Knowledge Goes Pop

Front matter

) CAN THIS MAN &

CA iN ic ER r CLARE BIRCHALL

HOME GROWN Jid ‘|

Preface

Acknowledgements

1 2

3 4

Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You

Cultural Studies on/as Conspiracy Theory Hot Gossip: The Cultural Politics of Speculation

Sexed Up: Gossip by Stealth

Conclusion: Old Enough to Know Better? The Work of Cultural Studies

Index xi

129 151 159 171 183

Preface

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

A voice on late-night talk radio told me that Kentucky Fried Chicken injects its food with drugs that render men impotent. A colleague asked if I thought the FBI was ‘in’ on 9/11.An alien abductee on the Internet claimed extraterrestrials implanted a microchip in her left buttock. The front page of a gossip mag screamed ‘Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal’. A best-seller suggested gender difference is so great, men and women may as well come from different planets. A spiritual healer claimed he could cure my aunt’s chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power of crystals.

This book came out of a deep fascination with the popular knowledges that saturate our experience of everyday understanding and communication in the twenty-first century. I was struck by how we mediate and are mediated by popular knowledges, how they influence the way we position ourselves in the world and shape the way we imagine the world works. I wanted to call such phenomena ‘knowledge’ in order to remind myself of its relation to the more ‘official’ knowledges that also tell us who we are, what to believe, and how to conduct ourselves socially. From Michel Foucault’s work, I knew that power relations are determined by knowledge, but I also wanted to think about the relations between knowledges in terms of power. Are popular knowledges, I wondered, marginalized by official knowledges? What challenge do they pose to traditional sites of knowledge production? Why does their presence cause so much institutional anxiety?

When I began to tell people that I was studying conspiracy theories (among other examples of popular knowledge) they responded in one of two ways.They either asked why on earth people believe in such ‘nonsense’ or grilled me for what really happened to Diana, JFK, or Martin Luther King. Was September 11 a set-up to legitimize the invasion of firstly Afghanistan and then Iraq? Is there such a thing as the New World Order? Does the Bilderberg group really pull the strings? They wanted me to tell them why these stories existed or if they were true. And in some ways it might have been easier to address these concerns. I could, with regards to the second concern, occupy myself with the veracity of particular statements produced within popular knowledges. (Was Diana really xii Preface murdered? Do aliens actually abduct humans? Will this book improve my sex life? Have the latest celebrity couple truly broken up?) Let’s face it, we are all capable of becoming absorbed by the details and this is part of the pleasure to be found in gossip, conspiracy theory, alien abduction narratives and the like. Some commentators have gone down this route, debunking certain theories and ideas perpetuated by these kinds of narratives.

Other commentators have addressed the first concern as to why people believe in ‘false’ or ‘fragile’ knowledge. Such approaches tend to perform symptomatic readings of popular knowledge in which the knowledge always takes the place of some psychosocial lack, or is read as a political act performed by usually disenfranchised agents. Francis Wheen, for example, in an article extracted from his book How Mumbo Jumbo Overtook the World writes, ‘The new irrationalism is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces whether these be the Pentagon or invaders from Mars. Political leaders accept it as a safe outlet for dissent, fulfilling much the same function that Marx attributed to religion’ (2004: 12).

Indeed, there are all sorts of routes to answer the question ‘Why do we turn to popular knowledge?’ - via psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, or anthropology - but I wanted to write a book that could open up a different way of responding to popular knowledges: one that moves beyond the truth or falsity of statements produced by a particular knowledge and the question of why people might choose to invest in them. Working against the grain of much academic work on fan communities and the idea of empowered consumers (in my field of cultural studies especially), I wanted to focus on the knowledge believed in, rather than those who believe. That is not to say that I wanted to eliminate the ‘subject’ altogether as there is always a residual concept of subjectivity in discursive mechanisms but I did not want to make claims as to these subjects’ intentions, desires, or reasons for belief. While I knew psychological motive and socio-political pressures would all inform a reading of popular knowledge’s increased circulation and employment, I felt that focusing on what makes each popular knowledge possible in the first place would allow me to consider the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledges. I thought that understanding these relationships was necessary for approaching some key events of our age. Having written this book, I still do.

