The Archeology of Knowledge is Foucault's attempt,
after the fact, to describe theoretically the method he used in his first three
books of history (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order
of Things). This is, then, not the presentation of a formal theory built
logically from axioms, but a description of a specific kind of approach to
history (a 'way of speaking' about history). Archeological analysis seeks to
describe the history of discourse, the set of 'things said' in all its
interrelations and transformations. These processes occur at a very specific
level, which is neither the level of the events of history, nor the level of a
teleological 'progress' of ideas, nor the level of an accumulation of formal
knowledge, nor the level of the popular or unspoken 'spirit of the times.' The
analysis of discourse abandons all preconceptions about historical unity or
continuity, describing instead the processes of discourse in all their disruptions,
thresholds, differences, and complex varieties.
Foucault begins with a polemic Introduction (Part I),
noting recent shifts in historical method, relating these shifts to the newly
uncertain status of the historical document, and critiquing histories that
depend on loose notions of continuity as unhelpful and outdated. He says that
these histories are also narcissistic, because what they really seek in forms
of historical continuity is the assurance that history depends on the constant
present of a transcendent human consciousness.
Part II, 'The Discursive Regularities,' asks what
kinds of unities really do exist in the history of discourse. Foucault tries
four hypotheses, in which unity is based on the object of discourse, the
author(s) of discourse, the concepts used in discourse, or the theories and
themes of discourse. Each hypothesized basis for discursive unity turns out to
be something more complex than we thought it was, and each turns out not to be
the single basis for unity, but one aspect of a discursive unity that can only
be described in its variability and complexity. The four hypotheses do yield
four specific levels at which discursive formations can be analyzed, however:
the formation of objects of discourse, the formation of enunciative positions
or modes, the formation of theoretical strategies, and the formation of
concepts.
In Part III, 'The Statement and the Archive,' Foucault
takes a step back from the level of discursive unities and attempts to describe
the discursive field from its smallest elements to its most general totality.
The smallest units are statements; although they have no single, stable unit
(they change size according to their field of use), they form the most detailed
level at which discourse can be analyzed. 'Statement' really refers more to a
specific aspect of articulated language than it does to a unit of language. The
statement is the level of the active, historical existence of a set of signs.
The rest of Part II is devoted to maintaining the rigorous description of the
statement as a positive, describable, specific aspect of history as Foucault
moves up to the level of the archive, which is 'the general system of the
formation and transformation of statements.'
Part IV addresses the difference between Foucault's
archeological method and that of the history of ideas. For the four issues of
originality, contradiction, comparison, and change, Foucault shows that his
method replaces broad continuities and generalizations with specific,
describable relations that preserve the differences and irregularities of
discourse. The last chapter in this part, 'Science and Knowledge,' deals with
the reasons that archeological analysis has focused on the history of the
sciences, and with the details of how this focus is carried out. Foucault
concludes with an intriguing, often poetic, dialogue between himself and a
hypothetical critic of his method. In it, he defends archeology against charges
that it is essentially structuralist and that it invests discourse with
transcendence over other elements of history.
Continuity,
Discontinuity, and Contradiction
The Introduction and first chapter of the Archeology
focus largely on a contradicting received ideas about the continuity of
history. Foucault argues that even the new study of the history of ideas,
although it targets moments of transition between historical worldviews, is
ultimately dependent on continuities that break down under closer inspection.
The history of ideas marks points of discontinuity between broadly defined modes
of knowledge, but the assumption that those modes exist as wholes fails to do
justice to the complexities of discourse. Discourses emerge and transform not
according to a developing series of unarticulated, common worldviews, but
according to a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional
relationships. These relationships are defined as much by breaks and ruptures
as by unified themes; in fact, discontinuity is an integral component of
unified discursive formations.
Discontinuities
in discourse can take the form of internal contradictions, and here too
Foucault takes the history of ideas to task for failing to examine its own
assumptions. The history of ideas depends on a view of discursive
contradictions as obstacles to be explained away in historical analysis.
Paradoxically, however, it also takes contradiction as the deep, almost
metaphysical principle on which discourse depends (without contradictions, what
would there be to discuss?). Foucault sees both these notions of contradiction
as violations of the attempt to describe discourses on their own terms. For
him, contradiction is yet another general label for a set of widely divergent
discursive processes. Foucault critiques not only assumed forms of historical
continuity, but also assumptions that historical discontinuity is one
(continuous) kind of thing.
Foucault's emphasis on discontinuities is also a
function of his strict definition of what discourse is and his tireless
insistence on describing that discourse in its clear, definable details,
without any 'interpretation.' The archeological method aims to describe
discourse only in its active existence in the world, and eschews any reading of
it that seeks a psychology, a spirit, or anything else beyond the statement
itself and its describable relations with other statements. This means that
archeology must assume nothing about the hidden unities that secretly bind
together the many things people say; any discursive unity must be described
anew, on its own terms.
Discourse
Foucault's version of discourse is the most pervasive
theoretical idea in the Archeology. The term has a history as the object of
study for a new kind of history, the history of ideas. But Foucault devotes
much of the Archeology to refining and winnowing the usual sense of discourse
into an object of analysis that is very strictly delimited. The first major
alteration that Foucault makes is a casting aside of everything but the
processes of discourse itself. Thus, his method studies only the set of 'things
said' in their emergences and transformations, without any speculation about
the overall, collective meaning of those statements. Archeology does not
describe history through discourse; it describes the history of discourse.
Foucault carries his insistence on discourse-in-itself
down to the most basic unit of things said: the statement. Just as discourse is
never taken as a partial sign of a greater, partially hidden historical truth,
so individual statements are never taken as expressions of a psychology, nor even
as vehicles for referential meanings and propositions. Foucault addresses
statements only in the specific conditions of their emergence and
transformation; these conditions are themselves discursive (and sometimes
institutional).
