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Michel Foucault began his career in an intellectual world for which literature and literary theory mattered a great deal. So it is understandable that, early in his career, literature, or, at any rate, a particular conception of literature, was a touchstone for him. More that that: it was a centre around which his work as a whole turned. That remained the case up until about 1968, when the student/worker ‘revolution’ transformed the political and cultural order in France. Although Foucault was not himself directly involved in these events, in their wake for a short period, he moved towards a kind of Maoism. In 1969, he published ‘What Is an Author?’, an essay which subjected the literary field to a distinctly post-literary inspection. Here he was interested not in literature as such but in the ‘author function’, by which he meant the terms on which certain texts and discourses came to have authors while others did not, and in the features and structures which enabled these texts to be authored. The essay implied that anonymity, and the radical equality it enabled, was a condition for a less elitist literary world.

But during his high literary period, from about 1963 to 1969, he published a series of more insistently literary essays and reviews, as well as a monograph on Raymond Roussel (first as simply Raymond Roussel in 1963 and translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel in 1986). At this point in his career, his interest in literature spills across into his non-literary works too. Most importantly, it underpins his breakthrough 1961 monograph on madness, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (first translated into English as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason in 1965), just as it does in his famous revisioning of intellectual history, Les mots et les choses (1967) (translated into English as The Order of Things in 1970).

In The Order of Things, for instance, the works of avant-garde or outsider writers such as the Marquis de Sade, Stephan Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge reveal experiences and impulsions that have been occluded by both the ‘classical’ and the ‘modern’ epistemes (or regimes of knowledge) that the book describes.

Who was Samuel Butler? He was born into a prominent Anglican family in 1835. His grandfather was a famous headmaster and bishop; his father a rich clergyman, and he himself, intended for the Church, was given a gentlemanly education first at public school and then at Cambridge. But after graduation his family's plans for him began to go awry. He worked in an East End parish, where it became clear that a career in the Church was impossible for him. And the alternative professions that his father proposed – the military, teaching, the law – were no more attractive, perhaps because they supported a social system he was beginning to question.

So in 1859 his family agreed to let him immigrate to Canterbury, New Zealand, providing him with the capital to set up as a farmer there. Canterbury was approved by Butler's family because it was a colonial project under Anglican sponsorship. It had been settled as recently as 1850 in the last of the enterprises organised on the basis of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of systematic colonisation, but was managed by the Canterbury Association, which deployed Wakefield's theory on the Church's behalf. It was named after the Canterbury Pilgrims; the departure of the association's ships involved highly publicised religious rituals at Canterbury Cathedral; its governing board was dominated by Churchly Tories.

On the face of it, the Canterbury Association was an incoherent enterprise since Wakefield's systematic colonialism drew upon secular-utilitarian political and economic principles. His system's key mechanism was ‘sufficient price’ based on the notion that, if colonial land prices were set at an artificially high level, and protected both from market forces and the anarchy of individual purchases from Indigenous peoples, then land sale profits could be used to solve the endemic problem of colonial labour shortages so as to enable purified versions of British society, capable of self-government, around the globe. In effect, Wakefield's scheme used centralising policies associated with the Benthamite radicals to serve a post-Burkean conservative purpose, namely the reinvention of traditional estate-based rural community – all this based on a faith in the translocatability of British society.

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To think about the study of literature as possessing “values” is, I think, already to skew things. In the Anglophone tradition, something has “value” if it can be measured in external units. Adam Smith famously argued that a value of a thing is measured either in terms of what might be substituted for it (its exchange value) or in terms of its quantifiable utilities (its use value). In this framework, value is primarily an economic concept, but, at least from Jeremy Bentham on, it has also been a governmental one. Although earlier philosophers like John Locke or David Hume did not deploy the term, Bentham introduced it precisely to advise those he calls “legislators” on how to manage a population's happiness. As such, it quickly came under attack: “Worth was degraded into a lazy synonyme of value; and value was exclusively attached to the interests of the senses” as Samuel Coleridge put it.

Today we have another sense of value too. It appears in “values of” sentences like “The University is committed to the values of diversity and transparency.” This “values of” phrasing is philosophically rooted in Nietzsche's “transvaluation of all values” (Umwertung alles Werte) in which value became not a measure but a predicate. In “values of” discourse, “value” refers to criteria for judgment and action that are, however, expressive. “Values of” discourse also recognizes that values differ: it is pluralist as well as expressivist. But just as literary studies stands outside the conceptual framework in which things are ascribed “value,” they do not, at least in one core lineage, quite have “values” either.

Indeed, from its beginning, a core strand of literary studies – which I will call “modern literary criticism” – sought to find standards without appealing either to value in the singular, to expressive values in the plural, or indeed to “worth,” or substantive qualities like right, good, or beauty. It turned rather to the literary heritage. It was committed to immanence: to finding what had worth in the heritage just as a result of comparative acts of attention to works in that heritage, as if to make judgments inductively on grounds supplied by the heritage.