Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972)

Foucault starts by arguing that a shift had occurred in recent intellectual history, which focused more on discontinuities, while history itself revealed growing interest to stable structures. The reason is: “questioning of the document” (6). Foucault claims that history should abandon (and partly had already abandoned) its relationship to sources: instead of attempts to see through them, as if they were transparent, it should look at them as archeology looks at monuments. Hence “archaeology of knowledge,” an attempt to look at documents as monuments, trying to find through operations of analysis discontinuities, ruptures, differences, shifts (but longer periods, too), because a search for them allows to strip from the history artificial discursive constructions imposed on it and gives an idea of other connections that might stand behind the production of discourses.

Foucault suggests that instead of accepting those discursive unities which are sacrificed by the power of traditions, a scholar should challenge them:

I shall accept the groupings that history suggests only to subject them at once to interrogation; to break them up and then to see whether they can be legitimately reformed; or whether other groupings should be made; to replace them in a more general space which, while dissipating their apparent familiarity, makes it possible to construct a theory of them (26).

Once again, identification of discontinuities allows to establish borders and frames of discursive phenomena, which is important because discourse fields are finite and can provide only a limited (even though a large) number of meanings.

Foucault’s method of discourse analysis also doesn’t look “behind” the level of the production of discourse (hence, once again, archaeology and refusal to look at documents as “transparent”). The question he asks to texts is: “What is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?” (27).

Instead of sticking to already existing unities of discourse, his task is to look at specific statements/events at the moment of their occurrence, without looking at “underlying” factors, in order to “be able to grasp other forms of regularity, other types of relations” (29), to set oneself free from categories imposed by others to become more sensitive and be able to describe “the interplay of relations within [a discursive event] and outside it” (29).

And here is Foucault’s method for analyzing discourse: instead of describing a domain of human knowledge on the basis of its objects (which can be very different – for medicine, it can be both healthy and ill people), language (which can be very different as used by different groups), conceptual apparatus (which can change, chronologically, geographically or ideologically) or thematic field (within one theme, it’s possible to pursue two and more different strategies, and vice versa), Foucault suggests:

Instead of reconstituting chains of inference, instead of drawing up tables of differences, [his analysis] would describe systems of dispersion. Whenever one can describe… such a system of dispersion… one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will sake… that we are dealing with a discursive formation – thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences and in any case inadequate to the task of designating such a dispersion, such as ‘science’, ‘ideology’, ‘theory’, or ‘domain of objectivity’ (37-38).

He then moves to give a more specific definition of what he understands as discourse. The object of the discourse of, say, materiality doesn’t speak of materiality as such. Instead, it constructs objects of what belongs to materiality – objects which are likely to be “highly dispersed.” The objects of discourse are constructed through relations to other objects (relations of proximity, resemblance, distance, transformation, etc.). These relations are secondary to “primary” relations – relations between institutions, economic and social processes, systems of norms, techniques, etc. The way it works is that relations “map” (or mark) the borders of discourse. After the initial mapping, rules of the production of meanings within discourse emerge and start to operate. Since everything is relational in discourse, it exists in a constant state of renewal.

Foucault’s agenda is to study only discourse in its complexity, as a phenomenon of its own, not to go to the objects outside it, those for which this discourse was created (he uses the term “tyranny of discourse”). He, however, admits the possibility of this alternative agenda. Neither says he that his discourse analysis will employ analysis of semantic meanings and shifts. Such analyses can be useful, but “they are not relevant when we are trying to discover, for example, how criminality could become an object of medical expertise, or sexual deviation a possible object of psychiatric discourse.” (48)

Finally, to the importance of discourse analysis: once discursive practices emerge,

One sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects. ‘Words and things’ is the entirely serious title of a problem… [but] a task consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs… but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe (49).

Understanding of how discourse works requires asking three questions: 1) who is speaking, in other words, who is endowed with authority to make relevant enunciations; 2) what institutional site a person should occupy to start producing discursive enunciation and, 3) what is the social space in which the production of discourse becomes possible and how different positions in the social space influence strategies that subjects employ to produce discourses (questioning subject, listening subject, seeing subject, observing subject, etc.).

