uch coherence might produce.
Literary texts and other works of art are at least as relevant to that discipline as, say, social practices such as the Balinese cockfights that Geertz describes, for the reason that they are artifacts of their cultures. Indeed, text and art belong to and proceed from the intellectual life of a culture, which puts them squarely within what Foucault designates as the archaeology of knowledge (3).
By no means does Foucault make claims for coherence; quite the reverse. His view is that it makes more sense, as it were, to characterize culture as an assembly of "assignable positions in a common space" (3), each of which effectively contributes to the culture even though Foucault resists the notion that the contributions are somehow "meant" to lend it coherence. Indeed, he is more concerned to examine the disparateness of contribution, or "systems of dispersion" (3), which achieve their character according as they mutually correlate. In the stices or on the boundaries between cultural inputs (for example, as expressed in literary texts), in particular according as individual expressions reveal power relationships, the "conditions of existence" (38) in their original context may be discerned.
Such an approach to a literary text enables insight into its cultural origins as well as, mutatis mutandis, the persistence of relevancies of the original cultural position to more modern experience. For example, one way of approaching narrative is to sort out motivations: Why did Jason marry and why does he leave Medea? Why does she kill children whom she loves? Why does the deus ex machina save her? Why, in Lawrence's Women in Love, is Gerald unable to accept love from Rupert or give it to Gudrun? Why does Hamlet delay killing Claudius?
But from a historicist perspective, rich interpretation is available irrespective of such questions. Identifying the conditions of existence of the play can insight into the condi...