Michel Foucault – remaking history

- The Archeology of Knowledge -



The Archaeology of Knowledge was Foucault’s methodological attempt at clarifying some concepts used more or less implicitly in his earlier works such as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). The book was written in Tunis, where Foucault asked to be deployed for the period of his boyfriend’s military service. From the very first paragraph the author challenges the classical view of making history:
“For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constants, the underlying tendencies that gather force (…), the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events.” [1]
For these historians, events are only the parts of a big puzzle whose image is already given, the single worthwhile task being the rearrangement of facts according to the model. He offers a new kind of approach in which the status of the historical event must be inverted. Foucault tries to re-focalize the attention from the long periods of time characterized by continuity and causality to the shifts and changes that suddenly appear and have apparently no explanation. It seems that the historians’ mission was to identify and eliminate everything that contradicts their suppositions:
“The great problem of the classic historical analysis is how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how there is a single horizon for so many different, successive minds.” [2]
It is exactly in this perspective that Foucault wants to engage. The important problem is for him no longer that of how a tradition is imposed, or that of tracing a line of continuity between disparate events, but “one of divisions and transformations that dissolves the continuous lines and serve as new foundations”. The old question of traditional history (“how can a causal succession be established between disparate events?”) must give place to a completely different set of questions that can allow different perspectives to the same line of events (the possibility of writing two completely different histories for the same event etc.).
Foucault remarks that in disciplines like the history of ideas, the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of thought and the history of literature, attention was already being turned away from vast unities like ”periods” or “centuries” to the phenomena of rupture and discontinuity. History must also go forward and adapt itself to the epistemological mutation that emerged in the humanities. He originates these long-term changes in Marx, Freud and Nietzsche’s operas. Foucault tries to attenuate the singularity of his attempt by mentioning previous research on the theme of discontinuity. He invokes Bachelard’s epistemological acts of threshold (which “suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time”) and Ganguilhem’s distinction between the microscopical and the macroscopical scales of history in which “events and their consequences are not arranged in the same way, (…) on each of the two levels, a different history being written”.
On a careful examination – without any ideological perspective [3] – history will reveal several pasts, several hierarchies of importance, several teleologies, all for one and the same situation. Awareness of the absence of a singular causal chain (that guaranties historical continuity) and the possibility of conceiving some parallel coherent histories on different levels of analysis are what engaged Foucault in this ambitious attempt to develop a new archaeological theory of history. The critical point from where the new questioning begins is the document:
“Ever since history has existed, documents have been used, questioned, and have given rise to questions: the questions were whether the documents meant something, whether they were telling the truth, and by what right they could claim to be doing so. All these questions pointing to the same end: the reconstruction of the past from which they emanate.” [4]
Now, history must change its position concerning the document. It must take as its primary task not the interpretation of the document or the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth, but that of working with it from within and developing it:
“The document is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the document itself unities, totalities, relations, series.” [5]
The researcher must set himself free from the anthropological justification of history as “an age-old collective-consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh his memory”. This and other metaphysical postulates must be, as much as possible, limited if not eliminated. History, in its traditional form, undertook to memorizing monuments of the past, and to transforming them into documents of the past. Now the task is that of transforming documents into monuments. If, in the classical view, archaeology aspired to the condition of history, from now on history must aspire to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the document.
This change of rapports has some consequences. The first is the proliferation of discontinuities within history. Instead of a continuous chronology of ration, traced back to some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales irreducible to a single law, which bear the types of history peculiar to each one and cannot be reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires progress and remembrance [6]. If, until recently, discontinuities were the raw material which, through analysis, hat to be rearranged in order to reveal the continuity of events, from now on they become one of the basic elements of historical analysis.
“Traditionally discontinuity was the historian’s task to remove from history. Now it constitutes a deliberate operation on the part of historian, not only a quality of the material. It is also the result of his description, and not something that must be eliminated by the means of his analysis. In short, the discontinuities are transferred from the obstacles of the work into the work itself.” [7]
The new concept of interpreting history is confronted with a number of methodological problems: the establishment of a coherent and homogenous corpus of documents, the establishment of a principle of choice, the specification of a method of analysis, the delimitations of groups and subgroups that articulate the material etc.
Another consequence of the archaeological turn is that the theme and the possibility of a total history begin to disappear, giving place to a new kind of history: a “general history” in Foucaultian terms. A total history seeks to reconstitute the general form of a civilization, the material or spiritual principle of a society, the common meaning of a phenomenon from a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion [8]. It supposes that the same form of historicity operates upon economic structures, social institutions and customs, political behavior and the development of new technologies. These unifying postulates are challenged by new notions – like series, divisions, shifts, limits, differences of level, chronological specifications etc. – proper to Foucault’s archaeological project.
“A general history tries to determine what form of relation may legitimately be described between different series of events (…). A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre – a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape. A general history would deploy the space of a dispersion.” [9]
Continuous history – says Foucault – is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject, the guarantee that everything that has eluded him can be restored, the promise that one day the subject (in the form of a historical consciousness) will be able to appropriate all those things that are kept away from him. In his systematic refusal to take the subject, be it empirical or transcendental, as a starting point for his analysis, Foucault adopted a resolutely anti-humanist problematic, though he still used to search for an a priori for knowledge [10]. The subject became a “vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals” [11].
