The work of representation

Dialectic’ is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and ‘semiology’ is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue (ibid).
construction, which is at the heart of culture, to its full depths. What we have offered here is, we hope, a relatively clear account of a set of complex, and as yet tentative, ideas in an unfinished project.

Rejecting both Hegelian Marxism (what he calls ‘the dialectic’) and semiotics, Foucault argued that:
Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts.

The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power not relations of meaning ...
(Foucault, 1980, pp. 114-5)