While Foucault notes that there is a great variety in the types of enunciation within any given discourse, he refuses to reduce them by “uncovering the formal structures, categories, modes of logical succession, types of reasoning and induction, forms of analysis and synthesis that may have operated in a discourse” (52) as he refuses to reduce them to any form of rationality or to their empirical genesis. Вместо того, чтобы возводить высказывания к субъекту высказывания, к тому, кто говорит, Фуко предлагает посмотреть, как различные модальности высказывания (или типы высказывания) «децентрализуют» субъекта, разрушают его целостность. Instead of tracing enunciations to the subject of discourse, Foucault offers to examine the way in which different modalities (or types) of enunciation “manifest his dispersion.” (54) A subject is dispersed to “the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse.” (54) In this “dispersed,” (or decentralized?) state, what unites a subject is not consciousness, but rather discourse. Therefore, Foucault sees no sense in looking at discourse as a phenomenon of expression:

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.” (55)

Foucault proposes to analyze concepts which are used by certain discourses, but not directly concepts, as Koselleck or Skinner: he argues that complexes of concepts and other enunciations must be examined for the ways in which “different elements are related to one another” (60) – for example, empirical evidence to arguments, memory to forms of hierarchy and subordination, etc. The task is to look at schemata which link different kinds of statements in a given type of discourse, then to look at rules which repeat in different texts within discourse.

These schemata make it possible to describe – not the laws of the internal construction of concepts, not their progressive and individual genesis in the mind of man – but their anonymous dispersion through texts, books and oeuvres… Such an analysis, then, concerns, at a kind of preconceptual level, the field in which concepts can coexist and the rules to which this field is subjected (60).

Within discourse, different ways of enunciating it are called strategies. To identify and differentiate strategies within one discursive formation, certain operations need to be applied to discourse analysis: to determine points of diffraction of discourse where two objects or types of enunciations possible within the discursive field become incompatible within one strategy; to study how different strategies work not in competition, but rather as compliments to each other (economy of discursive constellation); finally, to see how the formation and choice of strategies are determined by external authority, i.e. from the field of non-discursive practices. The procedures of the latter depend on “the rules and process of appropriation of discourse” (68), because there is a strong correlation between discourses and social groups:

The property of discourse – in the sense of the right to speak, ability to understand, licit and immediate access to the corpus of already formulated statements, and the capacity to invest this discourse in decisions, institutions, or practices – is in fact confined (sometimes with the addition of legal sanctions) to a particular group of individuals (68).

On the other hand, discursive strategies cannot be reduced to political conflicts between social groups (69).

Foucault then reflects on the nature of change (or, rather, mobility) of discursive formations. As their elements (discursive practices) mutate with time, the entire discursive formation, while retaining its entity and specific features, also changes with them (this is seen in the Soviet discursive formations which mutate in this way).

In the third part The Statement and the Archive, Foucault starts by defining what a statement is. He introduces this concept as a basic element of discourse, which to discourse is the same as a sentence is to a text. A statement  does not coincide with a grammatical sentence or logical proposition or a speech act, it is a different way to look at the linguistic activity. Foucault refuses to give any exact definition to it, instead he, in a Wittgensteinian way, proposes to define it through its function: “that is, in its actual practice, its conditions, the rules that govern it, and the field in which it operates” (87).

The function that statements perform is an enunciative function. It means that its role is not to refer to an object in the real world, it does not have a (direct) correlate:

It is linked rather to a ‘referential’ that is made up not of ‘things’, ‘facts’, ‘realities’, or ‘beings’, but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the object that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it (91).

It, therefore, evades a formal analysis or a semantic investigation and can be grasped only through “the analysis of the relations between the statement and the spaces of differentiation, in which the statement itself reveals the differences” (92). The statement also must have a subject, but it often – if not mostly – does not coincide with the author of the text (remember Barthes’s The Death of the Author). Finally, each statement must belong to a certain domain of meanings:

At the very outset, from the very root, the statement is divided up into an enunciative field in which it has a place and a status, which arranges or its possible relations with the past, and which opens up for it a possible future… There is no statement that does not presuppose others; there is no statement that is not surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects o series and succession, a distribution of functions and roles (99).

Foucault then moves on to the way scholars should describe statements as elements of discursive formations. For linguistic performance to occur, it is not enough to have just the system of language: between language and speech, one more level should exist which is responsible for the production of modalities which defines the borders within which subjects can create meanings. “We will call statement the modality of existence proper to that group of signs [act of speech]: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces… that allows it to be in relation with a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject, to be situated among other verbal performances…” (107).

The description of statements, consequently, does not require isolation of fragments as linguists work, but rather “defining the conditions in which the function that gave a series of signs (a series that is not necessarily grammatical or logically structures) an existence, and a specific existence, can operate” (108).

In the description of sentences, it is necessary to remember that not only meanings are important, but also gaps, limits, etc.:

There may in fact be – and probably always are – in the conditions of emergence of statements, exclusions, limits, or gaps that divide up their referential, validate only one series of modalities, enclose groups of coexistence, and prevent certain forms of use” (110).

