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8/9/2019 Said an Ethics of Language - Said on Foucault
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An Ethics of Language
The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language by Michel FoucaultReview by: Edward SaidDiacritics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1974), pp. 28-37Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464989 .
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8/9/2019 Said an Ethics of Language - Said on Foucault
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Michel
Foucault. The
Archeology
of
Knowledge
and
The
Discourse on Lan-
guage.
New York:
Pantheon
Books,
1972.
Since
the
publication
of
Les
Mots et les
choses
(the
title of its
1971
English
translation
is
The Or-
der
of
Things)
in
1966,
Foucault's work has
been
revisionist
in
character
and concern.
For not
only
have his
three
essays
on
Nietzsche
and
Deleuze,
his
two
later books
L'Archdologie
du
savoir,
and
L'Ordre
du
discours,'
all
been
about thinkers
and
thought,
revising,
reordering,
reinterpreting
what had
been
written,
ordered
and
interpreted
differently
from
them;
but also
Foucault
now
turned
his
thought
back towards
his own
previous
work. Thus
it
appeared
in 1969
that The Order
of
Things
and
Madness
and
Civilization
had
tried
"to
measure
the
mutations
that
operate
in
general
in
the field
of his-
tory;
an
enterprise
in
which
the
methods,
limits,
and
themes
proper
to
the
history
of ideas are
questioned;
an enterprise by which one tries to throw off the last
anthropological
constraints
[.
.
.].
These
tasks
were
outlined
[in
those two
earlier
books]
in a rather
dis-
ordered
way,
and
their
general
articulation
was
never
clearly
defined"
(p.
15).
Also
part
of
this
revisionist
phase
has been Foucault's disenchantment
with the
idea of an
author,
a
concept
he
has
found
grossly
incapable
of
dealing
with
the
trans-personal
authority
of texts
and
documents.
To
revise
has
not
meant
to
change
opinions
about which
authors are more
sig-
nificant than
others,
although
one can assume
that
that
too
has
happened
to Foucault.
To revise
for
him has
meant
primarily
to understand
more
closely
the
pro-
cess of
knowledge,
its
formation,
dispersion,
trans-
mission and
permanence,
in
terms
of
"anonymous
rules" that are extremely precise and specialized.
Moreover
he
has
been
at
pains
to show that
during
the
course
of this
understanding
he
has been released
not
only
from
obligations
to
the
history
of
ideas,
but
also
from the
conventional
biography
of
great
men
and
the
narration of
important
events.
All
told
then
a
good
deal
of
Foucault's
revision
has been
negative,
and his
description
of
those
anonymous
rules
is fre-
quently
an itemized
list
of what
they
are
not. Usu-
ally,
however,
the
negatives
are
pronounced
against
what
he
refers
to as
anthropology,
which
is the
very
thing
that
Nietzsche had called
anthropomorphism:
the
habit
of
making
all
knowledge
in
the
image
of
man
or, worse,
making every
item
of
knowledge
re-
ducible
to
an
original
human act
without
which
the
item would otherwise have no cognitive status.
Foucault's self-revision
is
theoretically
consis-
tent with one of the
principal
themes
of his histor-
ical
research,
the
disappearance
in
contemporary
knowledge
of man's
role as central
subject,
author
and
actor.
But
why
not also
practically
consistent?
Because Foucault
is,
as I have elsewhere
said,
far
too
clearly
the
unusually impressive
author
of his
work. This is an
unhesitating compliment
to him
as
a
stylist
of
thought,
yet
I
intend it also as a
way
of
Edward
Said,
Professor of
English
and
Comparative
Lit-
erature at
Columbia,
is
teaching
at Harvard this
year.
Edward Said
J i r T It
O
I L G Q J ( J
making
very
doubtful his
theoretical
ambition
to
find
himself,
as
he
would
like,
"on the other
side
of
discourse."
An
anonymous
writer he
clearly
is
not.
Nevertheless
the
ambition
to write
as
if
from the
standpoint
of
anonymous
rules
has been worth main-
taining
since,
according
to
Foucault,
he
now knows
that
discourse
"is
made
up
of
a
limited number
of
statements for which a group of conditions of exis-
tence can
be
defined."
Among
these conditions an
author is
not
necessarily
one
of
the most
important.
To
understand this
we
need
only
recall that Freud's
account of
the
Unconscious
and its
behavior
is
not
completely
dependent
for its
intelligibility upon
the
neurotic
patient.
The author of neurotic
thoughts
does not
authorize,
except
in
a
limited
way,
the
en-
tire
system
of
coherence
by
which
his
thoughts
can
be understood.
Similarly,
Marx's
description
of ide-
ology envisages
no
particular
individual;
as
a
philo-
sophic
idea
it has
a
force
(in
Marxist
discourse)
that
need not
always
be referred back to
Marx's
biogra-
phy.
"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
and to
speech.
It is this 'more'
that
we must reveal and
describe"
(p.
49).
The
questions
Foucault has
been
asking
himself therefore are
as
i
These last two works
now
appear
together
in
English
as The
Archeology
of
Knowledge
&
The Discourse
on
Language.
The
first,
whose
French
original
appeared
in
1969,
is translated
by
M.
Sheridan
Smith,
and
the sec-
ond,
which
originally
appeared
in
1971,
is
translated--
less
carefully-by Rupert Swyer.
Unless
otherwise
noted,
page
references
appended parenthetically
to
quotations
from
Foucault are
taken
from
this one
volume
of
two
translations.
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follows: can
one describe intellectual
production
without
stopping
the
description
at
terminals
like
author,
Zeitgeist,
period,
texts,
ideas or
language?
What
gives
written
language
a
recognizable imprimt
6ver
and
above
the
signature
of its author? What in
short is
the
regularity
of
language
in
use
in
relation
to
which
an author is a
kind of
eruptive
irregularity?
In
raising
these
questions
Foucault,
I
suspect,
would
prefer
to
be
called
a teacher
rather than
an
author,
because
a teacher
exposes knowledge directly
before his students, he frees "a coherent domain of
description"
for and
with
his
students.
The
more
Foucault's
work
increases
in
volume
and
authority
the
more
he
has
agitated
to
diminish
the
author's
prerogatives,
the more also he has
become
a teacher
who
stands
in
"the field
of
coordination and sub-
ordination
of
statements in which
concepts appear,
and
are
defined,
applied
and transformed"
(pp.
182-
83).
Nowhere does Foucault
himself make the ex-
plicit
distinction
between author
and
teacher,
but
it
is
a
very
useful one nonetheless.
Primarily
a teacher
makes
explicit
what an author
hides inside the
flow-
ing
lines of his
language: namely
that
knowledge
is
dispersion,
strategy,
formation,
discontinuity.
