Giorgio Buccellati, Critique of Archaeological Reason
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| Part 1: Introduction | General queries : p.4 | What types of series should be established? What criteria of periodization should be adopted for each of them? What system of relations (hierarchy, dominance, stratification, univocal determination, circular causality) may be established between them? What series of series may be established? And in what large scale chronological table may distinct series of events be determined? |
| Introduction | The questioning of the document: p. 6 | It is obvious enough that ever since a discipline such as history has existed, documents have been used, questioned and given rise to questions; scholars have asked not only what these documents meant but also whether they were telling the truth, and by what right they could claim to be doing so whether they were sincere or deliberately misleading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or tampered with. But each of these questions and all on the basis on what the documents say, and something merely hint at, of behind them; the document was always treated as the language of a voice since reduced to silence, its fragile, but possibly decipherable trace. |
| Introduction | The interdisciplinary of history: p. 7 | History must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long and through which it found its anthropological justification: that of an age-old collective consciousness that made use of material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs etc.), that exist in every time and society either in a spontaneous or in a consciously organized form. |
| Introduction | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The traditional form of history: p. 7 | History in its traditional form undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; 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. There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context and things left by the past aspired to the condition of history and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it may be said to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of monuments. |
| Introduction | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The consequences: p. 7-9 | 1) history proper was concerned to define relations (of simple causality, of circular determination, of antagonism of expression) between facts or dated events; the series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series; 2) the notion of discontinuity assumes a major role in the historical disciplines. For history in its classical form the discontinuous was both the given and the unthinkable: the raw material of history, which presented itself in the form of dispersed events - decisions, accidents, initiatives, discoveries; the material, which through analysis had to be rearranged, reduced effaced in order to reveal the continuity of events. 3) the theme and the possibility of a total history begin to disappear, and we see the emergence of something very different that might be called general history. The project of a total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle - material or spiritual - of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion - what is called metaphorically the 'face' of a period. Such a project is linked to two or three hypothesis; it is supposed that between all the phenomena of which traces have been found it must be possible to establish a system of homogeneous relations; a network of causality that makes it possible to derive each of them, relations of analogy that show how they symbolize one another or how they all express one and the same central core. 4) the new history is confronted by a number of methodological problems, several of which, no doubt, existed long before the emergence of the new history, but which, taken together characterize it. These include: the building up of coherent and homogeneous corpora of documents (open or closed, exhausted or inexhaustible corpora), the establishment of a principle of choice (according to whether one wishes to treat the documentation exhaustively, or adopt a sampling representative elements); the definition of the level of analysis and of the relevant elements (in the materials studied, one may extract numerical indications; references - explicit or not - to events institutions, practices, the words used, with their grammatical rules and the semantics fields that they indicate or again the formal structure of the propositions and the types of connexion that unite them); the specification of a method of analysis (the quantitative treatment of data, the breaking down of the material according to a number of assignable features whose correlations are then studied, interpretative decipherment, analysis of frequency and distribution); the delimitation of groups and sub-groups that articulate the material (regions, periods, unitary processes); the determination of relations; functional, causal , or analogical relations; or it may be the relation of the 'signifier' (significant) to the 'signified' (signifie). |
| Introduction | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The aim of the book: p.15, 16 | My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this transformation, the problems that it arises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. In so far my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration) the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. In short, this book like those that preceded, it does not belong - at least directly, or in the first instance - to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being consciousness, origin and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. |
| Part 1: Unit of Discourse: Avoid notions which only diversify the theme of continuity. |
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| The notion of tradition: p.21 | :it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin; tradition enables us to isolate the new against a background of permanence, and to transfer its metric to originality, to genius to the decision proper to individuals. . |
| Unit of Discourse: |
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| The notion of influence: : p.21 | which provides a support - of too magical kind to be very amenable to analysis - for the facts of transmission and communication; which refers to an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delimitation nor theoretical definition) the phenomena of resemblance or repetition; which links at a distance and through time - as if through mediation of a medium of propagation - such defined unities as individuals, æuvres, notions or theories. |
| Unit of Discourse: |