Foucault finally comes to the relationship between statements and discursive formations which are, in his definition, “groups of statements” (115) which are connected by a similar set of the rules of production of meanings, of subjective positions, of the use in non-discursive fields. His project can be then approached in two ways:

To describe statements, to describe the enunciative function of which they are the bearers, to analyse the conditions in which this function operates, to cover the different domains that this function presupposes and the way in which those domains are articulated, is to undertake to uncover what might be called the discursive formation. Or… in the opposite direction; the discursive formation is the general enunciative system that governs a group of verbal performances – a system that is not alone in governing it, since it also obeys, and in accordance with its other dimensions, logical, linguistic, and psychological systems” (116).

A discourse is, then, “a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation… made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined” (117). Discourse is very historical - “a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the mids of the complicities of time” (117).

Finally, a discursive practice is “a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative unction” (117).

Having established that, Foucault argues that his version of the analysis of discourse is “based on the principle that everything is never said… (118) On the basis of the grammar and of the wealth of vocabulary available at a given period, there are, in total, relatively few things that are said.” (119) The principle upon which discourses work is to limit possible enunciations, therefore the analysis of discourse should “define a limited system of presence” (119):

The discursive formation is not therefore a developing totality,… it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions (119).

Still, it should not be understood that the task of scholars is it study these ‘exclusions’ as a repression: discourse works in a positive way, it gives instruments to speak of what it covers and does not deal with the unsaid or repressed meanings:

The description of a statement does not consist therefore in rediscovering the unsaid whose place it occupies; nor how one can reduce it to a silent, common text; but on the contrary in discovering what special place it occupies, what ramification of the system of formations make it possible to map its localization, how it is isolated in the general dispersion of statements (119).

Interpretations that one can make, thus, are made on the basis of this rarity of statements, and it is an instrument to fight this rarity (which can be used in respect to Finlandization debate):

To interpret is a way of reacting to enunciative poverty, and to compensate for it by multiplication of meaning (120).

Foucault calls it “administration of scarce resources” – in this way, the entire Finlandization debate can be seen (at least, its initiation) as an attempt to use this empirical resource as an extra interpretation for one’s discursive formation. He then says that the statements in discourse inevitable become “the object off a struggle, a political struggle” (120).

Foucault emphasizes that the analysis of statements should be undertaken without a reference to a thinking subject, because the logics of discourse is not determined consciously (by cogito), but by its own logic.

One of the principles upon which discourses operate includes their historicity. Every statement within discourse is based on antecedent statements, but one enounced, it reorganizes and redistributes them in accordance to new relations which emerged with its enunciation. In this respect, any statement constructs its own past. Historicity of discourse makes any discourse positivist.

Positivity of discourses gives a perspective to understanding of political debates, which can be interpreted as a field (a battlefield) which is created by the form of positivity of any given discursive formation. Within this field, discursive battles take place which deploy different resources, but they are unable to move outside the limits imposed by the current type of positivity:

Different oeuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation – and so many authors who know or do not know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another,  meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the master, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea – all these various figures and individuals do not communicate solely by the logical succession of propositions that they advance, nor by the recurrence of themes, nor by the obstinacy of a meaning transmitted, forgotten, and rediscovered; they communicate by the form of positivity of their discourse, or more exactly, this form of positivity (and the conditions of operation of the enunciative function) defines a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translation of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed. Thus positivity plays a role of what might be called a historical a priori (127).

A historical a priori for any given discourse is important, because it provides that sum of meanings which is “a condition of reality for statements” (127). In other words, it doesn’t matter whether statements correspond to “external real world” – the main thing is that they should correspond to the reality created by previous statements in its discourse, i.e. to this historical a priori.

As the result, within a discursive formation, we get groups of statements which are articulated on the basis of certain historical a prioris, characterized by different types of positivity, and it immediately gives certain depth to analyses of discursive surfaces which no longer seem homogeneous and monotonous. Foucault suggest to give the name of archive to these systems of statements (which can be events, things, arguments, etc.).

The idea of archive helps to explain “why, if there are things said – and those only – one should seek the immediate reason for them in the things that were said not in them, nor in the men that said them, but in the system of discursivity, in the enunciative possibilities and impossibilities that it lays down” (129). Archive is a formalized construct which stands between language and speech, it

“defines the system of enunciability,” (129)
 “is a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge,” (130)
“is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.” (130)

Due to its specific place between language and speech, “the archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable” (130). It exists in fragments, regions and levels.