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The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language

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"Archaeology Of Knowledge" finds Foucault at his barest, trying to build up his own theory. Like others have said, it is fascinating to see how much he tries to encompass and how extremely difficult his own enterprise is. Foucault spends many pages trying to explain to us what he means by "discoursive formation", "object formation", "formation of concepts", etc., and the place where his own theory stands vis-à-vis a so-called "history of ideas". You can learn lots from this book, because, like myself, sometimes you get lost in Foucault's magistral writing, his fabulous way of weaving history and thus cannot clearly follow his own particular method of research. If you want to see some of his (earlier, almost stricly discourse-oriented) key concepts clarified, reading this book will prove very fruitful. As always, you're left with a lot of questions and with a distinctive feeling of "now what?". But then again, that's what's so utterly beautiful and engaging about Foucault... he forces you to think for yourself and provides you of the right tools to do it.
I read the spanish translation of this book so I can't comment on the english one, but the contents of this book are priceless.

Let's be childish enough to use coarse categories: "Discipline&Punish" is Foucault's most beautiful book. "The Order of Things" is the most brilliant (that's why it made him a star). Let's also say "The History of Sexuality" is his most exciting book. Then "The Archaeology of Knowledge" is the most fascinating: it is Foucault's attempt to write a theory of what he is doing. And it is a brilliant failure: this is the only time that we see Foucault, the master of brilliant formulation, completely naked. It is endearing to watch how he is trying to write a piece of philosophical theory, while all his other books demonstrate how unnecessary such theory is.

This is no light reading and the English translation is barely comprehensible. I bet that there is a serious mistranslation on any given page. With good translations at hand, some notorious readers (Foucault lovers and Foucault enemies alike) might actually have understood what the words "discourse" and "dispositif" mean. Countless articles and books would not have been written. That's why a good German translation would have been even more desirable (the one in print is as miserable as the English one, same bet)...

Do not be fooled by those who dismiss this as a mere curiousity in Foucault's oeuvre. This difficult work is absolutely essential for understanding his central concept of 'discourse'. All of his works are better understood after a careful reading of this difficult work; this is true even for the later 'geneaological' works.

In this book Foucault wished to both show his own way of looking at things and to distance himself from his previous more structuralist leaning book on the same subject, THE ORDER OF THINGS. The book is more of an interesting insight into how Foucault did research for then it is a way of showing how someone else can go about imitating his style of post-structural archeology.

Foucault tries to outline throughout the book both how and the importance distancing histories from subjects and eras. He would rather and did focus on the discourse itself, but not just privileged discourses on the surface, the deep underlying genealogies that stem from rules, processes and agreed upon or forced barriers that underlay a topic. Foucault of course throughout his career used his perceived method to trace how power institutions came to use knowledge from the enlightenment to present as an ever encompassing tool of political and theory laden subjective strands that now masquerade themselves as the methods of institutions in a neutral/objective fashion.

In a sense disguising their power in the rhetoric of objectivity and science whether the institutions methods really warrant that or not given their previous genealogical history. I say genealogical because Foucault by admission borrows heavily from Nietzsche in instituting his perceived method of archeology and in his focus on power relations through his short histories.

This way of doing things is not only in opposition to his own earlier writings, he is also implicitly going against the likes of Marx, Sartre and Hegel. He does so in outlining the impossibility of an overarching meta-historical position. The size and interconnectedness of discourses is just too large and amorphous to really pin down a teleological element or epochal formation that makes any sense. Also a general criticism against vanilla structuralism and his own earlier idea of "epistemes."

He criticizes the teleological wish that every subject in the humanities, become a "true science" in some sense. Saying that they may not be unfinished subjects, but rather alternatives to science as a way of describing the world.

In the appendix they added his seminar DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE, in my edition of the book. It seems to be a helpful more easy to understand shorter version of what he said throughout the book before. Playing a similar role to STRUCTURE, SIGN AND PLAY, in Derrida's writings about his own deconstructive way of reading. I thought the questioning of Foucault's, can we have a philosophy in some way which is not Hegelian in this essay a strange, but thought provoking one. If what Foucault means is, "can we now have a philosophy which is ahistorical after Hegel?" I'm not exactly sure, seeing as anti-foundationalist stances are always in some way based on humanity's relation to it's own knowledge, Foucault may have a point in that all philosophy after this point will have to take historical discourse into account, since foundationalism is no longer an option.

The thing is I agree with a lot of what Foucault says, but I'm not sure anyone else could use this method other than Foucault. There aren't any obvious flaws in what he says or how he lays things out, yet I'm sure even the most diehard foucauldian, would have trouble really implementing a history under the same parameters that Foucault himself did in any kind of exactness. Still a worth while read for those interested in how Foucault viewed himself and his own work. I would recommend to those with an intermediate level of knowledge in philosophy and also after having read some of his histories. As what he says makes a lot more sense if you understand the examples he lays out from his other works.

