Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

As Edward Soja (1989) recognizes in his landmark Postmodern Geographies, what Foucault is after is not a denial of history, but a reworking of the ways it functions in our culture:

Structuralism's presumed "denial" of history has triggered an almost maniacal attack on its major proponents by those imbued most rigidly with an emancipatory historicism. What Foucault is suggesting, however, is that structuralism is not an anti-history but an attempt to deal with history in a different way, as a spatio-temporal configuration, simultaneously and interactively synchronic and diachronic (to use the convential categorical opposition). (p. 18, footnote 2)