Foucault also operated a drastic modification on the usual concept of historical time. Instead of a linear and totalizable time, he came up with a stratification, a dispersion of the series of events. The Archaeology of science tried to simultaneously undermine transcendental consciousness and traditional historical time.
Against the a-historical character of the Kantian a priori, and the trans-historicality of its Husserl equivalent, Foucault proposes the paradoxical hypothesis of an a priori fully given in history, which transforms itself with it. Technically, the term “historical a priori” is contradictory because history is the space where experience is given, constituting the very possibility of the a posteriori to exist and to manifest itself. On the other hand, the a priori is the a-historical ‘place’ where the transcendental subject can be founded. Transcendentalism is what Foucault tries to elude.
Foucault’s critique of transcendentalism is twofold. Firstly, it implies denunciation of the anthropological illusions that chained the thought of modernity and, secondly, it tries to find a valid answer to the problem of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, based on a historical a priori. His search for a non-anthropological foundation is very similar to the phenomenological attempt at finding a solution to exceed transcendentalism (the transcendental ego and the a priori).
Foucault makes a distinction between a centred subject and a decentered one. In the nineteenth century anthropology and humanism tried to preserve the sovereignity of the subject against the decentration first operated by Marx (relations of production, class struggle etc.), then by Nietzsche (his genealogy). More recently, the research of psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethnology have decentered the subject in relation to the laws of his desire, the forms of his language and his mythical discourse [12]. These kinds of things cannot be explained by means of historical consciousness. We now have an eclipse of that form of a total history that was secretly, but entirely related to the synthetic activity of the subject (an ideological form of history).
Given the novelty of his project, some attempted to place him within the frames of structuralism, de-constructivism or the postmodernist trend. Foucault rejected all classifications. He was initially happy to go along with the structuralist description, but later emphasised his distance from this approach, arguing that unlike the structuralists he did not adopted a formalist approach. However, wherever the structuralists searched for homogeneity in a discursive entity, Foucault focused on differences. He also had to argue with Derrida, with whom he ceased to communicate after some theoretical disagreements. Neither was he interested in having the postmodern label applied to his own work, saying he preferred to discuss how 'modernity' was defined.
Conceived primarily as archaeology, history must deliver itself from a huge mass of notions, all linked with the theme of continuity. The most important are the notions of tradition, influence, development and evolution, and that of spirit. The notion of tradition is intended to give “a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical”. It makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of causality, allowing a reduction of the differences proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin.
The second notion is that of influence, which provides a support for the facts of transmission, justifying an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delimitation nor theoretical definition) with the help of other two subordinate notions: resemblance and repetition.
The notions of development and evolution fall into third place. They create the possibility of grouping a succession of dispersed events, of linking them under the same organising principle, of discovering a principle of coherence and of outlining a future unity.
The last notion is that of spirit, which enables us to establish a community of meanings, symbolic links and resemblances between the simultaneous or successive phenomena of a given period. This notion allows for the sovereignty of collective consciousness to emerge as the principle of unity and explanation.
All these concepts are ready-made syntheses, groupings that we normally accept before any examination. We must question those divisions or groupings with which we have become so familiar. For example, categories like ‘literature’ and ‘politics’ are quite recent. They can be applied to medieval or classical culture only as retrospective hypotheses and by some formal analogies; but neither literature nor politics, neither philosophy nor the sciences did articulate the field of discourse in the seventeenth or eighteenth century as they did in the nineteenth century. In any case, these divisions are always reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, and institutionalised types.
There are a number of units that are configured with the help of these and some other similar notions, but the unities that must be suspended above all are those of ‘author’, ‘book’ and ‘œuvre’.
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences. The ‘book’ is only a node within a network. It is not simply the object that one holds in his hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as someone questions that unity, it blurs its self-evidence; it indicates and constructs itself only on the basis of a complex field-of-discourse. The only strong identity of a book is its material support. Beyond it we lose the coherence of a theme or of a single voice. Fragments from several books can be more coherent one with the other than fragments from a single book.
The problems raised by the œuvre are even more difficult. How can we designate the name of a single author to a collection of texts? And the designatory function is not a homogeneous one. The establishment of a complete oeuvre implies a number of choices difficult to justify. What status should be given to the letters and notes left by the author? How about private conversations recorded by those present at the time, in short, the vast mass of verbal traces left by an author at his death? Could we associate the authorial function with these verbal and conversational traces? The œuvre – says Foucault - can be regarded neither as an immediate unity, nor as a certain unity, nor as a homogeneous unity.
The last and the most complex unit that Foucault tried to disaggregate is the author. In dealing with the author, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses.
