Sunday, June 6, 2010

The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault

The Archeology of Knowledge is Foucault's attempt, after the fact, to describe theoretically the method he used in his first three books of history (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things). This is, then, not the presentation of a formal theory built logically from axioms, but a description of a specific kind of approach to history (a 'way of speaking' about history). Archeological analysis seeks to describe the history of discourse, the set of 'things said' in all its interrelations and transformations. These processes occur at a very specific level, which is neither the level of the events of history, nor the level of a teleological 'progress' of ideas, nor the level of an accumulation of formal knowledge, nor the level of the popular or unspoken 'spirit of the times.' The analysis of discourse abandons all preconceptions about historical unity or continuity, describing instead the processes of discourse in all their disruptions, thresholds, differences, and complex varieties.

Foucault begins with a polemic Introduction (Part I), noting recent shifts in historical method, relating these shifts to the newly uncertain status of the historical document, and critiquing histories that depend on loose notions of continuity as unhelpful and outdated. He says that these histories are also narcissistic, because what they really seek in forms of historical continuity is the assurance that history depends on the constant present of a transcendent human consciousness.

Part II, 'The Discursive Regularities,' asks what kinds of unities really doexist in the history of discourse. Foucault tries four hypotheses, in which unity is based on the object of discourse, the author(s) of discourse, the concepts used in discourse, or the theories and themes of discourse. Each hypothesized basis for discursive unity turns out to be something more complex than we thought it was, and each turns out not to be the single basis for unity, but one aspect of a discursive unity that can only be described in its variability and complexity. The four hypotheses do yield four specific levels at which discursive formations can be analyzed, however: the formation of objects of discourse, the formation of enunciative positions or modes, the formation of theoretical strategies, and the formation of concepts.

In Part III, 'The Statement and the Archive,' Foucault takes a step back from the level of discursive unities and attempts to describe the discursive field from its smallest elements to its most general totality. The smallest units are statements; although they have no single, stable unit (they change size according to their field of use), they form the most detailed level at which discourse can be analyzed. 'Statement' really refers more to a specific aspect of articulated language than it does to a unit of language. The statement is the level of the active, historical existence of a set of signs. The rest of Part II is devoted to maintaining the rigorous description of the statement as a positive, describable, specific aspect of history as Foucault moves up to the level of the archive, which is 'the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.'

Part IV addresses the difference between Foucault's archeological method and that of the history of ideas. For the four issues of originality, contradiction, comparison, and change, Foucault shows that his method replaces broad continuities and generalizations with specific, describable relations that preserve the differences and irregularities of discourse. The last chapter in this part, 'Science and Knowledge,' deals with the reasons that archeological analysis has focused on the history of the sciences, and with the details of how this focus is carried out. Foucault concludes with an intriguing, often poetic, dialogue between himself and a hypothetical critic of his method. In it, he defends archeology against charges that it is essentially structuralist and that it invests discourse with transcendence over other elements of history.

The Introduction situates Foucault's overall historical project in relation to the contemporary state of historical studies. This context is particularly necessary for Foucault, whose understanding of history posits an intimate link between the practice of the historian and the subject matter of history; this is clear from the definition of history cited above, in which 'history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.' The historian does not simply study history as a kind of memory, but adds to and alters the accumulation of and relation between documents that constitute history. In addition, the mass of historical documents provides the conditions of the very possibility of the historian's enterprise; the historian does not think in a vacuum, but owes what he or she is able to enunciate in part to what has been enunciated before. In light of Foucault's mention of Freud in relation to his project (both introduce 'discontinuity' to their respective fields), we might note that this critique of the historian is linked to a critique of the human subject in general: just as the historian is not a detached, self-transparent consciousness passively observing past events, neither is the human subject a totally independent entity passively observing the field of memory. This interlocking of human subject and human history is used to explain why the historical changes Foucault observes here have not been observed before: we resist them because our old, continuous, rational story of history guarantees that we don't have to confront our selves as anything but fully-independent, rational subjects.

This complication of the traditional role of the historian as subject of history is one effect of a change in the conception of what constitutes history. The most important component of this change is the document. Much of the rest of the Foucault's discussion will be devoted to an explication of what kind of a thing the document is, so we will not look too closely at it here. In the Introduction, Foucault is primarily concerned with listing the effects that the renewed 'questioning of the document' has had on the field of historical studies. Roughly, we can class all of these effects under a kind of massive complication of received notions about how to interpret historical materials, how to put them in relation to each other in terms of causality and in terms of their place in an overall schema. The primary characteristic of this complication is that it rejects large-scale narratives about the progression of history. One primary target in the background here is Hegel, who nonetheless is only the most exhaustive and influential exemplar of the idea that all of history fits into a single overall schema and tends toward a single end (in his philosophy, this end is the total earthly realization of the rational Spirit).

Foucault observes a number of shifts in contemporary historical practice that question such a teleological narrative. In the field of history proper, there has been a turn away from sequences of political events (successions, wars, the stuff of classical history) toward highly specified, underlying histories (like that of corn). This is a history with new specificity, focused less on the interpretation of the decisions and actions of men than on the movements of material. Although Foucault does not say so explicitly, the implication is that this kind of deep, specific history is much more closely tied to the document and less to historical 'events' as such, and that it therefore resists grandiose speculation about the teleology of human history. In the various branches of the history of thought, on the other hand, there has been a new emphasis on moments of transition, not from one stage of a progression to a logical next step, but from one kind of thinking to a kind that is deeply discontinuous with the first. This is a history of breaks, eruptions, of radical shifts in the limits of possible thought; in short, a history of discontinuities (though Foucault points out that these discontinuities are 'positive,' that they are not simply absences but can be and are described).