More-
over
the
teacher's
place
of
business
is
the
class,
a
site of exteriority, whereas the author's locale, a
page,
is
far
less visible
as
activity
(which
it
is),
and
much
more
his
private property.
All this
is
a
political
motif
running
through
Foucault's
Archeology
as
he
turns
the
teacher's
openness upon
the author's
ac-
cumulated reserves
of
power.
Class
struggle
within
knowledge
pits
man-the-author as historian
(whose
security
is
"the
destiny
of
rationality
and
the
teleo -
ogy
of
the
sciences,
the
long,
continuous
labor
of
thought
from
period
to
period,
the
awakening
and
the
progress
of
consciousness,
its
perpetual
resump-
tion of
itself,
the
uncompleted,
but
uninterrupted
movement
of
totalizations,
the
return
to an
ever-
open
source,
and
finally
the historico-transcendental
thematic,"
p.
39)
against
a
revolutionary
teacher
whose
vocabulary
replaces history
of ideas
with
"archeology,"
documents
with
"monuments,"
texts
with
"discourses,"
language
with
"statements"
(enonces).
The teacher's aim
is
an
attempt
to
reveal discursive
practices
in their com-
plexity
and
density;
to show
that
to
speak
is to do some-
thing-something
other
than
to
express
what
one
thinks;
to
translate what one
knows,
and
something
other
than
to
play
with
the
structures
of
a
language
(langue);
to
show
that to add a statement to
a
pre-existing
series
of
statements
is
to
perform
a
complicated
and
costly ges-
ture,
which
involves
conditions
(and
not
only
a situa-
tion,
a
context,
and
motives),
and
rules
(not
the
logical
and
linguistic
rules
of
construction);
to show
that a
change in the order of discourse does not presuppose
'new ideas,' a little invention and
creativity, a different
mentality,
but transformations n a
practice,
perhaps
also
in
neighboring practices,
and in
their common articula-
tion.
(p. 209)
Thus
the
teacher
deprives
the
sovereign subject
(or
cogito)
"of
the exclusive and instantaneous
right"
to
change
discourse.
What
has
become more clear than
ever
in
Foucault's
revisionist assault
upon
scholarship
is the
particular
will to
knowledge pushing
his work for-
ward. On
the one
hand,
in his most
recent series of
lectures
at the
College
de
France he has been
study-
ing
the
regular
transformations which a
"polymor-
phous"
appetite
for
knowledge
can
undergo;
on
the
other
hand,
the
trajectory
of his own
intellectual
project
has
re-formed itself
to
accommodate
certain
actualities in research
elucidated
by
his
practice.
I
think
it is
imperative
to
understand
that his
vocabu-
lary
of
working
terms-monument,
archeology,
statement,
discourse,
etc.-is not
a
fussy
way
of
de-
claring
his
originality,
but
is rather a
design
to
meet
the actualities and the desires of will to knowledge
in
general,
and his
own search for
knowledge
in
par-
ticular. If
his most recent work
appears
to
be
more
explicitly political
and
revolutionary
than the
work
that
brought
him
great
fame,
then that
is
because,
I
think,
he has
only
lately
apprehended
the latent
pub-
lic
quality
of his historical
investigation
in
Madness
and
Civilization
and The
Order
of
Things.
Probably
the
May
1968
events
in
Paris
played
a
major
role
in
bringing
him out
from behind
his
work: two
espe-
cially
important
and
extended
interviews,
in
which
Foucault
began
to draw forth
the
political meaning
of
"archeology,"
date from that
period.
One
is
"R6ponse
'a
une
question," Esprit,
No. 5
(May
1968),
pp.
850-74;
the other is
"R6ponse
au
Cercle
d'6pis-
t6mologie,"
Cahiers
pour l'analyse,
9
(Summer
1968),
pp.
9-40.
From
then
on,
I
believe that Foucault's
inter-
ests are dominated
by
a
symptomatic
group
of
pres-
sures on him
(one
can
just
as
well call
them desires
or condititons
or
obsessions).
Taken
all
together
these
pressures
have
kept
him
responsible
for
the
goals
and
the
results
of
his
research,
and
responsive
to the
encroachments on him
of
the
academy,
the
community
of
radicals,
the
injustices
of
contempo-
rary
society,
and his
own
popularity.
The
first
of
these
pressures
is the
simplest
to state and
the
hardest
to deal with. It
is the historian's need
to see
history
as a mass of historical
documents
intended,
necessi-
tated, by certain condititons, not as chance produc-
tions
willed into
existence
by
the flukes
of
genius
or time.
An
intellectual
rejection
of
the
watery
ra-
tionale
usually
employed
in
determining
the
setting
of a text in time and
place,
this
pressure
enables
Foucault to
search for
rigor
in
explanation
where
none had
been
possible previously.
Yet in
order
to
resort
neither
to
mechanically
determinist
explana-
tions nor to
simple
causal
arguments,
Foucault
re-
draws
the terrain in
which,
as
a
historian,
he
can
function
systematically.
To
asnwer
the
question
why
did X
(not A)
say
Y
(not
B)
on
occasion
Z
(not W),
X,
Y, Z,
A,
B
and W
must
be
re-defined
as
belonging
wholly
to an
historically
and
particularly
apprehensible
or-
der. This order Foucault calls discourse. Hence:
"The
question
posed by
language analysis
of
some
discursive fact
or other is
always:
according
to what
rules has
a
particular
statement been
made,
and con-
sequently
according
to what
rules could other
sim-
ilar
statements
be made? The
description
of the
events of discourse
poses
a
quite
different
question:
how is it
that
one
particular
statement
appeared
rather than
another?"
(p.
27).
Obviously
statement
is
the
key
word
here,
and
consequently,
as we shall
see,
Foucault
must make the
nature
of
the statement
coherent both
from the
standpoint
of
its
retrospec-
diacritics/Summer
974
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tive historical
analysis
and of its
rationally
intel-
ligible
method of
production.
However
the
place
of
discourse,
its
setting,
in which
statements
occur,
is
specified by
Foucault as the
archive. The retrieval
of
the archive from
its own time and
place
in the
past
and
its
description
is
what,
with
only
the most
unavoidable
geological analogy
intended,
he
calls
archeology.
The next pressure has already been implied in
my
initial definition of discourse
and archive.
Par-
adoxically history
no
longer
can
be
conceived
of
as
a
domain which
is
entirely,
or
even
mainly, temporal
(if
by
time one
means,
generally,
the
linear
succes-
sion of dates and
events).
