The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

14 / Gary Gutting

Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is not a theory of knowledge in the sense of analytic epistemology: it is not a philosophical account of the nature of knowledge in general. Nor is it épistémologie in the French sense (associated with Bachelard and Canguilhem), a philosophical account of the nature of scientiic knowledge. It is a historical rather than a philosophical project, although its historical approach depends on philosophical assumptions about the priority of language over subjective experience. Archaeology is similar to what Canguilhem called the “history of concepts.” His two historical studies that have “archaeology” in their titles, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Gaze and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, both contain strong elements of such a history. But archaeological histories are, we might say, radicalizations of Canguilhem’s histories in that they focus not on the standard scientiic disciplines in a given period (for example, in the nineteenth century, biology, economics, and philology) but on the deeper cognitive structures that underlie such disciplines. In Foucault’s terminology, history of concepts operates only the level of connaissance, the concepts and theories of particular sciences, whereas archaeology operates at the level of savoir, the cognitive structures that deine the shared cognitive ield in which these concepts and theories are deployed.

Foucault’s archaeology, as its embrace of a history of concepts suggests, is closely tied to his effort to come to terms with Hegel. Foucault eschews the “bad Hegel” of the complete System, absolute knowledge, total synthesis, and inal necessity, but he wants to preserve the “good Hegel” for whom experience is given its undeniable place as a historical reality but is nonetheless subordinated to a more fundamental objective structure (which in turn, however, allows for new forms of experience whereby we can break out of the pattern set for us by the past).

Archaeology tries to avoid the “bad Hegel” by committing itself to a description of historical concreta that are irreducible to any philosophical synthesis. Particularly important for Foucault, because of its connection with efforts of human self-under- standing, is the history of what he calls “the human sciences.” Because he aims to write genuine histories of these sciences, based on his own archival research, his projects have to be judged by criteria of factual accuracy that, in principle at least, guard against the Hegelian temptation of itting everything too neatly into an independently posited philosophical system. On the other hand, within the discipline of history, his archaeologies are much closer to an “idealist history” that deploys broad interpretative schemes, more illustrated than proven by data, than to an “empiricist history” that fears to venture much beyond the bare catalogue of facts. This sort of high-lying history can readily ind itself taking on, for better or worse, Hegelian features. The three histories (of madness, clinical medicine, and the emergence of the modern “sciences of man”) that preceded Foucault’s detailed formulation of the archaeological methodology in The Archaeology of Knowledge show the dificulties

Archaeology / 15

he faced in trying to devise a historical methodology that was free of Hegelian entanglements.

Foucault’s irst major book, History of Madness in the Age of Reason, makes considerable use of Hegelian concepts – for example, alienation, recognition, unhappy consciousness, master–slave relation – to describe various aspects of the existence of the mad and of society’s perception of them. Although such descriptions need not imply a commitment to Hegel’s overall metaphysical view, they raise questions as to whether Foucault’s account is based solely on the patient archaeological reconstruction of the language of seventeenth-century delineations of madness. Further, History of Madness is framed in terms of what Foucault presents as classical reason’s effort to exclude madness as its simple denial, rather than (as, Foucault claims, was done in the Middle Ages and Renaissance) treating madness as the essential complement of reason, in continuing dialogue with it. Moreover, Foucault describes these historical developments as changes in the experience of madness. If we ask who or what has this experience, the only answer would seem to be reason itself, which, even if it avoids a progressive teleology, seems to posit something like Hegelian spirit as the subject of the historical experience of madness. Foucault himself seems to recognize this in the self-critique of The Archaeology of Knowledge when he says that his History of Madness

“accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an ‘experience’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history” (EAK, 16, translation modiied).