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| The notions of development and evolution:: p.21-22 | they make it possible to group a succession of dispersed events, to link them to one and the same organizing principle, to subject them to the exemplary power of life (with its adaptation, its capacity for innovation, the incessant correlation of its different elements its system of assimilation and exchange), to discover, already at work in each beginning, a principle of coherence and the outline of a future unity to master time through a perpetually reversible relation between the origin and a term that are never given but are always at work. |
| Unit of Discourse: |
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| The notions of spirit: p.22 | which enables us to establish between the simultaneous or successive phenomena of a given period a community of meanings, symbolic links, an interplay of resemblance and reflection, or which allows the sovereignty of collective consciousness to emerge as the principle of unity and explanation. |
| Unit of Discourse: |
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| Groupings or divisions: p.22, 30 | We must also question those divisions or groupings with which we have become so familiar. Can one, accept as such, the distinction between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction etc., and which tend to create certain great historical individualism? Two facts must be constantly borne in mind: that the analysis of discursive events is in no way limited to such a definitive or as absolutely valid: it is no more than an initial approximation that must allow relations to appear that may erase the limits of this initial outline. |
| The Discursive Regularities |
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| Calls into question the old-unities and their formulations: p. 31 | What, in fact, are medicine, grammar or political economy? Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through time? Do they conceal other unities? And what sort of links can validly be recognized between all these statements that form in such familiar and insistent way, such an enigmatic mass? |
| The Discursive Regularities |
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| Hypotheses p: 32-35 | 1) Statement different in form and dispersed in time form a group if they refer to one and the same object. 2) to define a group of relations between statements: their form and type of connexion. 3) may it not be possible to establish groups of statements, by determining the system of permanent and coherent concepts involved? 4) To regroup the statements, describe their internconnexion and account for the unitary forms under which they are presented: the identity and persistence of themes. |
| The Discursive Regularities |
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| The æuvre of a collective subject p: 37 | one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable position in common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations. Such an analysis would not try to isolate small islands of coherence in order to describe their internal structure; it would not try to suspect and to reveal latent conflicts; it would study forms of division; Or again instead of reconstituting chains of inference (as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy) instead of drawing up tables of difference (as linguists do), it would describe systems of dispersion. |
| The Discursive Regularities |
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| Hypotheses p: 32-35 | 1) Statement different in form and dispersed in time form a group if they refer to one and the same object. 2) to define a group of relations between statements: their form and type of connexion. 3) may it not be possible to establish groups of statements, by determining the system of permanent and coherent concepts involved? 4) To regroup the statements, describe their internconnexion and account for the unitary forms under which they are presented: the identity and persistence of themes. |
| The Formation of Objects |
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| p: 41-42 | 1) First we must map the first surfaces of their emergence: show where these individual differences, which according to the degrees of rationalization, conceptual codes, and types of theory will be accorded the status of disease, alienation, anomaly, dementia, neurosis or psychosis degeneration may emerge and then be designated and analyzed. 2) We must also describe the authorities of delimitation: in the nineteenth century, medicine became the major authority in society that delimited, designated, named and established madness as an object; but it was not alone in this: the law in particular, the religious authority, literary and art criticism became involved. 3) We must analyze the girds of specification: these are the systems according to which the different kinds of madness are divided, contrasted, related, regrouped, classified, derived from one another as objects of psychiatric discourse. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Formation of Objects |
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| Discursive relations p: 44-46 |
1) The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse, historical condition required if one is to 'say' anything' about it, and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish with them relations of resemblance, proximity, distance, difference transformation - as we can see, these conditions are many and imposing. 2) Relations are established between institutions, economic, and social processes, behavioral patterns, system of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterization; and these relations are not present in the object. 3) Relations must be distinguished first from what we might call 'primary' relations, and which, independently of all discursive or all object of discourse may be described between institutions, techniques, social forms, etc. 4) Discursive relations are not, as we can see, internal to discourse; they do not connect concepts or words with one another; they do not establish a deductive or rhetorical structure between propositions or sentences. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Formation of Enunciative Modalities |
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| What do we need to be aware of? p: 50-55 |
Who is speaking? Who among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort of language. Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of individuals who - alone - have the right sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically or spontaneously accepted to proffer such a discourse? We must describe the institutional site and also the position of the subject defined by the situation. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Formation of Concepts |
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| Organisation: p: 57-63 |
An organization that involves forms of succession; and among them, the various ordering of ennuciative series; the various types of dependence of the statements.....it was the system of dependence between what one learnt, what one saw, what one deduced, what one accepted as probable and what one postulated.