Foucault
begins
The
Archeology
of
Knowledge
with a
stocktaking
of the
extent
to
which recent
historical research
is about
"the
great
silent,
motionless bases
that
traditional
history
has covered
with a
thick
layer
of
events"
(p.
3).
To
uncover
those bases
is
to
admit
that
an
"epistemological
mutation" has
overtaken
the
study.
of
history.
Its essential
point
is
what Foucault
and
others have
called
decentering,
which
is fundamen-
tally opposed
to
anthropological
and
humanistic
at-
tempts
to
write
total
history
radiating
out
from man.
For
the new
kind of
history
there
is no
quasi-divine
archi,
or
telos,
no
Weltanschauung,
no
smug
con-
tinuity,
no
immobile
structures
necessarily
to
be
found
in
it. The effects
of
ethnology,
linguistics,
psy-
choanalysis,
and
generally
of
Nietzschean
interpre-
tation have been
to
dissolve
the
priority
of
these
given
calendars
which
supposedly
typify
time.
Rather
the historian
must now write
general
history:
"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,
on the
con-
trary,
would
deploy
the
space
of a
dispersion"
(p.
10).
How else
is
one
to
deal
with
such
questions
as
the "apparently unmoving histories" of "sea routes
[...]
of
corn or
of
gold-mining
[...]
of
drought
and
of
irrigation
[...] crop
rotation
[...]
of the
balance
achieved
by
the
human
species
between
hunger
and
abundance"
(p.
3)?
No
longer
is the
historian
simply
to link
events
in a
causal
series;
he
must
now
ask
about
different
sorts of
series,
new
criteria
of
period-
ization,
differently
articulated
systems
of
relation
between
series.
Dates,
by
which
a
sequential
calendar
miming
the
line
of a
man's life
was
formerly
con-
structed and
given priority,
acquire
diminished
and
qualified
significance.
Recurrent
distributions
and
architectonic
unities,
displacements
and
transforma-
tions-these
are
the
spatial
indicators
of historical
activity
today,
and
it
is
Foucault's
goal
to formulate
a method sensitive to these indicators.
But the
linear
image
of
time,
based on the se-
quential
calendar
of a man's
life,
is itself abetted
by
"two models
that have
for so
long
imposed
their
image:
the
linear model
of
speech
(and
partly
at
least of
writing)
in which all events succeed one
an-
other,
without
any
effect
of coincidence and
super-
position;
and
the model
of the stream of conscious-
ness
whose
presence
always
eludes itself in its
open-
ness
to
the future
and
its retention
of the
past" (p.
169).
It
is to break
the
hold of these models
that
Foucault
describes
discourse and
archive,
with
their
own
forms
of
sequence
and succession. Here we
come
to the
third
and the most
complex
pressure up-
on the new
method. For
just
as
history
is not
tem-
poral
sequence,
because
the
birth-to-death
span
of
man's
life
is
an
adequate
measure neither
of
large
units
like
demographic expansion,
of
phenomena
of
rupture,
discontinuity,
coincidence,
and
complemen-
tarity,
so too
the
spatial dispersion
enacted
by
his-
tory
cannot be filled with
objects
that are
analogies
(disguised
or
not)
or
direct unmediated
representa-
tions of human life. Textual evidence, in other
words,
is
based
on historical
documents,
but these
documents are
formed and
persist
monumentally,
according
to
their own
laws,
and
not
according
to a
human
image.
A
text
does
not
simply
record-is
not
the
pure
graphological
consequence
of-an
im-
mediate desire
to
write. Rather it distributes
various
textual
impulses, regularly
and on
several
axes;
what
gives
these
impulses
unity
is
what Foucault
calls
a
discursive
formation,
bound
neither
by
an
individual
author,
a
"period,"
a
"work,"
nor an idea.
A
text,
to
those who
persist
in
making
of a
contingent
print-
ing
device an
ontological
unit
having
final
value,
is a
fundamentally
inconstant
epistemological
judgment.
The
background
for this
more
than
simply
relativist
thought
was
first sketched
in
detail
by
Fou-
cault in
the
final
pages
of
The
Order
of
Things.
He
remarked there how mimetic
representation
after
such
writers as
Sade,
Mallarm6
and
Nietzsche
could
convey
neither
their desires
nor
their
psychological
discoveries.
Concurrently
the
logic
of
syntax
as well
as
the linear
sequence
of
printed language
in
their
work is
assaulted
(and
found
wanting)
by
a
wish to
express
non-syntactic, non-sequential
thought.
To-
gether
with
these
writers, Marx,
Saussure
and Freud
put
forward
systems
of
thought
for
which no
image
was
adequate.
Thus
writing
could not have a
predic-
tive form
based
either
upon biological growth
or
up-
on
a
representative governing image.
Instead
writing
sought to constitute its own realm, inhabited entirely
by
words and
the
spaces
between
them. In turn
the
relations between
this
realm
and
empirical reality
were made
possible
according
to
particular strategies
and
enunciative functions. What
ideas one
has about
a text therefore
change
definitively
as one examines
a novel
by Virginia
Woolf,
or
a textbook
of
organic
chemistry,
or a
political pamphlet,
all
dating
from
roughly
the same
period.
The
Archeology
of
Knowledge
takes the
pro-
cess
of
defining
the realms of
language
and
"reality"
commonly
known
by
all
three
such
"texts"
a
step
closer to formalization. The
vocabulary
and
the
problematics
of that
kind
of
knowledge
are articu-
lated
by
Foucault with the
principle negative
aim of
avoiding descriptions equivalent to, or understand-
able in terms
of,
sense
impressions.
Since
no
image
is
capable
of
containing knowledge-formal
knowl-
edge
cannot be
immediately
seen,
heard, smelled,
felt,
or tasted-it
can
neither
be
produced
nor
sought
after
(desired)
in the
simple experiential
terms
of
daily
life. The
will to
knowledge expresses
itself
in
what Foucault
calls an
element
of
rarity
very special
to it. Hence the
pertinence
of Foucault's
choice
of
savoir over
connaissance
(English regrettably
trans-
lates both
as
knowledge)
for the
object
of his
study:
the former is unthinkable without reference to condi-
tions and
appropriations
that make it
knowledge,
the
latter-as
Foucault
says
in a
summary
of his
1970-
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71 course of
lectures at
the
Collkge-is
best
studied
as
something
fundamentally
subjective
and
selfish
(interessde),
produced
as an event
of desire
(produite
comme
evenement du
vouloir),
and
determining
truth
by
falsification
(determinant
par falsification
l'eflet
de
vdritd).
