The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, Smith, 1972)

The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, Smith, 1972)

In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze.

One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests.

Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas.

Translated from the French by A.M. Sheridan Smith

p.38 whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation... The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division.

p.49 in analysing discourses themselves, one sees... the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define... the ordering of objects. 'Words and things'... is the ironic title of a work [JLJ - apparently formal "discourse" within a practice] that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of... 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 (langue) and to speech. It is this 'more' that we must reveal and describe.

p.112 the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning, the brusque gesture of the index finger of designation, always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function

p.117 We shall call discourse a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation... it is, from beginning to end, historical - a fragment of history... posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality

p.117 what we have called 'discursive practice' can now be defined more precisely... it 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 function. [JLJ - glad you cleared that up...]

p.122 The analysis of statements operates therefore without reference to a cogito. It does not pose the question of the speaking subject... it is situated at the level of the 'it is said'... we must understand by it the totality of things said, the relations, the regularities, and the transformations that may be observed in them

p.182-183 The group of elements, formed in a regular manner by a discursive practice [JLJ - discursive practices are the processes by which cultural meanings are produced and understood], and which are indispensable to the constitution of a science, although they are not necessarily destined to give rise to one, can be called knowledge. Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain constituted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific status...; knowledge is also the space in which the subject may take up the position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse...; knowledge is also the field of coordination and subordination of statements in which concepts appear, and are defined, applied and transformed...; lastly, knowledge is defined by the possibilities of use and the appropriation offered by discourse... There are bodies of knowledge that are independent of the sciences..., but there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by the knowledge that it forms.

[JLJ - thanks for "clarifying" that Michel. What he apparently means in brief is this: start with a set of rules which govern the production of formal discourse, such as academic journals, for example. You establish a set of rules, discourse happens which fits those rules, the crank is turned, time passes, and knowledge emerges from the discourse. Slightly long-winded, but cleverly worded. Oh wait. We can use this concept for a machine playing a strategic game. The problem is reduced to setting the rules for the discussion of the likely consequences of each playable move in the game position. Once these rules are cleverly and clearly established, you just turn the crank, and the discourse (magically?) turns out knowledge useful for "playing" the game.]

p.183 Knowledge... can also be found in... narrative accounts