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The Archaeology of Knowledge (Template:Lang-fr) is a 1969 book by philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault's main excursion into methodology, it provided an anti-humanist excavation of the human sciences, particularly, but not exclusively, psychology and sociology. He wrote it in order to deal with much of the negative reception that The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses) had received, and to describe the methods he used in his first three books.

On the Archaeology of Knowledge

Foucault directs his analysis toward the "statement", the basic unit of discourse that he believes has been ignored up to this point. "Statement" is the English translation from French énoncé (that which is enunciated or expressed), which has a peculiar meaning for Foucault. "Énoncé" for Foucault means that which makes propositions, utterances, or speech acts meaningful. In this understanding, statements themselves are not propositions, utterances, or speech acts. Rather, statements create a network of rules establishing what is meaningful, and it is these rules that are the preconditions for propositions, utterances, or speech acts to have meaning. Depending on whether or not they comply with the rules of meaning, a grammatically correct sentence may still lack meaning and inversely, an incorrect sentence may still be meaningful. Statements depend on the conditions in which they emerge and exist within a field of discourse. It is towards huge entities of statements, called discursive formations, that Foucault aims his analysis. Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible tactic, and that he is not seeking to displace other ways of analysing discourse or render them as invalid.

Foucault's posture toward the statements is radical. Not only does he bracket out issues of truth; he also brackets out issues of meaning. Rather than looking for a deeper meaning underneath discourse or looking for the source of meaning in some transcendental subject, Foucault analyzes the conditions of existence for meaning. In order to show the principles of meaning production in various discursive formations he details how truth claims emerge during various epochs on the basis of what was actually said and written during these periods of time. He particularly describes the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and the 20th Century. He strives to avoid all interpretation and to depart from the goals of hermeneutics. This posture allows Foucault to move away from an anthropological standpoint and focus on the role of discursive practices.

Dispensing with finding a deeper meaning behind discourse would appear to lead Foucault toward structuralism. However, whereas structuralists search for homogeneity in a discursive entity, Foucault focuses on differences. Instead of asking what constitutes the specificity of European thought he asks what differences develop within it over time. Therefore, he refuses to examine statements outside of their role in the discursive formation, and he never examines possible statements that could have emerged from such a formation. His identity as a historian emerges here, as he is only interested in analysing actual statements in history. The whole of the system and its discursive rules determine the identity of the statement. But, a discursive formation continually generates new statements, and some of these usher in changes in the discursive formation that may or may not be realized. Therefore, to describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happen to change the discursive formation. Their difference to the dominant discourse also describe it. In this way one can describe specific systems that determine which types of statements emerge.

Foucault's views on discourse was one of the most controversial of the book. His idea that discourse can be described in and of itself (not as a sign of what is known but as a precondition for knowledge) opened up possibilities for showing that what we think we know is actually contingent on how we talk about it.

Episteme

Foucault redefines his notion of the "episteme" in the Archaeology of Knowledge. The term no longer refers to a set of things known by a collective scientific subject, but rather to a set of discursive relations without content and without a knowing subject. The episteme, therefore, is now the specific set of relations that makes it possible for discourse to be taken as 'knowledge' and then as 'science'; it mediates between less systematic discursive positivities and increasingly regularized ones. Knowledge itself, therefore, is merely another discursive effect. In other words, knowledge is the set of discursive relations that make it possible for a statement to qualify as something that is known.

Reception

In his book Foucault (1986), Gilles Deleuze describes The Archaeology of Knowledge as "the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities."

See also

• Foucauldian discourse analysis

Notes

1. Deleuze, Foucault (1986, p.14).

References

• Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. London: Althone, 1988. ISBN 0-8264-5780-0.
• Foucault, Michel. 1969. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-28753-7.

• 1969 books
• Books about discourse analysis
• Philosophy books
• Works by Michel Foucault