Page "Historicism" Paragraph 16

Since the 1950s, when Lacan and Foucault argued that each epoch has its own knowledge system, which individuals are inexorably entangled with, many post-structuralists have used historicism to describe the view that all questions must be settled within the cultural and social context in which they are raised.

Answers cannot be found by appeal to an external truth, but only within the confines of the norms and forms that phrase the question.

This version of historicism holds that there are only the raw texts, markings and artifacts that exist in the present, and the conventions used to decode them.

This school of thought sometimes goes by the name of New Historicism.