Therefore
knowledge
(savoir)
is that of which
one
can
speak
in
a
discursive
practice,
and
which is
specified
by
that fact: the domain
consti-
tuted
by
the
different
objects
that
will
or will not
acquire
a scientific status
(the knowledge
of
psychiatry
in
the
nineteenth century is not the sum of what was thought
to be
true,
but
the
whole
set
of
practices, singularities,
and
deviations
of
which
one
could
speak
in
psychiatric
discourse);
knowledge
is also
the
space
in
which the
subject may
take
up
a
position
and
speak
of the
objects
with
which he
deals
in
his
discourse
(in
this
sense,
the
knowledge
of clinical
medicine
is
the whole
group
of
functions
of
observations,
interrogation, decipherment,
recording
and
decision that
may
be exercised
by
the
sub-
ject
of
medical
discourse); knowledge
is
also the field
of coordination and subordinationof statements n
which
concepts appear,
and are
defined,
applied
and
trans-
formed
(at
this
level,
the
knowledge
of Natural
History,
in the
eighteenth
century,
is
not the
sum of
what was
said,
but
the
whole set of
modes
and
sites
in
accordance
with
which
one
can
integrate
new
statement
with the
already said); lastly, knowledge is defined by the possi-
bilities of use and
appropriation
offered
by
discourse
(thus,
the
knowledge
of
political
economy,
in
the Clas-
sical
period,
is
not
the
thesis
of the different
theses sus-
tained,
but the
totality
of its
point
of
articulation
on
other discourses or
on
other
practices
that are not dis-
cursive).
There are bodies
of
knowledge
that are inde-
pendent
of the
sciences
(which
are
neither their
histor-
ical
prototypes,
nor their
practical by-products),
but
there is no
knowledge
without
a
particular
discursive
practice;
and
any
discursive
practice may
be defined
by
the
knowledge
that
it
forms.
(pp.
182-83)
Knowledge
is
specified
by
discourse,
and
vice
versa.
The
tautology
does not
matter,
if
only
be-
cause
what it
thereby
banished
is
a
conception
of
knowledge as the free-floating, spontaneous emana-
tion of
genius
and/or individual
hard
work. Fou-
cault is not
the first
modern to
attack
this romantic-
ally
humanist vision
of
knowledge, although
I think
he
does more to
regularize
the
irregularities
of
knowledge,
to
specify
knowledge
that
is,
than most
others.
The
importance
of
the attack has
gone
far
too
long
unnoticed,
however,
especially
in
the
United
States. In
the first
place
romantic
knowledge
(con-
naissance),
signifies
property quite
narrowly,
the
property
of the
big
brain
whose
inspiration
knowl-
edge
therefore seems.
Secondly
it
is
antidemocratic,
not in
any
vague
counter-culture
sense,
but rather
in
the sense
that
permits
its votaries to wave
the
ban-
ner of
science and
knowledge
and,
at the
same time
to conceal the privilege-but not the rigor or real
science,
which
are absent-that
entitles them
to
act
as
thought-producers.
In March
1972 Foucault be-
gan
explicitly
to
speak
of
an
interplay
of
desire,
power
and interest
as
being
the
radical intellectual
target
in
the
struggle
to uncover
the hidden
strategies
of
social
power
(L'Arc,
number
49,
p.
9).
The con-
tinuity
between such a
statement and
Foucault's
at-
tack
upon
anti-democratic
epistemology
in
The
Archeology
is
plain.
Thirdly,
and this
realization I
believe
is
necessitated
by
the first
two,
romantic
knowledge
is
anti-intellectual and
anti-rational. Yet
nowhere
does
Foucault
say
as a result
that
knowl-
edge
(savoir)
is
immediately
accessible to
introspec-
tion,
to
direct
questioning,
or
even
to
consciousness.
What
he does
say
is
that
knowledge
is
produced,
dis-
seminated and
reformed
in
ways
that can be
intelligi-
bly
specified
and
characterized,
albeit with
difficulty.
In one or two
places
Foucault
carefully
distinguishes
between his
archeological
method and
Chomsky's
methods
(never
mentioned
by
name)
of
linguistic
analysis
based
upon
the
generative
model.
While
both theories appear to have a strong libertarian
thrust,
archeology,
by
seizing,
out of the mass
of
things
said,
upon
the
statement defined as
a
function
of realization of
the
verbal
performance, distinguishes
itself from a
search
whose
privileged
field is
linguistic competence:
while
such
a
description
constitutes a
generative
model,
in order
to
define the
acceptability
of
statements,
archeology
tries
to
establish rules of
formation,
in order to
define
the
con-
dition of their realization.
(p.
207)
The
opacity
of
this
disclaimer
thins
out
a
bit
if
it
is
read with the
following,
earlier,
passage
in
mind:
"it is
vain to
seek,
beyond
structural,
formal,
or in-
terpretative
analyses
of
language,
a domain
that is
at
last
freed from all
positivity,
in which the
freedom
of
the
subject,
the labour of
the human
being,
or
the
opening up
of
a transcendental
destiny
could
be ful-
filled"
(p.
112).
Positivity
and
specification:
these
make
up
the
tough,
almost
material,
rind of
knowledge.
Yet like
an
archive
(as
understood
conventionally) they
are
not
wholly corporeal
either,
for
they
inhabit a
spe-
cial
medium
of
rarity. Mainly,
positive
and
specifi-
able
knowledge
is
regular,
it absorbs
discontinuity
and
individual
effort,
it
conceals its
structure,
it is
eminently capable
of
being
there,
even
if
it
is not
visible,
and it
is
repeatable.
This is
not as
unimag-
inable a
constellation
of features as its
seems.
Fou-
cault has assembled
together
various
characteriza-
tions made by other writers, some of whom he names
and
acknowledges,
others
he
probably
did
not
have
in
mind. It is
a useful
exercise to
describe a few
of
these correlative
discoveries made
by
others.
They
have the
virtue
of
placing
Foucault
against
a
rela-
tively
familiar
background
where,
if
my
irony
is not
mis-interpreted,
the almost
oppressively
novel
vocab-
ulary
of his
methodology
itself
seems
more
regular.
Nevertheless
one
must
note
that Foucault's own
thought
about
originality
is
highly
ambivalent.
I
shall
return to that
critical
problem
a
little later.
One
brings
Foucault
together
with
Thomas S.
Kuhn,
Georges
Canguilhem
and Michael
Polanyi
only
with
trepidation.
Nevertheless I have
ventured
to do so
and find
the
attempt
instructive. All of
these writers on the structure of scientific knowledge
stress
the
regularity
of
that
knowledge,
that
is,
the
shared
paradigms
discussed
by
Kuhn that
comprise
a
"research
consensus." This
consensus enables further
research,
accommodates or is
radically
altered
by
anomaly,
and
always,
according
to
Kuhn,
performs
the function of
providing
in
ongoing
time
"a
new
and
more
rigid
definition of
the
field"
of scientific
research. "Men
whose
research
is
based on
shared
paradigms
are
committed to
the same rules and
standards
for scientific
practice.