The forms of coexistence which outline a field of presence (by which is understood all statements formulated elsewhere and taken up in a discourse, acknowledged to be fruitful, involving exact description, involving exact description, well-founded reasoning or necessary presupposition. We must also give our attention to those that are criticized, discussed, and judged as well as those that are rejected or excluded. We may define the procedures of intervention that may be legitimately applied to statements. These procedures are not in fact the same for all discursive formations. p.63. In any case, the rules governing the formation of concepts however generalized the concepts may be, and no the result, laid down in history and deposited in the depth of collective customs, of operations carried out by individuals; they do not constitute the bare schema of a whole obscure work, in the course of which concepts would be made to emerge though illusions, prejudices, errors, and traditions. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Formation of Strategies |
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| Summary: p:64-70 |
Determine the possible points of diffraction of discourse. These points are characterized in the first instance as points of incompatibility: two objects or two types of enunciation, or two concepts may appear, in the same discursive formation, without being able to enter - under the pain of manifest contradiction or inconsequence - the same series of statements. They are characterized as points of equivalence: the two incompatible elements are formed in the same way and on the basis of the same rules; the conditions of their appearance are identical; they are situated at the same level and instead of constituting a mere defect of coherence, they form an alternative, even if chronologically speaking, they do not appear at the same time even if they do not have the same importance, and if they were not equally represented in the population of effective statement they appear in the form of 'either....or'. Lastly, they are characterized as link points of systematization: on the basis of each of these equivalent, yet incompatible elements, o coherent series of objects, forms of statement and concepts has been derived. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Remarks and Consequences |
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| Summary: p:71-76 |
Focault explicitly concludes that his intention is not to deny all value to these unities or to try to forbid their use; it was to show that they required, in order to be defined exactly, a theoretical elaboration. He tries to define if one can really speak of unities? Is his proposed re-division capable of individualizing wholes? And what is the nature of the unity thus discovered or constructed? 1) When one speaks of a system of formation, one does not only mean the juxtaposition, coexistence, or interaction if heterogeneous elements (institutions, techniques, social groups, perceptual organizations, relations between various discourses), but also the relation that is established between them - and in a well determined form - by discursive practice. 2) These systems of formations must not be taken as blocks of immobility, static forms that are imposed on discourse from the outside, and that define once for all its characteristics and possibilities. They are not constrains whose origin is to be found in the thoughts of men, or in the play of their representations; but nor are they determinations which formed at the level of institutions, or social or economic relations transcribe themselves by force on the surface of discourse. 3) What are described as systems of formation do not constitute the terminal stage of discourse, if by that term what mean the text (or words) as they appear, with their vocabulary, syntax, logical structure or rhetorical organization. Analysis remains anterior to this manifest level, which is that of the completed construction: in defining the principle of distributing objects in a discourse, it does not take into account all their connexions their delicate structure or their internal sub-division; in seeking the law of the dispersion of concepts, it does not take into account all the process of elaboration, or all the deductive series in which they may figure. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Part 4: The Archaeological Description/Chapter 1 p:135-140 |
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| Archaeology and the History of Ideas | This part proceeds with domains of application. We can examine what use is served by this analysis that I have rather solemnly called 'archaeology'. Indeed we must: for, to be frank, as they are at the moment, things are rather disturbing. I set out with a relatively simple problem: the division of discourse to great unities that were not those of æuvres, authors, books or themes. And with the sole purpose of establishing them, I have set about constructing a whole series if notions (discursive formations, positivity, archive), I have defined a domain (statements, the enunciative field, discursive practices), I have tried to reveal the specificity of a method that is neither formalizing nor interpretative; in short, I have appealed to a whole apparatus, whose sheer, weight and, no doubt, somewhat bizarre machinery are a source of embarrassment. p.135 It is not easy to characterize a discipline like the history of ideas: it is an uncertain object, with badly drawn frontiers, methods borrowed from here and there, and