In the first place, books are objects of appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned to real persons only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtedly in others as well discourse was not originally a product or a possession, but an action. It was first a gesture of communication before it became a possession caught up in a circuit of property values [13]. The notion of author appeared on a large scale in Europe mostly after the establishment of the catholic index nominorum, and only with the scope of identifying and controling pernicious texts and, subsequently, their authors.
The authorial-function is not constitutive to any discourse. Not even in the European civilization were the same types of texts always linked with an author. There was a time when literary texts (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valued regardless of the identity of their author. In the Middle Ages it was only the so-called ‘scientific’ texts that needed validation by specifying the name of the author. The name of an author was a proof for the veracity of a given discourse.
A completely new conception developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: scientific texts came to be accepted on their own merits. The proof of veracity was founded on an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification.
“Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author as an index of truthfulness disappeared and, wherever it remained as the inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements or a pathological syndrome. At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was only acceptable if it carried an author's name; every poetical or fictional text was obliged to state its author and then the date, place, and circumstances of its writing.” [14]
A last theme that must be clarified is Foucault’s concept of discursive formation. In his attempt at giving this notion a description he formulated many hypotheses (only to reject them afterwards). The first hypothesis is that statements different in form and dispersed in time form a group when they refer to one and the same object. The second hypothesis on making up a discursive formation meant defining a group of relations between statements, one which was based on their form and the type of connection between them. The third hypothesis was based on the possibility of establishing groups of statements by determining the system of permanent and coherent concepts involved. For example, the Classical analysis of language and grammatical facts rested on a definite number of concepts whose content and usage had been established once and for all. Some of these concepts were judgement (defined as the general, normative form of any sentence), the subject and the predicate, the noun and the verb etc.
Some authors identify the early concept of ‘episteme’, used by Foucault in The order of Things, with the notion of discursive formation. The large groups of statements that configure medicine, economics and grammar, studied before as different epistemes, are actually discursive formations. A discursive formation – in Foucault’s terms – “is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities” [15].
The premise of his archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations) are governed by rules beyond those of grammar and logic, operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determine the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. The archeologist’s concern is to uncover the ‘rules of formation’ that govern these configurations of knowledge and to highlight the epistemological breaks that mark the movement from one episteme to another [16]. In Kantian terms, an episteme is the historical a priori which makes certain forms of knowledge become possible.
There are some similarities between modern physics and Foucault’s archeology, as Pamela Major-Poetzl has revealed. Foucault himself did not claim to be adapting the theory of relativity to the study of cultural phenomena. Nonetheless, there is a big similarity between archaeology and field theory. Einstein´s field theory has shifted the attention from things (particles) and abstract forces (charges and gravity) to the structure of space itself. Like field theory, archaeology has shifted the attention from things (objects) and abstract forces (ideas) to the structure of "discourses" (organized bodies of knowledge and practice, such as clinical medicine) in their specific spatio-temporal articulations [17]. Like Einstein, Foucalt was not able to entirely eliminate the concept of things and build a theory of pure relations, but he was able to relativize "words" and "things" and to formulate rules describing epistemological fields. However, while Einstein's theories rest on a firm basis of mathematical proof in addition to extensive experimental verification, Foucault has no such mathematical language at his disposal. He is forced to use words, words that he must pull out of their accustomed meanings and put into a new series of relationships.
The fundamental entity of discourse is the statement. But statements do not indicate “things”, “facts”, “realities” or “beings”, but laws of possibility, rules of existence. No one can “find structural criteria of unity for the statement (…) because it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities and witch reveals them, with concrete contents in time and space” [18].
The chronology of Foucault´s major works was interrupted by two periods of silence of five and eight years respectively, at the end of which Foucault had changed his previous methods. Archaeology was thus being followed by genealogy and that in its turn was being followed by the study of the “techniques of the self”. Asked whether he was being inconsequent when periodically changing his vision and his methods, Foucault answered that he could not hold the same vision after years and years of studies. He never pretended to possess any eternal truths about anything. Nevertheless, the most appropriate characteristic of his life and work is the development of a technique of the self.

Notes:

[1] Foucault, Michel: The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, p. 3.
[2] Ibidem, p. 5.
[3] History, says Foucault, must detach itself from “the ideology of its past and reveal this past as ideological”, ibidem, p. 5.
[4] Ibidem, p. 6.
[5] Ibidem, p. 7.
[6] Ibidem, p. 8.
[7] Ibidem, p. 9.
[8] Idem, ibidem.
[9] Ibidem, p. 10.
[10] Beatrice Han: Foucault’s Critical Project. Between the Transcendental and the Historical, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 4.
[11] Major-Poetzl, Pamela: Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Western Culture, North Carolina University Press, 1983, p. 5.
[12] Foucault: quoted work, p. 13.
[13] Foucault, Michel: What is an Author?, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ed. D. F. Bouchard, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.124-127.
[14] Ibidem.
[15] Foucault, Michel: The Archeology…, p. 191.
[16] Owen, David: Maturity and Modernity. Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, Routledge, New York, 1994, p. 144.
[17] Major-Poetzl, Pamela: quoted work, p. 5.
[18] Ibidem, p. 24.