The archaeology of knowledge

The Archaeology of Knowledge is a comprehensive explanation of Foucault’s methodology. Within this book, he deals with fundamental terms like discourse, enunciative modalities, concepts, strategies, statements, and so on. According to Lindgren (2000:294), archaeology is a method of historical research aimed at the statements of discourses and statement processes, practices whose primary purpose is to reveal the discursive rules that constitute various fields of knowledge.

In that sense, we should begin by defining what discourse is for Foucault. Foucault (cited in Hall, 1997:44) defines ‘discourse’ as:

[A] group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment. …Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. But… since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and influence what we do – our conduct – all practices have a discursive aspect.

With the archaeology of knowledge, Foucault focuses on a new method, a systematic articulation of the meaning and role of discourses. He argues that knowledge is created through discourse. His main interest is how we should study the knowledge (from lecture notes). Related to this interest, he examines how we are made subjects, how we are being subjects. To answer these questions, he looks for the relation between power and knowledge. He points out that discourse is a means of controlling the social practices and institutions in a society. How is it done then? For him, controlling the social practices and institutions in a society is done by managing the knowledge of the society. In that sense, purpose of archaeological analysis is to reveal historical conditions that make knowledge possible and epistemic area where these conditions occur. In other words, according to archaeological analysis, knowledge is historically constituted within an episteme and due to the rules defining discursive practices of this episteme. Foucault says:

By episteme, we mean… the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresholds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices. The episteme is not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities (Archaeology 191)

In that point, he is interested in statements. The primary analytical element of archaeology is the statement (Lindgren, 2000: 298). In The Archaeology of Knowledge, with the concept of archaeology, he is paying attention to discourse and a scrutiny of the statement. In that sense, there is a discussion about what Foucault’s statement includes. For example, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow (cited in Barrett, 2004: 176), Foucault does not deal with all statements but he deals with statements that have autonomy and include actual assertion. Foucault’s ‘statement’ is different from “the simple inscription of what is said” (Deleuze, 1988: 15). According to Barrett (2004: 176), statements of Foucault are not proposition or sentence. According to him, the statement is not as a linguistic unit like the sentence, but as “a function” (Foucault, 98). This example is mostly expressed to grasp how a statement is considered. AZERT, which is formation of letters on French typewriter, is not a statement. On the other hand, placing this formation in the instruction book as “alphabetic formation accepted by French typists” is a statement. In Foucault’s words: “…the keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters” (85-86).

With the method of archaeology, he attempts to define the actual statements as practices that are subject to certain rules, historically, and culturally determined rules that determine what statements are produced. In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that the statement itself does not create meaning. Rather, statements create a network of rules that determine what is meaningful as we can see in the AZERT example. Briefly, the statement enables “groups of signs to exist, and enables rules or forms to become manifest” (Foucault, 99). The conditions of a statement point toward how claims of truth are constructed. In that sense, we can claim that he is not interested in essential truth. He is interested in the idea of “truth production.” Thus, we can see this aim in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things.

In that sense, he tries to give us an idea about how his work is different from traditional understanding history. His attempt can be described as strategy of discontinuity. Instead of searching for homogeneity in a discursive entity, Foucault looks at ruptures, breaks to understand the production of meaning and knowledge. Thus, he argues that disciplines like grammar, medicine, and sexuality have no positive unity. The thing uniting them is the “rules of formation.” Rules of formation determine how new statements can be made. Such an analysis of discontinuous discourse does not belong to the traditional history of ideas or of science:

… it is rather an enquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge is constituted… Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of the word, as an “archaeology” (Order, xxi-xxii).

He explains this with a good metaphor.

The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory… history, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, [and] transform them into documents… In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument (Archaeology, 7).

The main purpose is to study the document not what document represents. In other words, purpose of archaeological analaysis can be stated in three titles:

To show discontinuities in the history of thought.
He sees these discontinuities as normal not a stigmata.
…the theme and possibility of a total history begin to disappear, and we see the emergence of something very different that might be called a general history. The project of a total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization… The problem that now presents itself — and which defines the task of a general history — is to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series… not only what series, but also what ‘series of series’ — or, in other words, what ‘tables’ it is possible to draw up. A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre… a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of dispersion (9-10).

In other words, the purpose is to find rules working within different series. What we witness is not continuity without interruption but dispersion. We should examine objects, statements, and theme. He prefers to look into concepts, themes, and paradigms at all levels of discourse; the “discursive regularities.” These constitute discursive information. Task of archaeology is to study this. Responsible of the said is not the writer; it is history. Foucault summarizes this as:

Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them… its problem is to define discourses in their specificity; to show in what way the set of rules that they put into operation is irreducible to any other… it is not a ‘doxology’; but a differential analysis of the modalities of discourse (139).

Secondly, to begin to comprehend a discursive formation, we have to question the speaker: who is speaking? The purpose of this analysis is to look at conventional and established discourses and institutions, such as medicine. Once we ascertain who is speaking, we must examine the document to see who they are speaking for.

The third set of rules of formation of a discursive formation is those that relate to the ‘formation of concepts.’ An attempt to define regularity in the process of the emergence of concepts has nothing to do with an effort to describe a chronological or hierarchical process. Rather, the rules of formation of concepts would describe the organization of the ground of statements where these statements appear and circulate. This organization, according to Foucault, entails ‘forms of succession’, ‘forms of coexistence’, and ‘procedures of intervention’ (56-58).