With so many claims on what knowledge is and what it should be - exemplified not least by current international debates about school curricula (see Apple 2003) - I wanted to perform a timely investigation into the relationship between un-legitimated and legitimated forms of knowledge. Of course, thinking through this relationship threw up difficult self-reflexive questions about any knowledge in a disciplinary form - including cultural studies, the particular knowledge-producing discourse that I identified with - that I might mobilize

Preface xiii to analyse popular knowledge. That is to say, I realized that the way in which I approached such cultural phenomena was crucial: if I approached popular knowledges according to an ideal of critical distance, say, positioning popular knowledges as the other of, foreign to, and outside legitimated knowledge, I would in effect already have decided in advance what these popular knowledges were. Indeed, although such an approach would have allowed me to pontificate about the political significance (either positively or negatively) of popular knowledges, position them as subcultural, or think about their role within everyday life (acts familiar within cultural studies), I would not have been able to think about the close relationship they hold to my own knowledge production. Taking this relationship into account would, I hoped, lead to a better understanding not only of why popular knowledges matter but also what kinds of strategies we can employ in order to gain this better understanding. In other words, as well as thinking about the role of popular knowledge in contemporary culture, I also wanted to think about what kind of cultural studies might be up to the job of thinking through the questions it raises about legitimacy and responsibility.

I have tackled the themes of this book through two main examples: conspiracy theory and gossip. I could have chosen to concentrate on a number of others, such as urban legends, the self-help rhetoric and pop-psychology that permeates talk shows such as Oprah (US Harpo Productions) and Montel Williams (US Paramount Pictures), or alien abduction narratives. While singular and unique, I felt that such knowledges could usefully be considered on a continuum. This whole book could be thought of as exploring the question of how to do justice to popular knowledge - how to analyse it responsibly in a tension between the universal (popular knowledge as a whole) and the singular (individual instances of popular knowledge).This meant making decisions about which examples to focus on. I could not study all forms of popular knowledge (although I wanted to open up more space for such work).

Besides, reading ‘responsibly’ would never be about producing exhaustive lists. And so, I had to make some decisions as to which forms and singular practices of popular knowledge (conspiracy theory, gossip) and case studies (such as Diana and September 11 conspiracy theories, and the gossip that permeated the lead up to the second Gulf War) I considered to be important and interesting. My selections, therefore, were informed by two aspects. Firstly, my desire to do justice to each example obviously placed a limitation on how many could be included. But, more pertinently, it seemed to me that conspiracy theory and gossip and their framings of knowledge were in urgent need of consideration at this socio-political conjuncture, when war is waged on little more than gossip, and interpreting information as calculated plot shapes a whole nation’s future. These choices might have been different at another time. I hope in making these decisions about what to focus on, I have kept open the way for further investigations into other popular, or indeed, unpopular knowledges.

XIV Preface

Mostly, I wanted to write a kind of ‘self-help’ book for the contemporary zeitgeist - characterized, ld argue, by the making of decisions on the basis of knowledge that cannot be decided. Keep it with you at all times for you never know when talk radio will be talking again, when paranoia will inflect a colleague’s voice, when everyone around you will turn to a way of knowing that you haven’t yet learned to trust, or equally when your government will try to persuade you that their knowledge is not infected by its popular ‘other’. It might not be a question of arming yourself against these cognitive effects, but of opening yourself to them. It might be disorientating; you may require some assistance; or at least desire some company...

Acknowledgements

I owe special thanks to the following people: Geoff Bennington for humouring me in the kindest way possible; Paul Smith for always raising the question of politics; Robert Smith for the spontaneous lectures while cooking; Gary Hall for persuading me that it might be a good idea to write a book and then helping me to see it through; Tristan Palmer at Berg for not asking me to write a textbook; my colleagues in Media and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University; Neil Badmington, Kay Dickinson, Jem Gilbert, Matt Hills and Paul Myerscough for being, at various points, receptive readers; and everyone who has listened and responded with patience and care to papers I have given at various conferences and talks.

In less academic matters, thanks are due to Roger Birchall and Christine Clarke for love and support; Lou Dodds for essential outdoor pursuits; Polly Russell for being in on the conspiracy before asking what it is; Matt Herbert, Lola Oliyide, Robyn Pierce, Caitlin Pitts and Richard Vine for good gossip; and Ms Millicent Rose for being so small.

