, but as diffuse, relational, and operative at micro levels of social interaction. Power produces knowledge, and knowledge reinforces power. These dynamics, for Foucault, are evident in seemingly benign practices, such as confession in religious or psychiatric contexts, where individuals are induced to disclose truths about themselves—truths that are then used to normalize, discipline, and govern behavior. These aspects are well elaborated in his lectures Technologies of the Self (1982), where he explores how subjects are shaped by obligations to truth, confession, and self monitoring.
Foucault introduced the notion of technologies of the self: practices through which individuals shape and monitor their own behavior in accordance with internalized norms. These norms are often legitimized by institutional regimes of truth, such that subjects become both the object and agent of their own regulation. In this schema, even self-liberation is potentially complicit with systems of domination. The individual who disciplines themselves in line with a “progressive” truth is not necessarily freer than one governed by traditional norms. They are simply adhering to a different set of discursive imperatives.
Thus, to uncritically abandon one framework in favor of another—to replace structuralist assumptions with poststructuralist ones—is not a radical gesture but a recursive one. The question is not whether one system is more “correct,” but whether the very logic of systemic thinking can be disrupted.
Poststructuralism and the Risk of Intellectual Conformity
In light of these dynamics, we must ask: what happens when the academy itself becomes governed by a poststructuralist regime of truth? What occurs when theoretical resistance calcifies into orthodox expectation? Foucault warned against precisely this tendency—the naturalization of historically contingent ideas into seemingly immutable structures. When poststructuralist thought becomes the unexamined background of academic life, its capacity for disruption diminishes. It becomes, paradoxically, a conservative force.
To be authentically poststructuralist, then, may require a willingness to critique poststructuralism itself—to interrogate the assumptions, discourses, and subject positions that it generates. The task is not to disavow the insights of Foucault or his intellectual descendants, but to resist the temptation to treat these insights as doctrinal. The truly critical thinker must be prepared to confront even the foundations of critique.
In this sense, the poststructuralist must become, in a provocative twist, post‑poststructuralist—one who not only dismantles dominant structures but also interrogates the frameworks that have enabled their own critique.
William Horton is an educationalist and author. He holds a B.A. in Indigenous Studies, a B.Ed., an M.Ed., and started his Ph.D. in Education. William has written for many different outlets on philosophy, education, culture, and politics.