A friend who found Foucault's The Order of Things useful and interesting recommended that I give the Archaeology of Knowledge a try. I had enjoyed his first book, Madness and Civilization, so I took up the challenge.

I spent an extremely frustrating month trying to make sense of The Archaeology and then gave up. From the first page on Foucault uses totally unfamiliar concepts in a vocabulary loaded with neologisms which he neither defines nor references. Since the concepts are used in extraordinarily complex locutions, invariably along with other idiosyncratically opaque terminology, it seems impossible to discern their meaning from the context in which they occur.

I have since been advised that The Archaeology of Knowledge is much more approachable for one who has read everything else that Foucault has written, and who has also mastered Derrida and Kristeva. That may be true, but it's not a risk I'm willing to take. Even if I did eventually manage to decipher the code used in producing The Archaeology, I doubt that the intellectual payoff would be substantial. Foucault is the kind of author who delights in keeping people guessing, making sure that no one can ever be certain as to his meaning. It all sounds very profound, but what does it mean. When all is said and done, Foucault wants to keep us off balance, uncertain, but somehow deeply impressed, as in "Perhaps this is what Foucault means by discursive formation! Ah ha!" Or, "Oh, I see: dispersion refers to the post-structuralist notion that any signifier is inevitably modified by an infinitely large number of other signifiers, so its meaning is never absolute... I think ..." But we're never sure.

I have since read interviews with Foucault written when he was at his most influential. Success seems to have been an intoxicating experience for him, and he indulged himself in a sort of yes-I-am, no-I'm-not obfuscation. There is a common and suitably profane English term for this, head-[blanking], sufficiently familiar so that most readers can fill in the blank. Readers who find virtue in head-[blanking] by construing it as an instance of "the death of the author" are kidding themselves. An author who writes an incomprehensible book that somehow gets to be taken very seriously is not dead, but very much in control.

In any case, I'm sure that The Archaeology of Knowledge will have a long life in references and indexes as Foucault's major methodological work. Learned people, moreover, will purport to discern its meaning and will discuss it with ease and assurance.

I had a similar experience 30 years ago when I studied ethnomethodology. I could talk about it with facility and self-satisfaction, but I couldn't shake the vague suspicion that I had merely become adept at exchanging utterances in a shared but meaningless logic of head-[blanking].

As an addendum, an irate reader of this review took me to task for evaluating a book that I do not have the conceptual wherewithal to appreciate. He may have a point, but I've read Habermas, Eagleton, Anthony Giddens, Peter Berger, and other contemporary social and cultural theorists with little difficulty, so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to make some sense of Foucault.

Foucault is not a light read - you will spend several hours just trying to interpret this text. His wording is unusual and complicated, and sentences can run on for almost a paragraph. Sometimes you'll just want to tear your hair out.

Nonetheless, this book is important. The theories Foucault presents in this book, while nearly impossible to cite correcly, do reappear in many modern texts, especially ones about modern literature or the academy. My suggestion is you read it with the assistence of others, preferably including someone with more academic experience (i.e. a professor.)

When Michel Foucault wrote in The Order of Things that underlying all human activities were standardizing sequences of phenomena that he called "great uniform texts," he saw more stability in human discourse than he did in his very next book, The Archaeology of Knowledge. In this latter effort, Foucault reversed course and envisioned human history as composed of discrete epochs that in The Order of Things he called "epistemes" that were discontinuous in the sense that the disappearance of one episteme had nothing to do with the appearance or direction of the other. Further, when he examined these epistemes, which he now labeled "discursive formations," he stopped probing their depths to glean meaning and substance as he did in The Order of Things and began noting the prevalent discourses and comparing them to isolate elements in common.

Regardless of whether Foucault called an epoch an episteme or a discursive formation, that epoch functioned pretty much the same as discontinuities were prevalent from one to the other. He does not mention how and why an episteme loses its characteristic discontinuity to become a discursive formation with a new discontinuity. Perhaps he himself does not know so he contents himself with describing the traits that are continuous within one episteme but are discontinuous within the succeeding discursive formation. He adds some new terms that he clearly hopes will clarify his assorted theses. The first term is a "discursive practice," which contain the vocalized discourses--mostly speeches and writing--of individual people. A discursive practice has meaning only for those who live in that episteme or discursive formation, thus making it discontinuous. The second term is a "non-discursive practice," which refers to the collective discourses of states, groups, and institutions. Foucault creates a paradox for himself when he notes that the discourses of a non-discursive practice are not limited to that epoch. These discourses, he suggests take on a life of their own due to their association with long-lived institutions, thus carrying meaning and content from episteme to discursive formation. This obviously cannot happen due to his earlier assertion about the impermeability of the boundaries between epochs, but since this does happen his core premise about the nature of historical epochs is nullified.

