A few things in response to Robin Neill's post of 12/7/95: 
 
A quote from Foucault prefaces Robin's question about the 
disjunction between economic discourse and "reality" (but 
never defines what this reality "is").  I couldn't find exactly 
where, but I believe the quote is from Foucault's "The Order 
of Things."  For the question posed, Foucault, particularly his 
"Order of Things," is not a very good (contemporary) guide 
for understanding this. 
  
First of all, it is well known that "Order" was written as a 
sort of tongue-in-cheek parody of Descartes' "Meditations."  
Therefore, one has to be careful not to lend Foucault's 
account or method too much weight.  Perhaps, as Ron 
Stanfield points out, your statement that you "ask questions 
to expose intellectual history, not to propose anything" is 
tongue-in-cheek as well in homage to Foucault?  
Unfortunately, Foucault IS proposing something--not a 
historical account, but a way of looking at history.  The 
question now is whether that way of looking at history is a 
proper guide to your question. 
 
You ask, in conjunction with a paraphrase from P.R. Saul, 
"can the signs we use, the instruments of discourse, become 
so disassociated from reality that they become 
disfunctional?"  Because Saul's quote refers to a seeming 
disjunction between economic "reality" and economic 
discourse (disciplinary discourse, that is).  Foucault's 
concept of episteme may be appropriate for how we think 
about our disciplinary discourse since we operate in a fairly 
closed system with fairly stable signifiers.  His search for 
referential guides--epistemes--is not necessarily to provide 
structure (Foucault has vehemently denied being a 
structuralist, then this "structure" is shifting one).  While 
episteme may be yet another epistemological novelty, it 
is not intended as a discursive anchor.  
 
However, in relating economic discourse to the 
world-at-large, as Robin's question seems to, our 
"instruments of discourse" are placed in manifold different 
systems of signification.  As some of the criticism 
lobbed at economists is that they no longer try to 
communicate with the public, it can be argued that they no 
longer try to relate their work within those other systems of 
signification.  Yet, our discourse still makes it way to the 
outside world and, to some degree, legitimizes 
policy--policies which might be responsible for the 
"persistent decline of North America." 
 
To use Foucault to explain the situation Robin highlights 
would be to totalize his concept of episteme--as if there 
were only ONE episteme at work which could explain this 
disjunction.  Yet, it is exactly the sort of referentiality 
that post-structuralists like Foucault critique. 
 
A better guide for the question you ask might be 
Baudrillard.  Like Foucault, he questions assumptions about 
referentiality, but he analyzes the structure of 
communication in a world dominated by the media, whereby 
media images are both referent and reality.  The situation 
Baudrillard terms "hyperreality" could be one way of looking 
at the disjunction between economic discourse and the 
world-at-large, that is, the production and consumption of 
signifiers as similar to that of capitalist production.  The 
striving for innovation renders impotent any single coherent 
system of referentiality.  To take it a step further, de Certau 
theorizes that people, in "consuming" these signs, in turn 
resignify the meanings that are presented to them.  
Therefore, the economic discourse that may appear stable 
for us, becomes a jumble of meanings in the world-at-large, 
and, perhaps, totally at odds with their "original" meaning 
within economics. 
 
Jonathon E. Mote 
1822 Chestnut #3F 
Philadelphia, PA  19103 
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