Michel Foucault’s essay ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ is a study of the theoretical problems behind the concepts used in historical analysis. In order to engage with these problems he has to begin with ‘negative work’. He must first take away the idea of the continuity of history. In taking this away he brings into light what he calls ‘The Unities of Discourse’ & ‘Discursive Formations’. Instead of looking for a historical narrative he investigates the ordering of objects. He asks powerful questions & persuasive speculations on history but he is not clear on how such a view of history can be used in reading theory. I have put in the three chosen paragraphs at the beginning not because I believe this is the best way to write but because this seems to be the best way of keeping the essay clear. His writing style also resists being shortened, paraphrased or quoted but as we will see that is exactly what he wants.
“We must also question those divisions or groupings with which we have becomes so familiar. Can one accept, as such, the distinction between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc., and which tend to create certain great historic individualities? We are not even sure of ourselves when we use these distinctions in our own world of discourse, let alone when we are analyzing groups of statement which, when first formulated, were distributed, divided, and characterized in a quite different way: after all “literature” and “politics” are recent categories, which can be applied to medieval culture, or even classical culture, only by a retrospective hypothesis, and by an interplay of formal analogies or semantic resemblances; but neither literature, nor politics, nor philosophy and the sciences articulated the field of discourse, in the seventeenth or eighteenth centaury, as they did in the nineteenth centaury. In any case, these divisions- whether our own, or those contemporary with the discourse under examination- are always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types: they, in turn, are facts of discourse that deserve to be analyzed beside others; of course, they also have complex relations with each other, but they are not intrinsic, autochthonous, and universally recognizable characteristics.”
“We must ask ourselves what purpose is ultimately served by this suspension of all the accepted unities, if, in the end, we return to the unities that we pretended to question at the outset. In fact, the systematic erasure of all given unities enables us first of all to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence, and to show that discontinuity is one of those great accidents that create cracks not only in the geology of history but also in the simple fact of the statement; it emerges in its historical irruption; what we try to examine is the incision that it makes, that irreducible-and very often tiny- emergence. However banal it may be, however unimportant its consequences may appear to be, however quickly it may be forgotten after its appearance, however little heard or however badly deciphered we may suppose to be, a statement is always an event that neither the language nor the meaning can quite exhaust. It is certainly a strange event: first, because on the one hand it is linked to the gesture of writing or to the articulation of speech, and also on the other hand it opens up to itself a residual existence in the field of a memory, in the materiality of manuscripts, books, or any other form of recording; second because, like every even, it is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, a reactivation; thirdly, because it is linked not only to the situations that provoke and to the consequences that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in accordance with a quite different modality, to the statements that precede and follow it.”
“The sagacity of the commentators is nor mistaken: from the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any reference to the living plenitude of experience. We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse- in which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light; an we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse itself.”…“I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects.”…“Of course, 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.”
His argument in the first paragraph states that it is wrong to assume that history has categories. In history there are no clear markers as to when the Victorian period ended & the modern period begun. In trying to understand history it has been cut up in blocks when it is really like trying to cut up water. One period flows into another messily. From this it is taken that modern knowledge is based on a revision of history that misleads & masks. Literary Critics end up looking at Romantic Poets rather than seeing Samuel Coleridge. In turn books should not be seen as a complete work but as a bundle of notes bounded together. Books are not the plants growing into a definite shape but the puzzles made out of storms. Retrospectively applying the label of Book onto a bundle of notes should not make it more complete. These labels are what Foucault would like to dispel.
A good example of discontinuity I think comes from Don Patterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary. Patterson reveals that he wrote the book ‘while awake, bored, half-asleep, full of cold, drunk, exhausted, serene, smart, befuddled & stupid’[1] & we must imagine that it was the same for Shakespeare. Foucault wishes to get at, or at least acknowledge, the writer as a living person and not as an antique item. My own example would be that I write this on an empty stomach in anticipation of going to the pub; but not even that would be totally accurate. This demonstrates the extreme difficulty of exact interpretations in Foucault’s method. The point of this method is not to show its weakness in providing interpretations but the weakness of interpretations in general. For the margin for error is a chasm wide.
Foucault’s questions are not the usual philosophical ‘Why?’ but rather an oddly pragmatic ‘How?’ In literature he would ask, “How is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?” To translate this back into orthodox it could be asked, “Why did it take one thousand, eight hundred & eighteen years for ‘Frankenstein’ to be written?” Asking ‘How?’ kicks the critic temporarily off kilter because the resources for answering such a reasonable question are not readily there. This shakes the certainty of a critic’s assumptions for what they do not have evidence for.