Some of the material in Chapter 2 appeared in 1999 as ‘alt.conspiracy. princess-diana: The Conspiracy of Discourse’, New Formations, 36, pp. 125-40 and in 2002 as ‘The Commodification of Conspiracy Theory’ in Peter Knight (ed.) Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, New York: New York University Press, pp. 233-53. Parts of Chapter 3 have appeared in a different form in 2004 in ‘Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out To Get You’, Culture Machine, 6 (http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/ articles/birchall.htm) and in 2004 as ‘Economic Interpretation’ in Rochelle Sibley and Charlotte Ross (eds) I/uminating Eco: on the Boundaries of Interpretation, Warwick Studies in the Humanities Series, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 71-87.

This book could not have been written without a sabbatical funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Middlesex University.

Clare Birchall

CHAPTER |

Conspiracy theory, alien abduction narratives, astrology, urban legends, self-help rhetoric, gossip, new age practices. It is so tempting, when someone asks what popular knowledge is, to respond by listing some examples. But this doesn’t really answer the question; it merely illustrates an answer that remains absent. It is easier to point to examples already penetrating everyday life than to come up with a list of hard-and-fast characteristics that can always be disputed. I don’t intend this book to become a checklist that people can reference in order to ascertain the ‘popular knowledge-ness’ of one discourse or another. I recognize that there are as many differences as similarities between various forms of popular knowledge and that discourses will slide imperceptibly between the ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’, between the ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, between the ‘high’ and ‘popular’.! Though singular and unique, I do think that knowledges like the ones I began by listing can usefully be thought of on a continuum of popular cognitive practices that deny scientific rationalism and justified true belief as the only criteria for knowledge. In thinking of this continuum, I will be able to make a meaningful engagement with questions regarding the status of knowledge in general.

KNOWLEDGE-SCAPE

While I will ultimately challenge the terms outlined in Figure 1, I want to use it as a springboard for thinking about the status of knowledge as it is theoretically configured, experienced, or presented to us in everyday encounters. It might be helpful to think of this diagram as a visual representation of an historically rooted debate in the ‘West’ about different kinds of knowledge.

Lingering at the top right-hand corner of Figure 1 (Position A) lies ‘justified true belief’. This formulation of knowledge can be traced back to Plato’s Theaetetus written in 360 sc in which Socrates is in dialogue with Theaetetus about the nature of knowledge. The logic of the ‘justified true belief’ account is as follows (S delineates the knowing subject, and p the proposition known). S$ knows that p if and only if:

Official knowledge

D A * Revolutionary knowledge * ‘Justified True Belief * Ideology * Scientific rationalism * Humanism

* Useful’ knowledge

Illegitimate Legitimate knowledge knowledge

* Popular knowledges * Grass roots know-how * Tabloid sensibility * Common sense * Vox Pop

Cc B

Popular knowledge

Figure 1 Knowledge-scape

E pis true; E S believes that p; and E Sis justified in believing that p.

If something is false (say, for example, the proposition that Prince Charles wrote this book), we cannot know it: this would be to know no thing (nothing). So, the proposition has to be knowable as true. Of course, we can believe something without necessarily knowing it; it only becomes knowledge if we can establish its truth and justification. Epistemologically, belief does not refer to the idea of having faith, rather it indicates our assent to a statement’s truth. Much attention in the dominant epistemological traditions has been given to the question of how justification can be ascertained and, latterly - since Edmund Gettier (1963) showed ‘justified true belief’ to be insecure or incomplete as a definition - what other criteria have to be in play for knowledge to be knowledge. Despite the many challenges to this definition of knowledge, I have situated ‘justified true belief’ as an example of the ‘official’ and ‘legitimate’ because of the force it has had and continues to have in ‘common sense’ understandings of knowledge.