an approach lacking in rigour and stability. And it seems to possess two roles. On the one hand, it recounts the by-ways and margins of history. Not the history of science bit that of imperfect, ill-based of knowledge which could never in the whole of its long, persistent life attain form of scientificity (the history of alchemy rather than chemistry, of animal spirits or phrenology rather than physiology, the history of atomistic themes rather than physics). The history of those shady philosophies that haunt literature, art, the sciences, law, ethics, and even man's daily life; the history of those age-old themes that never crystallized in a rigorous and individual system, but which have formed the spontaneous philosophy of those who did not philosophize. p.137 Archaeological description is precisely such an abandonment of the history of ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures, an attempt to practice a quite different history of what man have said. That some people do not recognize in this enterprise the history of their childhood, that they mourn its passing and continue to invoke, in an age that is no longer made for it, that great shade of former times, certainly proves their fidelity. But such conservative zeal confirms me in my purpose and gives me the confidence to do what I set out to do . p.138. 1) Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representation, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at least the depth of the essential in the place is which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better hidden discourse. It refuses to be 'allegorical'. 2) 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. It does not await the monument when on the basis of what they were not yet, they became what they are; nor the moment when solidity of their figure crumbling away, they will gradually lose their identity. On the contrary, 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; to follow them the whole length of their exterior ridges in order to underline them the better. It does not proceed, in slow progression from the confused field of opinion to the uniqueness of the system or the definitive stability of science; it is not a 'doxology'; but a differential analysis of the modalities of discourse. 3) Archaeology is not ordered in accordance with the sovereign figure of the æuvres; it does not try to grasp the moment in which the æuvre emerges on the anonymous horizon. It does not wish to rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and the social are inverted into one another. It is neither a psychology, not a sociology, nor more generally an anthropology of creation. The æuvre is not for archaeology a relevant division, even if it is a matter of replacing it in its total context or in the network of causalities that support it. It defines types of rules for discursive practices that run through individual æuvres, sometimes govern them entirely and dominate them to such an extent that nothing eludes them; but which sometimes, too govern only part of it. The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d'être of an æuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it. 4) Archaeology does not try to restore what has been thought, wished, aimed, at, experienced, desired by man in the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse; it does not set out to recapture that elusive nucleus in which the author and the æuvre exchange identities; in which thought still remains nearest to oneself, in the as yet unaltered form of the same, and in which language (langage) has not yet been deployed in the spatial, successive dispersion of discourse. In other words, it does not try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity. It does not claim to efface itself in the ambiguous modesty of a reading that would bring back in all it purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin. It is nothing more than a rewriting; that is in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Chapter 2 p:141-148 |
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| The Original and the Regular | In general, the history of ideas deals with the field of discourses as a domain of two values: any element located there may be characterized as old or new; traditional or original; conforming to an average type or deviant. One can distinguish therefore between two categories of formulation: those are highly valued and relatively rare, which appear for the first time, which have no similar antecedents, which may serve as models for others, and which to this extent deserve to be regarded as creations; and those, ordinary, everyday, solid, that not responsible for themselves and, which derive sometimes going so far as to repeat it word for word, from what has already been said. To each of these groups the history of ideas gives a status; and it does subject them to the same analysis: in describing the first, it recounts the history of invention, changes, transformations it shows how truth freed itself from error not consciousness awoke from its successive slumbers, how new forms rose up in turn to produce the landscape that we know today; it is the task of the historian to rediscover on the basis of these isolated points these isolated ruptures, the continuous line of an evolution. The second group, on the other hand, reveals history as inertia by weight and in accordance with what they have in common; their unique occurrence maybe neutralized; the importance of their authors identity, the time and place of their appearance are also diminished; on the other hand; it is their extent that must be measured. p.141 | ||||||||||||||||