To an extent I am in agreement with Foucault because it is all too easier for the labels of a particular period to become misunderstood shorthand for unrelated assumptions about certain writers, just as it is commonly misunderstood whom Frankenstein is. I can understand the need for, at least the awareness of, more detail for a complete picture but I can also see the need for titles for certain people & periods. It is important to be aware that history is made up of more than the artifacts that are left to us & it is important to know that we cannot simply reach for history, as Marx would have it, to prop up our own ideology; but how far are we supposed to go with this?
Searching for a more complete picture opens up the floodgates of detail that we may be unable to deal with. He does not expound in this essay exactly how we could study history from this view it but as a speculative point it is solid. The question of the discursive formulation seems to be more of a point of re-sizing the weighty perspective of history & scaling it down to a more accurate proportion. Again this is fine as theory but I would like to know what would be the practical consequences of its procedure of dealing with the ‘strange event’.
In the second paragraph he gives a three-part description of the ‘strange event’. It is wonderfully articulate &, I would believe it to be, an accurate description of history experienced; but one should ask how strange is this event? This event is really very ordinary as it occurs with regularity & consistency. What should be strange is that any sort of form can be made out of it at all.
There seems to be vagueness about what it is he is putting forward. If I understand what he is trying to communicate then there is an impossibility of studying history. What he may be doing is shifting our view of history from revisionist terms into an attempt to view history in a way that is more grounded on political rules & less subject to bias. But does not ‘loosening the embrace…of words and things’ make history the more flexible & more affected by bias?
I think the problem I am having with this view is that it turns the study of history, & to an extent literature, almost impossible in terms of extracting knowledge. This is I suppose the point of this essay that Foucault himself exemplifies in his writings. He is demonstrating the unreliability of history by resisting summary. This results in any commentary about Foucault to be messy, incomplete & difficult to penetrate. I would question here the assumptions being made about historians because I feel that an excellent historian would understand the amount of uncharted levels of detail involved in life & would peel back the historical labels to describe this discontinuity.
Another problem I am having is in the third paragraph as he describes how we should ‘stay at the level of discourse’. How can one ‘stay at the level of discourse’ when an inevitably pattern will emerge. It is certainly a hard task to maintain considering how prone the human mind is at ordering & collecting. If he could also provide an example of what the level of discourse looks like when it is talked about then that would strengthen his argument. For now I am unsure how it would be possible to have a discussion purely in discourse.
His lack of examples (though he promises us there will be some) shows his assumptions about the necessity of not returning to the ‘state anterior’. I would phrase this question of assumption by asking in the Foucalian manner “How are these ‘discursive formations’ needed?”
I am not prepared to go into a hypothesis about the hows of these discursive formations since it would require from me more reading than I have committed into this subject. I feel that the question does address the problem of the strength of his assumptions & the rigor of his thought. I worry that if one questions the underpinnings of Foucault he will crumble into pieces making the job of the commentator one of sweeping up the crumbs of his big ideas. I will now turn to how this view affects other reading theories.
For the Literary Critic this unity of discourse view of history makes close-reading strained as a scientifically viable exercise since the profound lack of evidence in regards to an author’s influence means it has more to do with convincing assumptions. With this exposed as being an unreliable method the critic must have a more personal, subject basis of criticism over the empirical & the objective. My query here would not be to question how accurate this is but to question the alertness of the critics. Are they not already aware of this problem? It is after all why critics, like the historian, present their interpretations as arguments & not facts. The stronger & more sophisticated the argument of an interpretation the more convincing it is. Making it more believable. It does have to be a belief but it does not necessarily need to be irrational. Foucault presents this problem as something new but I think the critics had been on to this for a long time. They had simply never expressed this in such detail as Foucault does.
For the time being I think that there is a purpose to a ‘return to the unities’ of the third paragraph because there has to be at some point in communication a simplification. Otherwise how could history be talked about in any meaningful way if we couldn’t use labels such as The Romantic Period? This idea quickly becomes anarchic & unmanageable. That would be why we use classifications & organising language to keep a hold on history in discussions. I think what he is trying to describe is the misuse of the word History when it really stands for Civilization, since it is the steady civilization that produces the artifacts that is in turn studied. It would be difficult, for example, to imagine how a History of Homelessness could be drawn out. This would tie-in thematically well to his other work on power & knowledge.
It’s hard to disagree with what he has said but it is too vague too really make use out of it. The implications of his hypothesis are clouded & what it would really mean for the critic is unclear. He also opens up a lot of problems about method that will make many critics uncomfortable with because they do not have the resources to cope. It is unfortunate that his style makes him difficult to pin down in a commentary, rendering it by default into a rambling, hotchpotch explanation, because if he would employ a clearer style it would equally unfortunately undermine what he is trying to achieve.
He ends the essay in the last paragraph writing that it is this unexpressed more that we must reveal. If this is possible than this essay will thankfully become more than simply good speculation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Foucault, Michel, ‘The Archeology of Knowledge’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) pp 90-96
Patterson, Don, ‘Lust In Action’, The Guardian Review (16.10.2010), 2-4.
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