As far as I concerned from the book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, it is presented the methodology of archaeology used in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things.

For example, while he examines the madness in Madness and Civilization, he studies the emergence of the discourse called psychiatry. He discovers that what made this discipline possible at the time it appeared was a whole set of relations between hospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures of social exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms of labor and bourgeois morality. In short, he examines external relations that characterized for this discursive practice the formation of its statements.

As the title suggest, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences investigate the history and the historic roots of the ‘human sciences’, having an interest in linguistics, biology and economics. Moreover, the book has a closing chapter on ‘history, sociology, psychoanalysis and ethnology’ (O’ Farrell, 2005:39).

Another example for archaeological analysis can be The Order of Discourse. This book corresponds to a summary of Foucault’s archaeological analysis. Within the book, there is a discussion about procedures, rules and principles, which regulate, control, and organize effects of discourse.

In The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, Foucault focuses on the discourses based on analysis, statistics, classification, and specification centered around sex by turning upside down the traditional notion. He examines truth about sex expressed in a language that is based on power and knowledge.

If we do the study of archaeological analysis by referring to these works, we can stretch out the obvious elements of the theoretical framework, which Foucault articulates in The Archaeology of Knowledge. From them, he derives and illustrates the basis of the methodology. This method is distinguished by its doubts about of continuity and the search for meaning in history. Dreyfus and Rabinow point out that archeological analysis “shows that what seems like the continuous development of meaning is crossed by discontinuous discursive formations” (1986: 106).

After The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault began increasingly to be interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, and how this relationship can lead to the production of particular ‘truths’ about the human ‘subject’ (McHoul & Grace, 1993:57-58). In other words, Archaeology is not studying the history of ideas. On the other hand, it is an effort to focuse on the condition in which a subject (the mad, for example) is constituted as a possible object of knowledge. He says:

Studying the history of ideas, as they evolve, is not my problem so much as trying to discern beneath them how one or another object could take shape as a possible object of knowledge. Why for instance did madness become, at a given moment, an object of knoweldge corresponding to a certain type of knowledge? By using the word “archaeology” rather than “history”, I tied to designate this desynchronization between ideas about madness and the constitution of madness as an object.

Thus, as far as I understood from the quotation, power is no longer the conventional power of institutions and/or leaders, but instead the modes of power that controls individuals and their knowledge, the mechanism by which power “reaches into to the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Power/Knowledge, 30). It is in discourse that power is manifest to identify the mad.

Briefly, with archaeological analysis, he is against the humanist concepts of self and objectivity. we can summaries this opposition under two titles:

He is against the idea of an autonomous individual. The subject for Foucault is not a rational agent thinking and acting under its own self-imposed and self-created commands. Rather the subject is a product of social structures, epistemes, and discourses as we witness in discourse of the madness. For example, in Discipline and Punish, he examines new creations producing the criminal as a new type of person.
He is also against an objectivist epistemology, theory of knowledge. Our meaning, experiences, and truths are not simply prearranged to us as stable and fixed objects. Rather they are constructed for us by the same social structures, the epistemes, and discourse that give us our identity as we witness the identification of the mad or as we gain our sexual identity.

Thus, archaeology of knowledge is looking for the rules for the statements in a particular discourse which makes us a particular subject. The problem with the archaeological method is that on the one hand, it allows the comparison of different discursive formations of different periods, it helps suggesting the contingency by simply showing that different ages had thought differently. For example, he deals with the development of medical practice during period 1760 to 1810 to express a new kind of medical thinking. On the other hand this method cannot convince us to know more about the causes that fabricate the transition from one way of thinking to an other. Later, he uses the concept of genealogy to explain what makes this transition. He did not abandon archaeology but genealogy was given a clear superiority.

To sum up, importance of archaeology in discourse analysis can be summarized with Foucault’s words:

Archaeological analysis [of painting] would have another aim: it would try to discover whether space, distance, depth, color, light, proportions, volumes, and contours were not, at the periods in question, considered, named, enunciated, and conceptualized in a discursive practice; and whether the knowledge that this discursive practice gives rise to was not embodied perhaps in theories and speculations, in forms of teaching and codes of practice, but also in processes, techniques, and even in the very gesture of the painter. It would not set out to show that the painting is a certain way of ‘meaning’ or ‘saying’ that is peculiar in that it dispenses with words, It would try to show that, at least in one of its dimensions, it is discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects. … it would try to explain the formation of a discursive practice and a body of revolutionary knowledge that are expressed in behavior and strategies, which give rise to a theory of society, and which operate the interference and mutual transformation of that behavior and those strategies (193-195).

His method is important because Foucault calls into question the relations among statements in accepted categories in discursive fields, literature, psychology, philosophy, and politics, for example and the relations among statements. By this way, we can examine different subject positions and ask questions about suppression and deception. Moreover, we can ask ourselves how we can conceive of discursive unities in any form at all.

References

Barrett, M. (2004). Marx’tan Foucault’ya IDEOLOJI. Doruk Yayinlari.

Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, P. (Eds.). (1986). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Foucault, M. (1967 [1961]). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (R. Howard, Trans.). London: Tavistock Publications.

Foucault, M. (1972[1969]). The Archaeology of Knowledge (A. M. S. Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1973[1966]). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1977[1975]). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1979[1976]). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin Press.

Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London The Open University/Sage Publications.

McHoul, A., & Grace, W. (1993). A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.