That
commitment
and the
apparent
consensus it
produces
are
prereq-
diacritics
Summer
974
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uisites for
normal
science,
i.e.
for
the
genesis
and
continuation of a
particular
research tradition"
(The
Structure
of
Scientific
Revolutions.
Chicago:
Univ.
of
Chicago
Press,
rev. ed.
1970;
p.
11).
If new
problems
emerge
as anomalies
it
is
because
they
are
in
disharmony
with "the
background provided
by
the
paradigm"
(p.
65).
Within the
paradigm,
as
Canguilhem
showed
in a
very
early study
that
pre-
dates Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions by nineteen
years,
criteria are formed
in
medicine,
for
instance,
that
determine
"the
normal"
and
"the
pathological."
He
concludes
that
"every empirical concept
of illness
retains a
disciplined
relation
with
an
axiological
con-
cept
of
illness.
Consequently
it
is
not an
objective
method that characterizes
a
biological phenomenon
as
pathological.
It
is
always
the relation between ob-
server
and
individual
patient,
mediated
by
the
clinic,
which
justifies
the label
pathological"
(Le
Normal
et
le
pathologique.
Paris:
P.
U.
F.,
rev.
ed.
1962;
p.
156).
Canguilhem dispels
the
subjectivist
fallacy
by
saying
that there
is
such
a
thing
as
objective path-
ology
so
long
as
it
is
understood
first
that
that
objec-
tivity
is
absolutely
tied to a
specific
biological
history
(with
its own time, events,
sequence,
sociology,
or-
der)
and
second,
that
the
object
of
objective path-
ological practice
"is
not
so much a fact as
a
value"
(p.
157).
In 1966
Canguilhem
refined
this view
by
say-
ing
that within a
science
like
pathology
there
are
norms
that
regulate
even
the
concept
of
error. Thus
"health
is
a
genetic
and
enzymatic
correction
of
an
error
[in
the
substitution
of
one
molecular
arrange-
ment
for another:
the
conceptual
structure of
bio-
chemistry
here
is
borrowed
from information-
theory].
To be
sick
is
to
have been
wrong,
wrong
not
in the sense
of
a
counterfeit
note
in the sense
of
a
false
brother,
but
in the sense
of a mistaken fold
of
the page, or of a wrong line of verse" (Canguil-
hem,
p.
208).
In
Personal
Knowledge (Chicago:
Univ.
of
Chicago
Press, 1958)-to
which Kuhn
re-
fers-and
in
his
Lindsay
Memorial
Lectures,
The
Study
of
Man
(Chicago:
Univ.
of
Chicago
Press,
1959),
Polanyi
demonstrates
that
what he calls
tacit
knowledge
can be
incorporated,
and
is indeed
an
important
part
of what
passes
for
"objective"
scien-
tific
research.
Tacit
knowledge
need
not be
immedi-
ately
formulable
in a set
of
rules;
nonetheless it
is
consentual
and works
as
a
basis
upon
which
scien-
tific
research
conducts
itself. The
point
is that
even
the
apparently
contradictory
status of
explicit
and
implicit
knowledge,
as well
as the
discontinuity
be-
tween
them,
does
not inhibit
the
regularity
of
the
whole body of scientific knowledge at any given
time.
Kuhn's brilliant
analysis
of the
role
played
by
textbooks in
contributing
to the scientific
par-
adigm
stands
in a
fairly
close
relation to
Foucault's
account of
discursive
practice
"as a
body
of
anon-
ymous,
historical
rules,
always
determined
in the
time
and
space
that have
defined a
given
period,
and
for a
given
social,
economic,
geographical,
or
lin-
guistic
area,
the
conditions
of
operation
of the enun-
ciative
function"
(p.
117).
Foucault's
archeology
of
knowledge
scants
the
difference
between
science,
social science and
hu-
manities.
All of these divisions are
subject
to
the
laws of discursive
practice,
and the relations
between
them
are
equally
a
function
of
these
laws.
If
from
the
"archeological"
historian's
viewpoint,
a
society
can be
studied as
a
quasi-transcendental
form of dis-
course
(I
adapt
this
notion
from
Angus
Fletcher's
theory
of a
transcendental
art-form in his The
Tran-
scendental
Masque:
An
Essay
on Milton's
"Comus."
Ithaca:
Cornell
Univ.
Press,
1972),
then
the intra-
social
exclusions
and
incorporations
that
comprise
the penal system, the organization of university cur-
ricula,
the
structure of
the
political
bureaucracy,
in-
sofar
as
these
are
coherent
positivities,
are discursive
practices,
too.
Thus a
positvity
is
that
acted-upon
knowledge
which
can
be
rationally
ascertained
and
articulated,
no
matter
how
implicit
or
hidden it
may
first
appear
to be.
The
more one
reads
in
Foucault
the
more one
notices
the
extent
to
which
he
is sus-
picious
of,
and
attracted
to,
knowledge
whose
prac-
tice
conceals the
fact
of
its
fabrication.
He
has this
in
common
obviously
with
a
number of
modern
thinkers,
of
whom
Barthes
the
structuralist,
Lukics
and
Adorno,
the
neo-Marxists,
furnish
the
most
directly
relevant
analogies.
Barthes'
anatomy
of
myth
(in
Mythologies)
construes
the
bourgeois
habit
of appeals to immutable
"reality"
as a form of illu-
sionment,
by
which
what is
present
is
falsely
given
as
not-made and
always-there.
Lukics'
definition
of
proletarian
class-consciousness also
demonstrates
how
the
bourgeois
status-quo
masks a
discourse
or
a
theory
that
denies
its
own
self-preserving
activity.
And
Adorno,
whose
philosophical
investigations
of
contemporary reality
play
an
important
role
in Fred-
eric
Jameson's
excellent
Marxism and
Form
(Prince-
ton:
Princeton Univ.
Press,
1972),
equates
the
so-
called
autonomy
of a
work
of art
in
class
society
with
the
class-derived
concealment of
work:
Works
of art owe their
existence to
the social
division
of
labor,
to
the
separation
of
mental and
physical
work.
In such a situation, however, they appear under the
guise
of
independent
existence;
for
their medium
is not
that of
pure
and autonomous
spirit,
but
rather
that of
a
spirit
which
having
become
object
now
claims
to have
surmounted the
opposition
between
the two. Such
con-
tradiction
obliges
the
work
of
art
to
conceal
the
fact
that
it is
itself a human
construction.