| Chapter 3 p:149-156 |
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| Contradiction | What it is a contradiction? Contradiction is the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness, thought and text, the ideality and the contingent body of expression. In any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can. At the end of this work, only residual contradictions remain - accidents defects, mistakes - or, on the contrary as if the entire analysis had been carried out in secrecy and in spite of itself, the fundamental contradiction emerges: the bringing into play, at the very origin of the system, of incompatible postulates, intersections or irreconcilable influences, the first diffraction of desire, the economic and political conflict that opposes a society to itself, all this, instead of appearing as so many superficial elements that must be reduced, is finally revealed as an organizing principle, as the founding, secret law that accounts for all minor contradictions and gives them a firm foundation: in short, a model for all the other oppositions. The history of ideas recognized two levels of contradiction: that of appearance - which is resolved in the profound unity of discourse and that of foundations - which gives rise to the discourse. What is discourse? Discourse is the path from one contradiction to another; if it gives rise to those that can be seen, it is because it obeys that which it hides. To analyze discourse is to hide and reveal contradictions; it is to show the play that they set up within it; it is to manifest how it can express them, embody them or give them a temporary appearance. Archaeology it ceases, therefore, to treat as general function operating, in the same way, at all levels of discourse, and which analysis should either suppress entirely or lead back to a primary, constitutive form; for the great game of contradiction - present under innumerable guises, then suppressed and finally restored in the major conflict in which it culminates - is substitutes the analysis of different types of contradiction, different levels in accordance with which it can be mapped, different functions that it can exercise. In the the intrinsic archaeological contradiction one can recognize:- inadequation of the objects, a divergence of enunciative modalities and incompatibility of concepts. p.154 | |||||||||||||
| Chapter 4 p: 157-165 |
Comparative Facts |
Archaeological analysis individualizes and describes discursive formations. That is, it must compare them, oppose them to one another in the simultaneity in which they are presented, distinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time-scale, relate them, on the basis of their specificity, to the non-discursive practices that surround them and serve as a general element for them. Archaeological study is always in the plural; it operates in a great number of registers; it crosses interstices and gaps; it has its domain where unities are juxtaposed, separated, fix their crests, confront one another, and accentuate the white spaces between one another. 1) In archaeological analysis comparison is always limited and regional. 2) What archaeology wishes to uncover is primarily - the specificity and distance maintained in various discursive formations - the play of analogies and differences as they appear at the level of rules of formations. This implies five distinct tasks: a) Archaeological isomorphism - to show how quite different discursive elements may be formed on the basis of similar rules. b) Archaeological model - to show to what extent these rules do or do not apply in the same way, are or are not linked in the same order, are or are not arranged in accordance with the same model in different types of discourse. c) To show how entirely different concepts occupy a similar position in the ramification of their system of positivity - that they are therefore endowed with an archaeological isotopia - although their domain of application, their degree of formalization, and above all their historical genesis make them quite alien to one another. d) Archaeological shift - to show on the other hand, how a single notion (possibly designated by a single word) may cover two archaeologically distinct elements. e) Archaeological correlations - to show how, from one positivity to another, relations of subordination or complementary may be established. 3) Archaeology also reveals relations between discursive formations and non-discursive domains (institutions, political events, economic practices and processes). |
| Chapter 5 p: 166-177 |
Change and transformation |
Whatever theoretical criticism one can make of the traditional history of ideas, it does not at least take as its essential theme the phenomena of temporal succession and sequence, analyses them in accordance with schemata of evolution, and thus describes the historical deployment of discourses. Archaeology, however, seems to treat history only to freeze it. On the other hand by describing discursive formations, it ignores the temporal relations that may be manifested in them; it seeks general rules that will be uniformly valid, in the same way, and at every point: does it not therefore impose the constricting figure of a synchrony on a development that may be slow and imperceptible? 