In addition to the logical flubs and inconsistencies that run rampant throughout the Foucault canon, The Archaeology of Knowledge is dressed up in semantic phraseology that defies all but the most dedicated and knowledgeable readers. I sometimes whether readers who praise him truly understand him.

My sympathies to anyone who has to read this. This was something I had attempted to read on recommendation of a professor. Later on in my graduate studies I had to read it. It is a required reading for anyone studying rhetoric. If you can get through it, you are destined for greatness. It is reading that requires intense concentration and no interruptions!

The Conclusion of this book (Chapter V) is perhaps the most interesting. Foucault appears to be corresponding with an undisclosed someone, wether with himself as a self critique, or with a critic. I won't put asside the possibility he is coversing with someone from the Tavistock Inst.; as Tavistock Publications Lim. was the first place of translation for this text. If he had not suceeded, in his archaeology of knowledge, an undermining of structuralism, with the thesis on human discourse, then perhaps it is because of a lack of conviction on part of this "someone" or on part of himself.

Understanding the implication of Foucault's thought process from a first read requires a refflective reader and in many ways requires a far-reaching mind from the start. This work is composed of a terminal plethora of architectures and teleological plethoras of exemplifications from science and history. Economics, stats, documents, records, and items from all discourses are examined and presented as artifacts of discursive knowledge. The Archeaology itself is the thematic for the Archive, and the archive is the preservatory of knowledge, that such discursive knowledge is preserved is archaeology. Foucault's task then is to undermine the archives of knowledge and present that knowledge back upon the structural framework of rational discourse. With observational power and radical ability, Foucault goes beyond the framework and invisibly subordinates it's needs to be observed and it's intention to be ritcheous (ritcheous in all that it accounts for, and ritcheous of the observer.) From the most primordial archean, to the revival of the primal archaic state, to the archaology of all knowledge, Foucault shows that in a way discourses built upon historical facts are like artifacts themselves. Here in the conclusion we see that the problematic of language (langue) as the derivational principal of discourses, cannot be made paletable (literaly!)

And so the audition fails because language or the "langue" is not sufficiently constructed for what it represents in discursive practice. At the zenith of the teleological project, when temporal conceptualization extinguishes itself from being quantified into being qualified, at the last quarter of the era, perhaps this work will be gleamed from the resevoire and conrgessively discussed.

Viewed against the background of Foucault's other books, *The Archaeology of Knowledge* is a curious work. In it, Foucault not only explicates the results of his early books on madness, medicine, and the history of the human sciences: he also offers programmatic statements that link up his methods with the main stream of 20th-century French historical researches. The *episteme* linking seemingly disparate fields of inquiry is here explicitly presented against the background of Ferdinand Braudel's *duree*, and other famed devices for recontextualizing historical facts. For Foucault is intent on demonstrating his method without reference to (*against*) the philosophical luminaries that had until then monopolized such meta-theory.

The uninformed, and perhaps some of the informed, may be surprised to find Foucault actually considering the fact itself: hardly a promising beginning for showing how everything seemingly natural about social life hinges on systems of power. But it is precisely the historical fact that Foucault is concerned with, the dry, value-free content of the "archive": he is interested in the conditions of the possibility of grasping the events of the world in the manner of the historian, and proceeds to elaborate a system for comparing and construing such data without reference to processes of consciousness or any other valorizing quantity from outside history.

He proceeds to do this by elaborating a pragmatics of discourse quite unlike linguistics of the Saussurean (or Gricean) variety, studying how contexts of information combine to produce a happening intelligible as an event, not only as a linguistic counter or evidence of an intention. His analysis strongly resembles that of the celebrated Thomas Kuhn, who in truth aimed not to relativize science but to explain its true "background" in actual scientific practice. Drawing many examples from (and correcting naivete in) his books *History of Madness*, *Birth of the Clinic* and *The Order of Things*, Foucault attempts to show how an intellectual history can carefully collate and juxtapose historical information without imposing an idealizing "mentality" on the originators of a discourse.

Recapping as it does his work of the Sixties, fans of Foucault's analyses in *Discipline and Punish* and *The History of Sexuality* may expect this book represents only "transitional" views of Foucault's, later discarded in favor of a full-blooded Nietzschean pursuit of power relations. But "genealogical" theories are not ignored here, particularly in Foucault's inaugural address for the College de France, "The Order of Discourse", generously included at the end of this volume. It is true that Foucault's theory does not represent the program of a "history of truth" elaborated in "Truth and Juridical Forms", early lectures on the history of the penal system included in volume 3 of the New Press's *Essential Works*. But by the same token those interested in the French social theorists who preceded Foucault will find that Foucault's engagement with their problems, especially those of his teacher Althusser, is here much more explicit than elsewhere.

In conclusion, this book is unlikely to grab you unless you have already made a significant investment in Foucault, or "contemporary" history more generally. But for anyone who has indeed spent some time thinking about such things, this book is an anodyne statement of important and influential views about history and how it is done.