Though these two sets of changes are apparently different, Foucault finds they can be described by one phenomenon (which has so far been unrecognized): a renewed questioning of what a document is and a consequent elevation of its status to part of history. In tracing the aforementioned changes, then, Foucault was merely pointing to the field of events that he will now theorize. He does not claim to have initiated these changes on his own (though his three previous books certainly participated), but neither is he simply a passive observer that will simply 'explain' them. Rather, this book is itself a document in the full sense, an enunciation that both depends on previous enunciations for its conditions of possibility and establishes new conditions of possibility. The document, including Foucaul'ts document, always has this triple existence in relation to past, present, and future. It will remain interesting, as we proceed through the Archeology of Knowledge, to consider how Foucault sees his own document in terms of his theory of documents, how he historicizes his own present work. In the end, Foucault will always see himself (as author) swallowed up in the vast mass of documents that constitute history for the historian; this is always a melancholy (and often a dramatic or grandiose) moment of realization for him. As he says at the end of the Introduction: 'I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.'

The primary sense that we should take away from this Introduction, besides Foucault's redefinition of the historian, is the sense that history is suddenly shifting from a progressive, linear story written by historians to a expansive field comprised of endless micro-stories, each with their own multi-leveled relations (whether affinitive or disruptive) to the contingencies of their past and future, and each with their own material existence: the document. There are also a few brief protests on Foucault's part that he is not a structuralist. Structuralism implies the kind of generalized framework of interpretation that Foucault wants to complicate. This persistent label will be a frequent problem for him, and we will return to it further on in the book.

In analysis of the 'enunciative function,' Foucault is making a more intense effort to describe the unique aspect of language that he calls the statement. He does this mostly through a process of elimination, taking existing tactics for analyzing a set of written or spoken signs and showing that there is something they miss. Through this process, Foucault is also seeking to draw some boundaries around the idea of the statement, showing what it does not involve. The overall aim is to distinguish the level of the statement from the level of linguistic signs and propositions on the one hand and from the level of simple, physical materiality on the other. The statement is something in between that Foucault describes rather mysteriously as a 'something else' or a 'specific relation that concerns itself.'

The statement is hard to define concisely because it covers so much ground. Everything from bar graphs to contracts to the opening sentence of a novel can be analyzed as a statement. Thus, our sense of what a statement is depends less on compiling a set of specific examples than it does on taking a specific approach to the analysis of a set of signs. If we take a piece of speech or writing as a statement, what aspects must we pay attention to? What do we want to know about signs in their role as statements? Foucault, in fact, devotes most of this chapter to showing what we don't want to know about statements. We don't, for example, want to know about the propositional content of the sentence, 'The golden mountain is in California,' nor are we concerned with its external referent (or about whether or not it 'really' exists). Instead, we would want to know about the position of this statement in relation to other actual and possible statements. Does the statement occur in a conversation? A novel? What other statements make it possible? What forms of authority does it depend on?

The analysis of statements also excludes any consideration of a human subject as a thinking, intending creator of the set of signs in question. For a given group of signs, the Foucauldian method does not ask how they resulted from an individual psychology, or what the motivation of the author or speaker was. The speaking or writing subject is replaced by an authorial function, a function that tells us from where and from what authority the statement comes without telling us anything about the actual, human author of the statement. Anyone can occupy a given subject-function, and any one person can switch between a wide range of such positions. Thus, in the analysis of the statement, we are not really concerned with 'context' in its traditional sense; the field in which the statement gains its identity is not one of physical objects and intending authors, but of positions, institutions, and above all, other statements.

There is a confusing undercurrent that runs throughout Foucault's separation of the statement from considerations of propositions and authors. The problem is that statements, though they involve much more than either of these things, are quite capable of containing both of them. When we analyze the sentence about the golden mountain, we are not concerned with the sentence as a proposition about an external referent, and we are not concerned with the psychology of the speaker. Yet these considerations can reappear at a different level (the level of the statement and its associated field). If the sentence about the golden mountain is spoken by a patient in an insane asylum, we would not, according to Foucault's method, focus on the likelihood of the mountain being wholly fictional (the propositional content) or on the particular madness of the patient (the psychology of the author). But it would still be crucial to know that the statement is, say, part of a series of statements made by insane people, or part of a diagnostic session.

The difference here is really in where we, as historians, are led when we analyze documents. Considering the golden mountain as a product of a particular psychology might lead us to speculate on what's 'really' going on in the head of the author, and perhaps to bolster these speculations with considerations of statements by the same author, or again to examine similarly strange visions in other time periods. Considering the golden mountain as a statement, however, we will be led to consider its place in a different kind of field; we would look for documents written in response to the statement (diagnoses, perhaps, or vehement denials that the golden mountain exists), and our conclusions will be about the rules that define psychiatric discourse rather than about the mind of the particular patient or the actual existence of the golden mountain. Considerations of such psychological or physical elements still exist, but only in other, related statements. The Foucauldian historian takes the field of statements as his or her only and most basic assumption, and the description of statements related in a discourse as his or her only goal.

No comments:

Post a Comment