A Little "Fashionable Nonsense"

The layers of this "archeology" represent, roughly speaking, a historicized form of the formalist philosophy of mathematics. Where Hilbert relied on the a priori (but ahistorical) "finitary intuition," Foucault formalizes something that romanticism called the historical a priori. In this manner, one gets a discrete sequence of historical configurations, each one being a "meta-theory" for the next. There is no continuity between these archaeological layers; they are presented as incommensurable historical facts, which ultimately makes it seem like Kant is the meta-theoretical condition of possibility of the Spice Girls--the epistemic ground on which they boogie. More seriously, the effects of this approach are nicely described by Sartre...

Vladimir Tasic, from Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought