Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’.
In 1968, Jean Hyppolite, chair in ‘The History of Systems’
at the school de France, died. By 1970, Michel Foucault had been elected into
Hyppolite’s vacant position, because the Chair of ‘The History of Systems of
Thought’. it had been an edge he, too, remained in until his death in 1984.
But it had been a title, unlike many others, that Foucault readily accepted. Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. Moreover, it had been a title which stood at the midpoint between his work on
archaeology which of genealogy, two concepts he developed as tools to for
conducting a historical analytic. This post sets out Foucault’s ideas on
archaeology.
Foucault’s notion of archaeology are often broadly
understood as an analytical tool for uncovering alternative and disturbed
histories of systems of knowledge: it suggests an unstructuring of accepted
knowledge and therefore the categories during which to explain its historical
experience. within the Archaeology of data (first published in French in 1969)
Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. Foucault sets out a framework for conducting archaeological critique generally
terms, having produced three earlier works which appropriated it (The History
of Madness in 1961; The Birth of the Clinic in 1963; and therefore the Order of
Things in 1966).
Archaeology of data wasn't Foucault’s most well-received
work, criticised for establishing in structural and positivist terms an
approach which sought to vehemently reject such things. Nevertheless, the book
dedicates significant space to questioning the propositions of traditional
history, incessantly discarding the teleological efforts of traditional
historians and compelling a rejection of historical narratives which seek to
make continuity between past and present. Foucault critiques the look for affirmations
of transcendental human consciousness (urdoxa), echoing a Nietzschean position
on self-comforting narratives. Instead, Foucault (like Georges Canguilhem and
Gaston Bachelard before him) involves the displacement of the topic because the
object of history, Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. proffering archaeology as an alternate mode of history which
holds discourse (rather than man) as its object of study. Foucault
substantiates his framework by defining and discussing a series of interrelated
concepts which constitute the archaeological method of discursive
investigation. Foucault involves the uncovering of historical ‘statements’
(defined, in its simplest form, as a singular unit of discourse) and an
analysis of the principles and systems of thought which govern their coming
into discourse, that is, their acceptance as statements of truth.
Although published three years earlier, The Order of Things
arguably takes the concept of archaeology further than in Archaeology of data ,
aligning it more closely with Foucault’s later thinking on the history of
systems of thought. The Order of Things presents an archaeology of systems of
data which reveal the structures common to discourses of particular historical
periods, which Foucault calls the ‘episteme’. In doing so, he provides an
account of the connection between archaeology and episteme:
Unknown to themselves, the naturalist, the economists, and
grammarians employed an equivalent rules to define the objects proper to their
own study, to make their concepts, to create their theories. it's these rules
of formation, which were never formulated in their title , but are to be found
only in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, that I even
have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, A level that I
even have called, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, archaeological.
For Giorgio Agamben, Foucaultian archaeology was concerned
with revealing the formation of the order of data ‒ what Foucault calls here
the ‘rules of formation’ – that govern the creation of particular discourses
within particular historic periods. These ‘rules of formation’ govern, too,
what propositions are included within this discourse as accepted knowledge, or
‘truth’, and also, therefore, what are excluded. As noted above, Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. within the
Order of Things Foucault sets out how, within distinct historical periods,
there have been similarities across the ‘rules of formation’ of various
discursive regimes. it's the parallel relationship between various discourses
of a given time which Foucault describes because the episteme: ‘the total set
of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that
produce to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems’.
Interestingly, however, in Archaeology of data Foucault
articulates how identifying the episteme ‘makes it possible to understand the
set of constraints and limitations which, at a given moment, are imposed on
discourse’. Ironically, such a search into the ‘constraints and limitations’ of
discourse necessarily goes beyond the archaeological method which Foucault
describes as ‘pure description’ (italics in original). the thought of
archaeology worrying only with describing historical traces of the emergence of
discourse, actually delimits the role of the archaeologist within the
interpretation and analysis of the discursive statements she discovers; an
interpretation and analysis necessary so as to enable an evaluation of
‘constraints and limitations. imposed on discourse’. it's this type of paradox
inherent within Foucault’s formation of the archaeological critique which led
him to transform the concept into his later notion of ‘genealogy’.
In this book, Foucault brings multiple disciplines in touch
on the way to do history. He draws from philosophy, sociology, phenomenology,
and therefore the history of ideas. But especially , he develops his own
terminology to elucidate how he thinks history need to be done, departing from
then-contemporary trends. In Archaeology, he defines such important concepts as
“discourse,” “archive,” and “episteme.” In doing so, he relies upon the three
histories he had written within the 1960s to demonstrate his method in
“practice.” Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. Thus, the book is both a defense and systematization of his add the
1960s and a manifesto for others to require up an identical approach.
Because of his incredible range and prolific output,
Foucault has been one among the foremost influential scholars of the 20th
century. In fact, consistent with many citation collections, he's perhaps the
foremost referenced scholar within the humanities. As such, it's difficult to
put Archaeology of data , especially , within his wider legacy. it's perhaps
less influential than the particular histories he wrote, especially Discipline
and Punish and therefore the History of Sexuality. But because the rare text
during which Foucault presents, dissects, and analyzes his own method, The
Archaeology of data may be a singular text in his oeuvre. Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. It continues to
supply the important concepts and approaches that historians and important theorists
in his wake draw upon to know how unspoken assumptions organize what actually
appears within the historical document .
In this book, Foucault brings multiple disciplines in touch
on the way to do history. He draws from philosophy, sociology, phenomenology,
and therefore the history of ideas. But in particular , he develops his own
terminology to elucidate how he thinks history need to be done, departing from
then-contemporary trends. In Archaeology, he defines such important concepts as
“discourse,” “archive,” and “episteme.” In doing so, he relies upon the three
histories he had written within the 1960s to demonstrate his method in
“practice.” Thus, the book is both a defense and systematization of his add the
1960s and a manifesto for others to require up an identical approach.
Because of his incredible range and prolific output,
Foucault has been one among the foremost influential scholars of the 20th
century. In fact, consistent with many citation collections, he's perhaps the
foremost referenced scholar within the humanities. As such, it's difficult to
put Archaeology of data , in particular, within his wider legacy. it's perhaps
less influential than the particular histories he wrote, especially Discipline
and Punish and therefore the History of Sexuality. But because the rare text
during which Foucault presents, dissects, and analyzes his own method, The
Archaeology of data may be a singular text in his oeuvre. Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. It continues to
supply the important concepts and approaches that historians and important
theorists in his wake draw upon to know how unspoken assumptions organize what
actually appears within the historical document .
MICHEL FOUCAULT within the Archaeology of data rejects the
normal historian's tendency to read straightforward narratives of progress
within the historical record: "For a few years now," he writes,
"historians have preferred to show their attention to long periods, as if,
beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal
the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the
irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies
that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of
continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the good silent,
motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of
events". Foucault, against this , argues that one should seek to
reconstitute not large "periods" or "centuries" but
"phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity" . the matter , he argues,
"is not one among tradition, of tracing a line, but one among division, of
limits" . rather than presenting a monolithic version of a given period,
Foucault argues that we must reveal how any given period reveals "several
pasts, several sorts of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several
networks of determination, several teleologies, for one and therefore the same
science, as its present undergoes change: thus historical descriptions are
necessarily ordered by this state of data , they increase with every
transformation and never cease, in turn, to interrupt with themselves".
"Archaeology
tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes,
preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses
themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules" (138).
Foucault doesn't examine historical documents so as to read in them "a
sign of something else" (138), for instance the "truth" or
"spirit" of a given period . Rather Foucault tries to form sense of
how a period's very approach to key terms like "history,"
"oeuvre," or "subjectivity" affect that period's
understanding of itself and its history.
"Archaeology
doesn't seek to rediscover the continual , insensible transition that relates
discourses, on a mild slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows
them" (139). Instead, Foucault wishes to know how disparate discourses
function by their own distinct sets of rules and methods . Discuss Foucault’s concept of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. Archaeology wishes
to "show in what way the set of rules that [discourses] put into operation
is irreducible to any other" (139). In other words, different discourses
have a disjunctive or discontinuous reference to one another .
Archaeology "does not attempt to grasp the instant
during which the œuvre emerges on the anonymous horizon. It doesn't wish to
rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and therefore the social
are inverted into each other . it's neither a psychology, nor a sociology, nor
more generally an anthropology of creation" (139). Rather, archaeology
examines how one œuvre are often shot through with different "types of
rules for discursive practices" (139). It treats "different rules for
discursive practices" as distinct from one another , and thus never
subsumable into some all-encompassing concept (e.g., the "author" or
the "spirit of the age").