Critique of Archaeological Reason
THEMES

Critique and hermeneutics

Giorgio Buccellati, May 2015

Overview
Table
Referentiality
Critique
Hermeneutics
Grammar and truth
The import for philosophy as a whole
References

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Overview

     I view hermeneutics as a moment within Critique.
     1. At the root lies the notion of archaeological reason as the constitutive aspect of a particular dimension of (pure) human reason – namely, human reason severed from the stream of cultural self-under-standing. It is the task of a critique to bear this out.
     2. The initial process focuses on the data, seen in their inner-referential quality. It defines there fore the nature of a broken tradition, as seen within the archaeological record.
     3. Hermeneutics focuses on the observer, and defines the extra-referential element to which the record relates, and which the observer has in common with the originary system.
     The table to the right gives a schematic synopsis of the argument and its terms.

Referentiality

     As I have argued in
     The interconnection between critique and hermeneutics may be viewed in terms of the way in which they relate to referentiality (see Notes, 15.7-15.8).
     The critique focuses on the inner dimension of a system. Accordingly, it views the system as rigorously auto-referential, with an emphasis on its structural make-up. It is closed to the outside not because it denies the existence of an external dimension, or the possibility of relating to it, but because the effectiveness of the analysis is proportional to the way in which levels of analysis are kept separate. It is for this reason that I stress the primary importance of defining archaeology for what it does exclusively: rather than just a question of semantics, it is a question of posing the boundaries within which the referential range of the system can be understood and analyzed.
     Hermeneutics, on the other hand, focuses on the extra-referential dimension of a system. Alternatively, we may say that the boundaries are broadened so as to define a wider system, one that subsumes, under the nodes of an inverted conceptual tree, other systems to which a critical approach has already been applied.
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Critique

the ore-linguistic dimension
Archaeological reason may thus be understood .
It is evidenced in the first place by the observation of the emplacement of elements exposed during excavation, and by the inferential reconstruction of deposition. It is the moment when the "breakage" is most dramatic, most apparent and most definitive.
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Hermeneutics

     Here, archaeological reason describes the observer's relationship to specific cultural environments to which no one any more natively belongs. The carriers of that culture did, indeed, share a common "space," and it is into this space that we aim be "inducted" again. The hermeneutic aim is to reconstruct the common space they shared so that we may be able to share it again, healing the brokenness, on the basis of the more universal condition of human cultural experience.
     the seminar as example
     Foucault, but starting from archaeology
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Grammar and truth

The import for philosophy as a whole

Kant > Heidegger/Gadamer/Derrida/Foucault
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Critique of Archaeological Reason THEMES