(p. 408)
Jameson
continues Adorno's
argument
as
follows:
"There
is thus
given
within
the
very concept
of work
-either in
the form
of
the
division of labor in
gen-
eral
or in
the more
specialized
types
of
production
characteristic of
capitalism-the
principle
of a cen-
sorship
of
the
work
process
itself,
of a
repression
of
the
traces
of
labor on the
product."
Yet if
the work
process
is
not to remain
occult,
a certain order must be assumed for it. How, if one
does not
wish to
employ
crude sensationalist meta-
phors,
can
one
depict
rational
work as
a
process
hav-
ing significant
material
consequences?
How does one
deal with
the
problem
of
showing
discourse
in its
persistence
to be
what Foucault
has called a
material-
istic
incorporeal?
Val6ry's
Leonardo
comes
to
mind
here.
What
interests
Val6ry
in Leonardo
is not
his
biography
but
his
constructive
power
as
a
mind.
Construction
itself has its own
logic
whose
basis
is
an
"intervention
in natural
things."
The initial
step
in
a construction
is
a decision to move
away
from
nature and into
the
constructive element.
(There
is
an
interesting study
of Leonardo's use of
sketches
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that
develops
this
theme
further
than
Valry:
E.
H.
Gombrich's
"Leonardo's
Method of
Working
out
Compositions"
in his
Norm and
Form:
Studies
in
the
Art
of
the
Renaissance
(London:
Phaidon,
1966).
Thereafter
Val6ry
meditates
upon
Leonardo's
architectural
projections
for
monuments
which,
al-
though
they
have no
empirical equivalent,
neverthe-
less
have
a
special
empirical validity.
Leonardo saw
"the air
[as
being]
full of
infinite
lines,
straight
and
radiating,
intercrossing,
and
interweaving
without
ever coinciding one with another." In this element of
rarity
Leonardo
puts
his
monuments:
The
monument
(which
composes
the
City,
which
in turn is
almost
the whole
of
civilization)
is
such
a
com-
plex
entity
that our
understanding
of
it
passes through
several
successive
phases.
First
we
grasp
a
changeable
background
that
merges
with
the
sky,
then
a
rich
tex-
ture of motifs
in
height,
breadth,
and
depth,
infinitely
varied
by perspective,
then
something
solid,
bold,
resis-
tant,
with
certain
animal
characteristics-organs,
mem-
bers-then
finally
a
machine
having gravity
for
its
mo-
tive
force,
one that
carries
us
in
thought
from
geometry
to
dynamics
and
thence to the most
tenuous
speculations
of
molecular
physics.
(Valkry.
Collected Works.
Prince-
ton:
Princeton Univ.
Press,
1972;
vol.
III,
pp.
49-50)
"In our time,"
says
Foucault,
"history
is that which
transforms
documents
into
monuments"
(p.
7).
Val-
6ry's
account
of the
constructed monument corre-
sponds
to
Foucault's
concept
of
the duration
in
his-
tory
of
texts as
monument: the historian's
discipline
is
archeology
("the
intrinsic
description
of the
monu-
ment")
which
also
passes
through
several
successive
phases.
A
document's
monumentality
can
only
emerge
when
discourse
is not elided
with
reality.
The
time
of its
construction,
the time
of
monumen-
tal
duration,
the
time
of its
analysis:
these
three are
correlates
that
tend
differently
to
repeat
each
other
without
being
copies
of
nature
or of
an
ideal.
Monu-
mentality
is
the
general
mode of
presence
of dis-
course, although
in
the
special
sense of the word
in-
tended
by
Foucault
(like
Valery
before
him)
monu-
mental
presence
does not
exclusively
mean
empirical
visibility.
A
library,
for
instance,
is
one
particular
mode of
presence
for
discourse
as
monument:
as vis-
ible
objects
the books in
the
stacks
are less
important
than
the
infinitely
interwined
lines
that
connect
the
books
to
each
other
and
keep
the word on the
pages.
Moreover in
the
conception
of
books and
language
as a
universe that
Borges
has
made
cur-
rent,
each
discourse
becomes
a sort of
cross-refer-
ence to
every
other discourse. In such
a universe
there
is
no
determinable
origin
and no final
goal,
since
repetition
underlies
cross-reference. Foucault's
philosophical
affinity
with Gilles
Deleuze derives
from this interest in repetition, although recently the
affinity
has
become
political
as
well.
Deleuze's
Dif-
ference
et
repetition (Paris:
P.
U.
F., 1968)
goes
a
very long
way
towards
laying
forth a
philosophy
of
repetition
with which
Foucault,
whose
recognition
that
there
is
no
Origin
is
pre-supposed
by
his
interest
in
repetition
and
discourse,
has
publicly agreed.
What
makes such
comparative
abstractions like dif-
ference and
repetition
clear in
Deleuze's otherwise
very complex
argument
is his
way
of
describing
those
things
as
forms of action.
"Repetition
[in
time]
is a condition of action
before it becomes a
concept
of reflection"
(Deleuze,
p.
21).
Using examples
from
Marx,
H61derlin,
Vico,
and
Nietzsche,
Deleuze
con-
structs before
his
reader the drama
of
repetition
that
is
capable
of
producing
the
absolutely
different.
Aside from
being
an
appealingly
surprising
volte-face,
this
argument
reveals
the
extent
to which
repetition,
as a device
or a mode
or a
philosophic
habit,
is
not
the
opposite
of
originality
in the romantic
sense
of
that
word. If as
a
concept
or a
description, original-
ity
concealed an
appeal
to
some
extra-positive "priv-
ilege" (the Muse, inspiration, a "raptus") it also
contained
an
anxiety
about the value of what
one
was
saying.
As
Vico was
one of the first to
argue,
all utterance
is
a
form
of
re-inscription:
hence
orig-
inality
is
a far more unstable
quality.
Instead,
it
and
creativity
belong
inherently
to what
Harold
Bloom
calls
misprision,
one
of whose
signs
is
parody,
the
form of
writing
relied
upon
to a
great
extent
by
many
of the modern
masters like
Eliot,
Mann
and
Joyce.
This
deliberate
mis-taking
characterizes
in-
ventiveness.
Far from
being
the
-realization
of
an
"interiority"
like
inspiration,
discourse
for
Foucault
is
only misprision
and
exteriority:
"it is
a
practical
domain
that
is
autonomous"
(p.
121).
Therefore,
"the time
of discourse
is not the
translation,
in
a
visible chronology, of the obscure time of thought"
(p.
121).
Here we
can
begin
to
understand how
repetition
produces
difference.
Discursive
language
is
like
a
repertory
theatre
that
stages
numerous
spectacles.