1) Let us take the apparent synchrony of discursive formations. One thing is true: it is no use establishing the rules in every statement, and they cannot therefore be put into operations with every statement, they do not change each time; they can be found at work in statements or groups of statements in widely separated periods. a) Archaeology defines the rules of formation of a group of statements. Archaeology analyses the degree and form of permeability of a discourse: it provides the principle of its articulation over a chain of successive events; it defines the operators by which the events are transcribed into statements. It does not challenge, for example, the relation between the Analysis of Wealth and the great monetary fluctuations of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; it tries to show what, in these crises could be given as an object of discourse, how those crises could be conceptualized in such an object, how the interests that were in conflict throughout these processes could deploy their strategy in such an object. b) Moreover, all the rules of formation assigned by archaeology to a positivity do not have the same generality some are more specific and derive from others. Archaeology does not set out to treat as simultaneous what is given as successive; it does not try to freeze time to substitute for its flux of events correlations that outline a motionless figure. What it suspends is the theme that succession is an absolute: a primary, indissociable sequence to which discourse is subjected by the law of its finitude; it is also the theme that there is in discourse only one form and only one level of succession. 2) Archaeology is much more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistribution. a) Instead of considering that discourse is made up of a series of homogeneous events (individual formulations), archaeology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse; the level of the statements themselves in their unique emergence; the level of the appearance of objects, types of enunciation, concepts, strategies choices and so on. b) In order to analyze an event, it is not enough simply to indicate changes, and to relate them immediately to the theological, aesthetic model of creation or to the psychological model of the act of consciousness, or to the biological model of evolution. We must define precisely what these changes consist of: that is substitute for an undifferentiated reference to change - which is both a general container for all events and the abstract principle of their succession - the analysis of transformation. c) To say that one discursive formation is substituted for another is not to say a whole world of absolutely new objects, enunciations, concepts, and theoretical choices emerges fully armed and fully organized in a text that will take place that world once and for all; it is to say that a general transformation of relations has occurred, but that it does not necessarily alter all the elements; it is to say that statements are governed by new rules of formations, it is not to say that all objects or concepts, all enunciations or all theoretical choices disappear. d) The appearance and disappearance of positivities, the play of substitutions to which they give rise, do not constitute a homogeneous process that takes place everywhere in the same way. We must not imagine that rupture is a sort of great drift that carries with it all discursive formations at once; rupture is not an undifferentiated interval - even a momentary one - between two manifests phases; it is not a kind of lapsus without duration that separates two periods, and which deploys two heterogeneous stages on either side on a split; it is always a discontinuity specified by a number of distinct transformations, between two particular positivities. | ||||||
| Conclusions p:199-211 |
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| The Controversy with Structuralism | The book disassociates from 'structuralism, or at least from what is ordinarily understood by that term. p.199 My aim was to show that the differences consisted of, how it was possible for men, within the same discursive practice, to speak of different objects to have contrary opinions, and to make contradictionary choices; may aim was also to show in what way discursive practices were distinguished from one another; in short, I wanted not to exclude the problem of the subject, but to define the positions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity of discourse. Lastly, as you have observed I did not deny history, but held in suspense the general, empty category of change in order to reveal transformations at different levels; I reject a uniform model of temporalization, in order to describe, for each discursive practice its rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation, its own forms of derivation, and its specific modes of connexion over various successions. p.200. I recognize the value of its (structuralism) insights of course: when it is a question of analyzing a language (langue), mythologies, folk-tales, poems, dreams, works of literature, even films perhaps, structural description reveals relations that could not otherwise be isolated; it makes is possible to define recurrent elements with their forms of opposition and their criteria of individualization; it also makes is to define recurrent element, with their forms of opposition, and their criteria of individualization; it also makes it possible to lay down laws of construction, equivalences, and rules of transformation. And despite a number of reservations that I had at the beginning, I now have no difficulty in accepting that man's language (langues), his