Below the horizontal dividing line of Figure 1 (positions B and C) lie discursive phenomena more closely associated with the popular (whether this be in the sense of populist or mass circulation and participation).That which, albeit provisionally, falls into the category of ‘legitimate’ and popular (position B) can be traced back at least to the challenge put forward in the English Civil War to the divine right of kings, and, latterly, to the drive for universal suffrage. Whereas for Plato, those ideas that couldn’t fulfil the criteria of knowledge were branded and devalued as opinion or doxa, in the tradition of what we could call democratic or Christian socialism, and populism of all political ilks, the knowledge of ‘the people’ is valued as being untainted by high office and therefore closer to truth. Such ideas see ‘the people’ and their knowledge as legitimate (more legitimate, even, than those in corrupting positions of power).

Broadly speaking, tabloids from both ends of the political spectrum (I am thinking primarily of the British press in this instance) such as the Mirror and the Sun, champion the ‘man on the street’ over politicians, large corporations and, more ambivalently, the law (particularly EU law, which is fashioned as being remote or insensitive to the concerns of the British people). This rhetoric, privileging the individual over the corporation or state, can be seen reflected in a surge of populist politics from the Conservatives and New Labour in contemporary Britain, in the admonitions of the ‘nanny state’ and advocacy of personal autonomy and choice. Elsewhere, populists who peddle their various politics in the name of the people include Australia’s Pauline Hanson, Winston Peters in New Zealand, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Carl I. Hagen in Norway, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Paul Wellstone, Howard Dean and John Edwards in the United States, Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Jorg Haider in Austria, Lula in Brazil, Preston Manning in Canada and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.”

Under the category of the ‘legitimate’ and popular, we could also situate ‘common sense’. Usually notions claimed as unmediated, self-evident common sense (such as the possibility of agency, the difference between the human and inhuman, or what constitutes truth) are filtered down from humanism and are in actual fact highly ideological and situated. Such ideas have legitimacy in their own terms with regards to the dominant ideology and are popular in their standing. That is to say, they are widely disseminated and, in general, support the official ideas of that society (even while they might be voiced with different, more individualist, concerns).

Position C in the bottom left-hand corner of Figure 1 is traditionally ascribed to the phenomena that I am interested in for this book (though in some appropriative accounts that praise popular knowledges, such phenomena has been ascribed position B). Under this category fall all those knowledges that traditionally have not counted as knowledge at all: knowledges of an uncertain status; knowledges that have not been verified; knowledges that are officially discredited (for different reasons) but which still enjoy mass circulation. These would include gossip and conspiracy theory (the two main examples I consider in this book), but also those knowledges I began this chapter by listing. With regards to a definition, I will postpone any attempt until later and as I will have much more to say about this realm, I will move on swiftly to position D.

The top left-hand corner of Figure 1 is perhaps the most slippery position of all, or at least the one that exposes the instability of all the positions. The clearest example of a knowledge that is official yet illegitimate arises from Marx’s conception of revolutionary knowledge. Knowledge that the working class is exploited is part of the official logic of capital and yet the expression of this knowledge is branded illegitimate by the ruling class. Exploitation is both part of the smooth running of industry, say, but it cannot be seen as a ‘legitimate’ idea to know because this might sanction resistance and revolution. Inequality and exploitation are ‘legitimate’ and official (position A) for those in power, but knowledge of them is framed as illegitimate in order to maintain the status quo. Position D, then, is the space of ideology. Here, discourses such as racism can be institutionalized (and official) and yet remain unacknowledged (illegitimate). Equally, in a slightly different formula, discourses like racism can be institutionalized (and official) and yet be exposed, dismissed and deemed illegitimate by another discourse, say liberalism or human rights. Either way, such discourses are positioned as illegitimate and official.

Figure 1 is something of a ruse (as is the as-yet unseen Table 1). I am not usually a fan of diagrams and tables because of their rigid appearance.The positions in Figure 1 are far from fixed and are dependent on external, contingent factors. All of the knowledges in position A, for example, could equally be in position D. What is illegitimate knowledge from one political position could be legitimate for another, depending on what legitimating criteria is drawn upon. I have, however, tried to provide a diagram that expresses the dominant ideology in the ‘West’ with regards to knowledge culture. The interventions that I will summarize and draw upon below arise from those disciplines that I feel to be the most helpful in preparing the ground to consider a particular dynamic evident in the diagram; namely, the tension between positions A and C. That is, I am interested primarily in questioning the relationship between knowledge that holds an officially ‘legitimate’ status and that which is considered to be of ‘illegitimate’ and popular status (at least from the vantage point of the ‘official’). This is the tension that will organize the concerns of this book, though the other positions in Figure 1 will never be far from view and will occasionally take centre stage.

