The Dissolution of "Man"

And the revelation of a new epistemic order

Michel Foucault

Currently, I am reflecting on certain ideas from French postwar theory as they relate to our current predicaments. Perhaps you share with me the stark presentiment that “culture” no longer functions as it once did: My sense is that the old forms—of the novel, the feature film, even the pop song—don’t hold the same force or magnetic pull as they did a few decades back. They continue to be produced, in profusion, yet even this “profusion” indicates a kind of absence. Of course, one reason for this is the re-patterning of our cognitive and attentive apparatus by the rapid-fire assault of social media. But there are, I feel, other reasons for this—more foundational ones—we can identify and address.

My thoughts keep returning to Michel Foucault's maddeningly difficult yet seminal work, The Order of Things, which I have made many attempts to assimilate. Happily, I am not the only one to struggle with this tome. Literary critic George Steiner, in his 1971 New York Times review, wrote: “An honest first reading produces an almost intolerable sense of verbosity, arrogance and obscure platitude. Page after page could be the rhetoric of a somewhat weary sybil indulging in free association.”

Nevertheless, Foucault develops a very provocative thesis in this book: He proposes that "man" as the central figure of knowledge is not an eternal truth but rather a recent historical construct, one that emerged with the “modern episteme” in the late eighteenth century and would, eventually, disappear. What I suspect to be happening now is this transition from the modern episteme, with its focus on “man” as the subject and focal point of knowledge, to something different, still hard to define.

Artificial Intelligence plays the central role in this dissolution and re-positioning. As AI continues to advance, we experience, in stages, the destabilizing revelation of a new epistemic order where human consciousness is no longer the sole or primary arbiter of knowledge and truth. This transition is not only having a de-centering effect on culture (as well as the interpersonal, intimate dimensions of human relations): It also profoundly impacts our political and economic order.