This
figure
connects
Foucault
with
Kenneth
Burke's dramatistic
analysis
of
literature,
although
Foucault
holds that
discursive
practice
is neither
benign
nor
necessarily
artistic:
effectiveness
is its main criterion of
success. Effec-
tiveness can
be
judged
in
several
ways
but
Foucault
is
right,
I
think,
not
to
make
effectiveness
dependent
upon
so
fickle
a
perception
as
the
retrospective
crit-
ic's.
Yet
neither is
effectiveness
passive conformity
to
a
sort
of
general
will.
Discursive
practice
is
modified
constantly by
each
statement made within
it, just
as
in Kuhn's
discussion
of
the research
paradigm
every
research
worker
re-articulates a
special aspect
of the
paradigm
and
extends
and refines it further.
We
must
still
ask,
however,
where discursive
practice
actually
takes
place,
how is its
effectiveness measured
or
realized,
and
what sort of
activity
it is
really.
In
answering
these
questions
in The
Archeology
of
Knowledge
Foucault
admits that
what
he
supplies
is
not
yet
a
theory
but
only
a
possibility
(pp.
114-15).
One
ought
to be
willing
to
accept
this
qualification
if,
in
exchange,
the
possibility provides
enough
of an
indication
that a
possibility
now is not
just
an
excuse
for
the absence of
theory.
In
other
words,
is
a
possi-
bility
described at
length
forceful
enough
to
prepare
the ground for a theory? I think it is, in this case.
For Foucault is
proposing
a method for
under-
standing
social
behaviour
as what
it
is
that
people
must do in
order to
speak
and
write as
contributors
to an
ongoing system
of
the
values,
discoveries,
er-
rors,
and institutions that
we call
knowledge
(savoir).
Since
knowledge
is neither
a
mysterious jumble
of
ideas nor a fact
of
nature,
and since it is
not some-
thing
that
one
has
but
something
that one
does,
it
is
best
conceived
of
initially
as
occupying
a
group
of
hypothetical
spaces.
One of
them
might
be where
one stands in order
to
speak,
another
might
be from
dkccri
IS/Summer
1974
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where he draws forth the elements
he
combines
to
make
a
statement,
another
might
be where he
puts
his
statement,
and a fourth
might
be where
his
state-
ment
is
either
preserved,
modified,
accumulated,
or
passed
on.
Surrounding
all
these
places
is a set
of
general
boundaries,
or
limits,
that holds all the
other
spaces
in.
This
constraint
is
the
dpistm&e,
which,
when
it is
specified
as
an
actively
populated
expanse
of knowledge-acts at a given moment in history, is
not an
open space
but rather
a
system
of
distances.
Thus in
the
eighteenth
century,
for
example,
the
dis-
tance between
religion
and
psychology
as
discipline
is
closer
than
it is a hundred
years
later. The
whole
map
of
such relations
is what
Foucault
means
by
dpistime.
This
is
very
different
from
describing
a
Zeitgeist,
or
an
ideology,
or
a
Weltanschauung.
What
distinguishes
dpisteme
from
them
is not
that
all
are
unconscious
or
communal,
but
that
only
the
episteme
is not
an
implicit
belief-system
sometimes
projected
by
individuals
or
institutions. Rather
the
dpistmrne
"is
a
constantly moving
set
of
articulations,
shifts,
and
coincidences
that are established
only
to
give
rise
to
others"
(p.
192).
The rules
collectively
governing
these move-
ments of the
dpistem'-governing
their
appearance
as
events,
for the
dpistime
is
usually
described
by
Foucault
as
a set
of
moving
constraints
that
estab-
lish an
outer
limit of
knowledge-make
discourse
possible.
The
historical
economy
of discourse is
the
archive:
The archive is
first
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
deter-
mines
that
all these
things
said
do not accumulate
end-
lessly
in
an
amorphous
mass,
nor are
they
inscribed
in
an
unbroken
linearity,
nor do
they disappear
at
the
mercy
of
chance external
accidents;
but
they
are
grouped
together in distinct figures, composed together in accor-
dance
with
multiple
relations,
maintained or blurred
in
accordance
with
specific
regularities.
...
The archive
is
not
that
which, despite
its
immediate
escape,
safeguards
the event
of the
statement,
and
preserves,
for
future
memories,
its
status
as
an
escape;
it is that which
em-
bodies
it,
defines at
the
outset
the
system
of
its
enunci-
ability.
Nor
is the
archive
that
which
collects the
dust
of statements
that
have
become inert once
more,
and
which
may
make
possible
the
miracle of their
resurrec-
tion;
it is
that
which
defines
the mode of occurrence
of
the
statement-thing;
t is
the
system
of
its
functioning.
Far
from
being
that
which
unifies
everything
that
has
been
said in
the
great
confused
murmur of
a
discourse,
far
from
being
only
that
which
insures
that
we exist
in
the midst
of
preserved
discourse,
it is
that
which
differ-
entiates
discourses
in
their
multiple
existence
and
speci-
fies them in their own duration. (p. 129)
Discourses
exist
within
the archive.
They
are
special-
ized modes
of utterance
(clinical
discourse,
for
in-
stance,
or
sociological
discourse)
that
must
not
be
confused
with
simple
jargon.
A discourse
is
syste-
matic,
and
it has
epistemological,
social,
political,
economic
and historical
relations
with other
dis-
courses in
the archive.
Most
important,
the
discourse
is
not
dialectical-"without
flaw,
without
contradic-
tion,
without
internal
arbitrariness"
(p.
114)-and
is made
up
of
statements,
which
"bear an
enuncia-
tive function"
(p.
115).
We are
back
to
effectiveness,
and it
now be-
comes
possible
to
see
that Foucault
is
most
interested
in
defining
the statement:
the
dpisteme',
the
archive,
even
discourse,
all
these
are
analytic
instruments
more or
less
invented
by
the
archeologist
in
order
to
approach
the
statement,
in
order
to
provide
a
suitable
terminology
for
apprehending
the
statement,
which
is
after
all
the
very
mode
and
presence
of
effectiveness.
For Foucault the
statement
is
not
a
sentence necessarily, nor any unit describable by
grammar
or
logic.
Moreover
since
it
is in and of
discourse
it
cannot be
something
latent
that
is real-
ized
by
discourse. The
more
Foucault
enumerates
what a
statement
is
not,
the
more it
is
evident
that
a
statement
is difficult
both to
make
and to describe:
it is
rare.
The statement is not
just
another
unity-above
or be-
low-sentences
and
propositions;
it
is
always
invested
in unities of this
kind,
or even in
sequences
of
signs
that do not
obey
their laws
(and
which
may
be
lists,
chance
series,
tables);
it characterizes not
what
is
given
in
them,
but
the
very
fact that
they
are
given,
and
the
way
in which
they
are
given.