uncounscious, and his imagination are governed by laws of structure. BUT what I absolutely cannot accept is what you are doing: I cannot accept that one can analyze scientific discourses in their succession without referring them to something like a constituent activity, without recognizing even in their hesitations the opening of an original project or a fundamental teleology, without discovering the profound continuity that links them and leads them to the point at which we can grasp them; I cannot accept that one can analyze the development of reason in this way, and free the history of thought from all taint of subjectivity. p.201 My aim was to analyze history in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject; to open it up to a temporality that would not promise the return to any dawn. My aim was to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism; it had to be freed from that circle of the lost origin and rediscovered where it was imprisoned; it had to be shown that the history of thought could not have this role of revealing the transcendental moment that rational mechanics has not possessed since Kant, and the meanings of the perceived world since Merleau-Ponty - despite the efforts that has been made to find it here. p.203. |
| Conclusions p: 199-211 |
Foucault's archaeology |
It is true that I have never presented archaeology as a science or even as the beginnings of a future science. And I have tried to draw up a survey - and in the process to make a good many corrections - of the work that I had done in certain fields of concrete research, rather than produce plans for some future building. The word archaeology is not supposed to carry any suggestion of anticipation; it simply indicates a possible line of attack for the analysis of verbal performances: the specification of a level - of a domain - the enunciative regularities, the positivities; the application of such concepts as rules of formation, archaeological derivation, and historical a priori. But in almost all its dimensions and over almost all its crests, the enterprise is related to the sciences, and to analysis of a scientific type, or to theories subject to rigorous criteria. p.206 After all, it may be that archaeology is doing nothing more than playing the role of an instrument that makes it possible to articulate, in a less imprecise way than in the past, the analysis of social formations and epistemological descriptions; or which makes it possible to relate an analysis of the positions of the subject to a theory of the history of sciences; or which makes it possible to situate the place of intersections between a general theory of production and a generative analysis of statements. |
| Appendix p: 215-237 |
The Discourse on Language |
In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers to cope with chance of events, to evade its ponderous awesome materiality. In a society such as ours we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar and familiar of these concerns what is prohibited. We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything. We have three types of prohibition, covering objects to speak of a particular subject; these prohibitions interrelate, reinforce and complement each other, forming a complex web continually subject to modification. The organization of disciplines is just as much opposed to the commentary principle as it is to that of the author. Opposed to that of the author, because disciplines are defined by groups of objects, methods, their corpus of propositions considered to be true the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever it able to make use of them, without there being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them. The methodological demands: 1) A principle of reversal, first of all. Where according to tradition, we think we recognize the source of discourse, the principle behind its flourishing and continuity, in those factors which seem to play a positive role, such as the author discipline, will to truth, we must rather recognize the negative activity and of the cutting-out rarefaction of discourse. But, once we have distinguished these principles of rarefaction, once we have ceased considering them as fundamental and creative action, what we do we discover behind them? Should we affirm that a word of uninterrupted discourse would be virtually complete? This is where we have to bring other methodological principles into play. 2) Next, the principle of discontinuity. The existence of systems of rarefaction does not imply that, over and beyond them lie great vistas of limitless discourse, continuous and silent, repressed and driven back by them, making it in terms of speaking or thinking, we must not imagine some unsaid thing, or an unthought, floating about the world, interlacing with all its forms and events. Discourse must be treated as a discontinuous activity, its different manifestations sometimes coming together, but just as easily unaware of, or excluding each other. 3) The principle of specificity declares that a particular discourse cannot be resolved by a prior system of significations; that we should not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face, leaving us merely to decipher it; it does not work hand in glove with what we already know; there is no pre-discursive fate disposing the word in our favor. We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity. 4) The principle of exteriority holds that we are not to burrow to the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits. |