KNOWLEDGE NOW

When thinking through the contemporary conditions of popular knowledge, we would do well to remember that the exchange of knowledge on a mass level is nothing new. The rise of the print medium and of general literacy ensured a degree of knowledge exchange on a wide scale. Locally, of course, ‘illegitimate’ knowledges have always been exchanged. Yet, the velocity and scale of knowledge exchange in the Internet age is unique.Those local, ‘illegitimate’ knowledges now enjoy mass participation. But it is not only the speed and scale of dissemination that marks this situation out as particular to the late twentieth, early twenty-first century. The whole question and context of knowledge into which popular knowledge arrives is situated within an epistemological conjuncture. Moreover, the ground into which popular knowledge arrives determines the way it will be configured, what role it has to play, and what will be challenged by that arrival. The questions raised by popular knowledge are unique today because of the particular way in which the ground of knowledge is configured. We could schematize part of that epistemological conjuncture as in Table 1.

The linear construction of this table is misleading, not only because of the interdependent and porous boundary between each knowledge but because there is no intrinsic order or hierarchy of importance to these knowledges (although we are often led to believe there is). It also disguises the way in which definitions are disputed within particular discourses, let alone between them. Moreover, this table is by no means exhaustive. We could, for example, add religious knowledge and scientific knowledge, and no doubt the list could go on in an endless, somewhat Borgesian, taxonomy. It is not my intention to attempt such work here, but this table should at least hint at the way in which new definitions of knowledge have both symbolic and material repercussions. When the humanities’ concept of knowledge is symbolically displaced by that proposed by the knowledge economy, for example, the institution the humanities’ concept is attached to - the university - in turn has to adapt to that challenge (by being forced to respond to market pressures).This symbolic displacement has very real effects on the experience of higher education.

Let me look at this effect in the UK more closely (although similar policies concerning the knowledge economy have been proposed by most governments in the ‘developed’ world). The role of the university is integral to the vision of a successful knowledge driven economy as outlined in the 1998 Department of Trade and Industry (DTD White Paper, Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy. It provides incentives for universities to develop links with businesses, to aid what is called ‘knowledge transfer’. The signifier ‘university’ is borrowed by ‘the university for industry’ - an idea that has lead to the creation of a public-private partnership whose services are currently delivered by Learndirect. The emphasis here is on the (often online) delivery of business and IT-oriented skills. The focus is on the acquisition of tangible content, rather than the experience of learning and the development of transferable cognitive skills. The development of this alternative ‘university’ implies that the traditional university is somehow ill equipped to cater for the new knowledge economy. In fact, higher education centres have been working

Table 1 Form of Site of Production Means of Criteria Knowledge and Circulation Legitimation Knowledge Industry; Free market Commercial use economy commerce; economy; and profitability; government policy; neoliberal/ design and the economy; neoconservative innovation; tacit economics; capitalism; knowledge with management appeal to new codified technical theory; sociology; and ‘inevitable’ knowledge the media economic phase; the media Knowledge The university Appeals to Intellectual within the ‘the university’; use; internally humanities university established endorsed awards; measures grants and such as reason bursaries; tradition and scientific rationalism; that which yields cultural capital Popular Relatively unofficial Insider knowledge; Whether it has knowledge and unregulated paradoxical been dismissed, sites (e.g. Internet; reliance upon excluded or face-to-face ‘official’ suppressed by any interaction) accreditation; of the above. degree of risk or perseverance required to obtain information Indigenous Localized sites; Tradition; culture; Repetition; that knowledge ‘home’ claims on the land which is revered;

often dogmatic; spiritually or agriculturally useful with Learndirect to deliver these courses but there are still indications that the traditional degree programme is considered to be out of step with the needs of industry. Some of this is valid criticism, and many universities have attempted to address these problems through work placement schemes and modularization. But there are many reasons why academics are resisting this change in the focus of degree programmes and the aims of higher education institutions. These range from political objections (many disciplines are based on critiquing rather than supporting commercial culture), to pedagogic concerns (over what effects the corporatization of higher education has on teaching). Straight away we can see an incompatibility arising between the first knowledge in our table and the second.

