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 [log in to unmask]