Nonetheless, there are features of the archaeological approach – particularly as developed in Foucault’s next two histories, The Birth of the Clinic and, especially, The Order of Things, that seem suited to avoiding Hegelian pitfalls. First, the focus on uncovering unconscious structures of thought suggests that even the most striking achievements of conscious thinking are, contrary to Hegel, based on and restricted by factors outside consciousness. Second, Foucault’s histories avoided any hint of Hegelian dialectical development by renouncing the attempt to explain changes in episteme, since he limited himself to archaeological descriptions of the deep structure of thought in discrete periods. Foucault could demonstrate that Renaissance thought took place within an episteme quite different from that of the classical age, and that the episteme of the classical age was likewise quite different from that of modernity. But he made no effort to account for the processes whereby one episteme was replaced by another, choosing instead to present isolated snapshots of different periods.

But neither of these features was a sure protection against Hegelian totalization. Structures that are unconscious for individual human minds at a given time may still be part of the conscious life of absolute spirit. (Even if we require that absolute consciousness be manifested in human consciousness, Foucault’s subsequent discovery of these structures can be taken as precisely this manifestation.)

16 / Gary Gutting

And, as Foucault realized, full-blooded history requires explanations of why changes in thinking occurred. Unless he was able to ind a satisfactory explanatory alternative to Hegelian dialectic, he had no reason to think that he had avoided Hegelian history. Moreover, even the avowedly explanation-free history of The Order of Things turns, at its most crucial point, to something very like Hegelian dialectic. This occurs when Foucault is trying to show how the modern episteme, centered on the concept of man as simultaneously empirical (an object in the world) and transcendental (constituting the world), is on the verge of collapse. In his section on “The Analytic of Finitude,” Foucault deploys a series of philosophical analyses that seem designed to show, in classic Hegelian fashion, how successive attempts at thinking of man as both empirical and transcendental make some progress in reconciling the two aspects but eventually fall into contradiction.

The lesson of Foucault’s archaeological histories was therefore the need to develop an effective alternative to the dialectical method of explaining historical change. Only in this way could Foucault carry out his project of confronting philosophical thought with a historical reality which that thought could not reduce to itself. It was this need that motivated Foucault’s development, beginning with his history of the prison, Discipline and Punish, of a complementary historical approach that, with more than a nod to Nietzsche, he presented as his genealogy.

Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge provides a detailed methodological relection on what he was doing – or at least moving toward – in the three preceding histories. The fundamental point is that the method is designed to provide historical accounts that are not centered around the activities of human subjects and, in particular, have no place for a transcendental subject that is the source of historical meaning and purpose. Foucault does not deny the obvious fact that humans have a role in making their history, but this role is speciied and limited by the discursive formation – a complex of rules that deine the sorts of objects, concepts, forms of cognitive authority (“enunciative modalities”), and theoretical viewpoints (“strategies”) that are possible in a given historical context. The discursive formation (roughly what Foucault had previously called an episteme) is not constituted by the subject but rather provides a place from which subjects speak and know but under strong constraints from the discursive formation. The history occurring within a discursive formation is not devoid of subjectivity, but it is free of what Foucault calls “transcendental narcissism” (EAK, 203).

Consistent with Foucault’s light from totalization, he presents discursive formations as systems of dispersion, not of uniication. A discursive formation is not a worldview, conceptual framework, or theory so much as a set of elements from which a variety of conlicting worldviews, frameworks, and theories can be developed. This allows us to “decenter” the subjective unities (ideas, opinions) of individual subjects, which are the primary focus of standard histories of thought (which Foucault labels “doxology”). The impersonal unity of a language disperses and displaces the

Archaeology / 17

proper names that dominate nonarchaeological histories. The unity of thought thus becomes language itself, with discursive formations delimiting the ield on which traditional conceptual and theoretical conlicts occur.

The archaeological understanding of language is essentially that of Saussure: “a collection of signs deined by their contrasting characteristics and their rules of use” (EAK, 85). For archaeology, however, the basic linguistic unit is not the syllable or the word but the statement, which (as Foucault admitted in correspondence with John Searle) can be understood as something quite like the speech act of analytic philosophy of language. But the analogy with speech acts is best taken as emphasizing that statements are moves in a language game, deriving their meaning from the ways in which they differ functionally from other possible moves. The similarity does not involve thinking of statements as expressing the intentional states of subjects. As Foucault puts it: “The analysis of statements operates ... without reference to a cogito.... It is situated at the level of the ‘it is said’” (EAK, 122). Of course, what “is said” is in fact said by some subject or another, but, from an archaeological standpoint, this subject refers merely to “a position that may be illed in certain conditions by various individuals” in accordance with the rules of a discursive formation (EAK, 115).