It is not that the humanities’ definition of knowledge is wholly different from knowledge that holds such a premium in the knowledge economy if, for the sake of argument, we take the former to be a philosophically derived definition of knowledge as a belief which is verified as far as possible and is subject to conditions of fallibility (the ‘justified true belief’ model). After all, scientific methodology, which is central to the knowledge economy, is based on such principles set forth by scientific rationalism: the idea that everything is rational and explicable through empirical observation and the consequent deduction of laws. However, the humanities are not generally interested in the economic utility of its knowledge (except in as much as the production and publication of ideas are pretty much essential to the furtherance of an academic career these days). Also, the objects of knowledge are very different between the knowledge economy and the humanities. The former is interested in scientific, technical, service-based, brand-oriented knowledge, and the latter in knowledge about history, culture and knowledge itself. These are not mutually exclusive interests Gf they were, I would not be writing about them here - and, in fact, the cultural inflection of commerce has been widely commented on), but businesses take historical and cultural factors into consideration when developing or marketing a brand or product primarily in order to gain a competitive edge in the market. Knowledge in the humanities by contrast is valued for being intellectually rather than economically ‘useful’.

Although the DTI White Paper claims that the knowledge economy ‘is not just about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge’ but also ‘the more effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of activity’, it is not clear how knowledges within the humanities, some of which are based on a tradition of critique and challenge, could be made economically useful in a direct way without fundamentally changing those disciplines (so that, for example, cultural studies gives way to practice and skills based media studies). Despite certain similarities in the configuration of knowledge, the knowledge economy and the humanities value knowledge for fundamentally different reasons. Given its predominance, it is inevitable that the knowledge economy will influence the future of the university and affect the appeal of different knowledges for students persuaded to think of themselves as customers in training to be ‘knowledge workers’.

When it comes to knowledge, there is not an infinite space for different configurations to exist. Those that gain precedence will influence what it means to know; what kind of knowledge is culturally valued; how we learn; and who will have access to knowledge and power. What, we could ask, happens to the idea of knowledge, its meaning and place in the world, when the signifier ‘knowledge’ is taken up by a different, even rival, discursive practice? What role will the university play if it is no longer the main site of knowledge definition, legitimation, and production? These questions are not purely conceptual; they have very real effects on the funding of particular disciplines at degree and doctoral levels.

I think of this task as a never-ending, culturally and economically focused epistemological enquiry. It is in this epistemological conjuncture that popular knowledges exist.

THOSE IN THE KNOW

As a backdrop to thinking about popular knowledge, I want to highlight just some of the (relatively) recent academic approaches to knowledge that have helped me to understand how knowledge has been positioned in the humanities and what challenges popular knowledges pose to that positioning. And although I won't explicitly refer to some of this work again, being aware of it will, I hope, convey how my approach in this book has developed, and establish the ground upon which I want to build in the chapters that follow.

Michel Foucault

No foray into the concept of knowledge could be attempted without acknowledging a debt to Michel Foucault. Foucault was concerned with analysing governing epistemic structures. In the first instance, this took the form of an archaeological method that dug below and beyond the ‘empirical content of specific knowledges’ (McNay 1994: 510); beyond, that is, a list of findings and a record of the key figures - beyond what is known, towards a conception of a particular knowledge in terms of how subjects are configured and constituted by it - to get to the material conditions that shape a body of knowledge in one way rather than another.’ In terms of the history of thought, this represents a shift from thinking in biographical terms, from privileging the ‘knowing subject’ (as a history of epistemology, for example, often does) towards ‘a theory of discursive practice’ (Foucault [1966] 1992: xiv). Foucault knew that this was contentious: ‘Can one speak of science and its history ... without reference to the scientist himself - and I am speaking not merely of the concrete individual represented by a proper name, but of his work and the particular form of his thought?’ (Foucault [1966] 1992: xii). He claims to not want to ‘deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes’ but rather to look beyond the ‘customary boundaries’ to ‘systems of regularities that have a decisive role’ in the history of a particular body of knowledge (Foucault [1966] 1992: xii-xiv).