It
has
the
quasi-invisibility
of the
"there
is,"
which is effaced
in
the
very
thing
of
which one can say: "there s this or that thing." (p. 111)
Perhaps
a
prefiguration
of
what Foucault means
by
a
statement
is
to be
found
in
the smile
of
the
Chesh-
ire
cat
or,
as he himself
says
in the
opening pages
of
The Order
of
Things,
in
the list
of
animals
given
in
a
Chinese
encyclopedia
referred
to
in "The
Analyt-
ical
Language
of
John
Wilkins"
by
Borges.
"Al-
though
the
statement
cannot
be
hidden
it
is
not
vis-
ible
either
[...]
it is
like
the
over-familiar
that con-
stantly
eludes one"
(pp.
110-11).
Another
important
aspect
of
the statement
is that it
is
correlative
with
a lack:
"There
may
in fact be-and
always
are-in
the conditions
of
emergence
of
statements,
exclu-
sions,
limits,
or
gaps
that
divide
up
their
referential,
validate only one series of modalities, enclose groups
of
coexistence,
and
prevent
certain
forms
of use"
(p.
110).
Thus a
statement
emerging
prevents
an-
other utterance from
emerging; conversely,
with
re-
gard
to a
whole series of
possibilities,
a
statement
emerges
to
be
something
else,
namely,
a
statement,
but not
an
idea,
or a
sentence,
or a
passing
remark.
At
all
events,
one
thing
at
least
must be
empha-
sized
here: that the
analysis
of discourse
[and
of state-
ments in
and
by
discourse]
thus
understood,
does
not re-
veal
the
universality
of a
meaning,
but
brings
to
light
the
action
of
imposed
rarity,
with
a
fundamental
power
of affirmation.
Rarity
and
affirmation:
rarity,
in
the last
resort of affirmation
[Swyer's
translation here
is
impos-
sibly garbled:
Foucault
says,
"the
rarity
of
affirmation"]
-certainly
not any continuous out-pouringof meaning,
and
certainly
not
any monarchy
of the
signifier.
(p.
234)
The
peculiar,
and I think the
crucial,
problem
of The
Archeology
of
Knowledge
is its
attempt
to
define effectiveness
without
theory,
that
is,
to
regard
practice
not
as a cause
of
effectiveness
but as
the
main
part
of it. To affirm with force even
as
one
ex-
cludes
much
else-this is
effectiveness.
Effectiveness
is also
to
modify
other effective
statements,
and
it is
also to
last,
to be
re-activated
(as
when a later
age
returns to
Marx or to
Freud),
to
be
consciously
ex-
cluded
(as
when The Wasteland
excludes Christian-
ity),
to be
re-appropriated
(as
in
his
essay
"Kafka
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and his
Precursors"
Borges gives
Kafka
his
forgotten
patrimony).
Lest it
be assumed that statements
in discourse
during
a
given
epistime
make
up
a
unity
resembling
either
the
Great
Chain of
Being
or a
Hegelian
total-
ity
Foucault
goes
out of his
way
to
show that this
is
not
what
he has in
mind.
Two of his most com-
plex
chapters
in The
Archeology-"Contradictions"
and
"The
Comparative
Facts"-insist
yet
more
strongly
on
the discontinuous
nature
of statements
in the archive. To the archeologist discourse is a
space
of
dissension.
Eighteenth-century
Natural
His-
tory,
for
instance,
is
essentially
a
set
of "intrinsic
oppositions [...
.
distributed over
different
levels of
the
discursive
formation"
(p.
154).
These
opposi-
tions
articulate
divergence,
incompatibility,
and
ex-
clusion. "In
the
case
of
the
systematic analysis
of
plants
[in
eighteenth-century
Natural
History],
one
applies
a
rigorous
perceptual
and
linguistic
code,
and
in
accordance with a
constant
scale;
for
method-
ical
description
[during
the same
period],
the
codes
are
relatively
free,
and
the scales of
mapping may
oscillate"
(p.
154).
When;
however,
there are
no
contradictions-that
is,
if
one wishes
to
show,
as
Foucault
did in
The Order
of
Things,
that
eighteenth
century
General Grammar and Natural
History
are
related
after
all-there
is "a
region
of
interpositiv-
ity,"
which is
tangled
but
is
also a set of
fairly
well-
articulated
correlations.
Everything
I
have
so far said of Foucault in-
terprets,
rather than
summarizes,
his
archeology
as
simultaneously
the
expression
of radical dissatisfac-
tion
and radical
affirmation.
Let
us
take
dissatisfac-
tion and
doubt first. I think
he
is
correct to
judge
Western historical
understanding
as
being
based
very
generally upon
two forms of
explanation,
one
ver-
tical,
and
one horizontal.
Both
generally
work to-
gether
since both mix
the
temporal
and
the
spatial
modes.
Written historical
evidence
is
judged
to
be
a trace, which when it is explained vertically is con-
ceived of
as the
exterior residual
expression
of
an
interior,
or
underlying,
force, rationale,
meaning,
image,
or
idea.
When it
is
explained
horizontally
it
is
conveived of
as
having
been
preceded
by
some-
thing
that
gives
it
meaning:
other
events,
a succes-
sive line of
development,
an
Origin.
To Foucault
any
form of
understanding
that sends
one
away
to
given
or assumed
ontologically prior
forms such
as
an
author,
a
period,
an
idea,
a
source,
a
world-view
-in
short,
a
genealogy
of order-discounts
the
pres-
ence of
the
evidence,
its
sheer
persistence
as event
or as
evidence,
in
favor
of deterministic
hyposta-
tizations. Moreover
these determinisms assume
a
priv-
ilege
in
the
understanding
without account
being
taken of their very circumstantial nature. When
Nietzsche said that discussions of
poets
like
Homer
(about
whom
as
authors
nothing
was
known)
were
judgments
made
by
later
generations
and not at
all
accurate
descriptions
of
reality,
he was
saying
some-
thing
that
Foucault
would
agree
with
readily.
To
say
that
Shelley
wrote "Adonais" is not
sufficiently
to
describe the
fact
that
"Adonais" was written. In or-
der to do that one would
have to
grasp
first
of all
why
to the critic in 1973
it matters that the
poem
was
written
(and
this involves an
archeological
de-
scription
of
literary
discourse
today),
then to
grasp
how as
writing
the
poem
was
received,
modified
and
preserved
in
poetico-elegiac
discourse
in the
early
nineteenth
century.
While one
may
never to able
to
complete
such an
archeological
description-and
Foucault
is under no illusion
that it is
anything
but
interminable-its
stated
requirements
are at