Nor should we think of these rules as transcendental principles that somehow “constitute” statements as meaningful expressions. Rather, the rules are merely descriptions of statements that have historically occurred and of the relations among them. “Discourse in this sense is not an ideal timeless form that also possesses a history ... ; it is, from beginning to end, historical” (EAK, 117). Foucault does introduce the (admittedly, he says, “rather barbarous”) term “historical a priori,” which might suggest a remnant of transcendentalism. But he insists that any condition imposed by such an a priori “is not a condition of validity for judgments but a condition of reality for statements”; that is, a condition that itself derives from the given historical reality “of things actually said” (EAK, 127). Foucault sums up his insistence that archaeology is in no way a transcendental enterprise when he says that if rejecting the transcendental means that “one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be one” (EAK, 125).

For all its importance as a methodological manifesto, TheArchaeology of Knowledge remains awkwardly related to Foucault’s histories. On the one hand, the book formulates an ideal method that, by his own admission, is not fully carried out in the histories (of madness, the clinic, and the human sciences) that precede it. On the other hand, Foucault did not publish another historical study until 1975 (six years after

The Archaeology of Knowledge), and the new study, Discipline and Punish, proclaimed a new, genealogical method, which operates quite differently from archaeology. It is therefore easy to see why Foucault scholars have paid relatively little attention to The Archaeology of Knowledge. Nonetheless, it is valuable as a guide to relection on the methodology of Foucault’s early histories, and the account of language and discursive formations is of considerable interest in its own right.

Archaeology / 19

Suggested Reading

Bernauer, James. 1990. Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight. London: Humanities Press, 1990, esp. chap. 4.

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ARCHIVE / 21

appears then as a kind of great practice of discourse, a practice which has its rules, its conditions, its functioning and its effects” (EFL, 66).

Discourses are not just amorphous collections of statements; rather, Foucault argues, these discourses obey certain rules or regularities, and these regularities themselves are determined by the archive. As the set of “all that has been said,” the archive functions as the limit or boundary for a discourse, and functions to establish the rules or regularities that govern the discourse’s transformations. In this way, the archive establishes the “conditions of existence” (EFL, 40) (or, if you prefer a more Kantian phrase, the conditions of possibility) for what can be said within a discourse and provides rules of transformation for these discourses. The archive thus constitutes what Foucault calls a discourse’s “historical a priori.” And so the “archive,” as deined in The Archaeology of Knowledge (in much more formal and technical, as well as metaphorical, language), is

irst the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass ... but they are grouped together in distinct igures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with speciic regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale. (EAK, 129)

As the “law of what can be said” (the second aspect of Foucault’s deinition), the archive establishes the regularities that govern statements and discourses, that give them the particular forms and rules that they actually have (rather than leaving them as amorphous masses). The archive functions at a middle level – the level of practices – between language (the rules of which allow for an ininite number of possible coherent expressions, many of which might never be said) and a passive collection (or “corpus”) of everything that has been said. At this level of practice, “it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modiication. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (EAK, 130).

Foucault speciies that the archive serves to deine two systems or kinds of regularity within discourse: enunciability and functioning. First, the archive deines a “system of enunciability” (EAK, 129) that regulates statements as events. That is, the archive determines what can actually be said or expressed at a given moment in history, by whom, with what authority, and so forth. (This is distinct from the grammatical rules that govern a sentence’s coherence. Rather, it addresses whether a statement will “make sense” or be accepted, given everything else that is believed in a particular discourse.) Second, the archive deines a “system of functioning” (ibid.) that distinguishes statements and discourses as things: “It is that which differentiates

ARCHIVE / 23

Suggested Reading

Flynn, Thomas. 1994. “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 28–46.

Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.