Thus, discourse is not just a set of articulated
propositions, nor is it the trace of an otherwise hidden psychology, spirit, or
encompassing historical idea; it is the set of relations within which all of
these other factors gain their sense (their conditions of possibility). This
argument is responsible both for the immense success of Foucault's method and
for the most persistent criticisms of it. The idea that discourse can be
described in and of itself, not as a sign of what is known but as a precondition
for knowledge, opens up limitless possibilities for showing that what we think
we know is actually contingent on how we talk about it.
Knowledge
One of the most important themes of the Archeology is
Foucault's evolving description of what knowledge is. Since the archeological
method sets aside any psychological notions and any assumptions of the rational
progression of history, its take on knowledge is unique and quite radical. The
history of ideas (and some of Foucault's earlier work as well) deals with the
series of epistemes through which a given science has progressed; the term
denotes a prevailing mode of knowledge and investigation. In the Archeology,
Foucault carefully redefines the notion of the episteme. The term no longer
refers to a set of things known by a collective scientific subject, but rather
to a set of discursive relations without content and without a knowing subject.
The episteme, then, is that specific set of relations
that makes it possible for discourse to be taken as 'knowledge' and then as
'science;' it mediates between less systematic discursive positivities and
increasingly regularized ones. Knowledge itself, as far as Foucault's method is
concerned, is just another discursive effect, albeit one of the most pervasive
and important ones. Knowledge in a given historical period is not defined by
propositions proved, nor even by things 'known' by an individual or collective
someone (remember, no psychology). Knowledge becomes the unstable, complex set
of discursive relations that make it possible for a statement to qualify as
something that is 'known.' If the history of ideas was concerned with showing
the transition between modes of knowledge, archeology is concerned with
describing the transformation of the conditions that determine what counts as
knowledge.
Other work of Foucault's explores these issues in a
way that is more political and more personal. Foucault increasingly analyzes
the conditions that define what counts as knowledge in terms of the way those
conditions are bound up with systems of surveillance, discipline, and power.
The question also becomes one of how we come to know ourselves and to be known
(and labeled) as selves.
Archeology
and the Archive
Foucault calls his new historical method an
'archeology' to designate a kind of impersonal, objective historical analysis
that replaces the interpretation of history with a rigorous and detailed
description of historical discourse. Contemporary trends in historical studies
have been defined, according to Foucault, by a crisis in the status of the
document as the basis for reading history. How should documents be interpreted?
Foucault's answer is not to 'interpret' them at all, and indeed to relocate the
basic element of historical study from the document to the statement (which is
only loosely bound to the specific document in which it is read).
This redefinition of the document in terms of
positively describable statements (and, ultimately, positive discursive
formations) means that Foucault must also redefine the historical archive. The
archive, then, can no longer be seen simply as a collection of documents, and
can no longer be interpreted as the collective knowledge of a given culture or
period. Instead, the archive must be seen in terms of the conditions and relations
that define statements and discourses; the archive then appears, to archeology
at least, not as a set of things but as a set of general rules concerning the
longevity of statements. Thus, the archive is defined as 'the general system of
the formation and transformation of statements.' Critics of Foucault argue that
the archeological method is impossibly (even obsessively) strict about refusing
to see the archive as a sign of something else. Foucault wants to describe
statements at a semi- scientific, archeological distance (in fact, he notes
that this distance is the only thing that allows us to describe an archive
accurately). Historical statements are then taken not as signs of something
else that the historian must read 'in' them, but as 'monuments' to be described
almost as one would describe a physical artifact. Foucault admits that other
kinds of analyses of language (like grammar or literary criticism) may have
their own validity; he just wants to focus exclusively on the way statements
arise and function in discourse. But is such a purifying project really
possible? Critics have suggested that this anti- interpretive, 'archeological'
distance of the historian from the archive is impossible, and that Foucault is
ignoring the discursive conditions by which his own analysis is defined.
Subject Position
The replacement of a psychologized, actual subject of
a statement by a subject 'position' built into the statement has proved one of
the most transformative ideas to come from Foucault's work. Although the
Archeology was written before Foucault's long, intensive engagement with issues
of identity and power, it provides the theoretical ground for that later work.
In analyzing discourse in and of itself, the notion
that each statement has an author becomes irrelevant (because the author is not
a part of the discourse itself). Instead, what archeology finds is that each
statement is coded as coming from a specific position within the discursive and
institutional field. This position involves a whole host of factors, among
which the most crucial for Foucault's later work are those of authority and
knowledge. The possibility of making statements that count as knowledge (or as
expert opinion, or as scientific fact) depends on a wide range of discursive
conditions, from the formation of specific 'objects' of knowledge to the
formation of 'strategies' for deploying one theory against another. One such
condition is that of the statement's 'enunciative modality,' the specific mode
in which it is formulated as coming from a particular subject position.
A given enunciative modality (i.e., a given subject
position) does not depend on an attachment to an actual author. One enunciative
modality can be used by many authors, and one author can use many different
enunciative modalities. Archeology is able to recognize this contingent,
variable nature of subject positions because it never looks beyond the
statement to an actual, psychological author. The resulting idea, that our
identities as agents in discourse are themselves aspects of discourse, has been
explosively influential, yielding whole academic fields that examine the
discursive constitution of identity.
This can also be a profoundly disturbing idea, because
it emphasizes the extent to which our selfhood is scattered beyond us rather
than originating with us. Foucault's language in the Archeology notes this
dissociative effect: 'Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically
unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the
contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his
discontinuity with himself may be determined.
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