The Archaeology of Knowledge Essay Questions

What does it mean to treat discourse as a monument?

Foucault considers historical documents to be “monuments” that have to be excavated, rather than mere records of other monumental things, like the events of a war or the series of inventions and discoveries that led to the light bulb. Archaeology does not study discourse in order to understand something else. Rather, it studies documents in order to understand the documents themselves, how they emerge within a field of unspoken rules that determine what it is possible to think and speak at a given time. Foucault’s archaeology, as he puts it, “is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument.”

What steps does Foucault offer to help us explore the “formation of objects”?

Foucault offers three steps. First, look at “surfaces of emergence,” or in what contexts these objects are first discussed. For instance, perhaps some objects were first talked about in relation to the familial context or a religious context, and so they emerge within a domestic or religious discourse. Second, look at “authorities of delimitation,” or the institutions that are authorized to talk about these objects. This might be medical professionals, for instance. Third, look at “grids of specification,” or how different objects are related to one another or put into organizational systems.

What is the “referent” of a statement?

Foucault’s “statements” do not refer to something in the world, as the word “doctor” does to an actual doctor. Rather, the “referent” for a statement is the field of emergence of the statement itself, or the rules under which it makes sense for “doctor” and “hallucination” to appear together. Statements are not descriptions of the world, but products of the rules for describing the world. The rules are what matter.

Why is the “original” not so different from the “regular”?

Both “original” and “regular” statements—what historians of ideas might call new statements and old statements—require work. Even maintaining stability requires activity, because it means people have to keep saying similar things instead of something else. Saying the same thing is just as active as saying a new thing. In turn, the task of Foucault’s archaeology is not to evaluate newness, but to determine regularity: to show how a discourse groups together different concepts and how different concepts come to relate to or deviate from one another.

What are the four “principles” that distinguish archaeology from the history of ideas?

First, archaeology does not study discourse in order to understand the events it represents, like reading documents from a war to understand the war. Rather, it wants to understand the conditions under which it made sense for the discourse to be written the way the way it was. This is what it means to treat discourse as a monument rather than a document. Second, its aim is not general truths, but the specificity of discourse; it likes discontinuity, or how one thing is not another, more than continuity, or false groupings that make disparate documents seem to be similar. Third, it is not interested in psychology or what motivates individuals to say a specific thing, because archaeology is first and foremost a study of impersonal rules that belong to no one in particular. Fourth, it does not seek to understand the essence of some statement from the past because, again, it is interested in what is exterior to the statement, the rules that condition its existence to begin with.

How does archaeology differ from the history of ideas in its treatment of contradiction?

Historians of ideas, according to Foucault, dislike contradiction and try to eliminate it from their analysis. They do so in one of two ways. First, they argue that what appears to be a contradiction on the surface actually indicates the unity of a discourse as a whole. Second, they may argue that contradiction is itself what creates discourse, in which case they have reduced the complexity of discourse to a single rule, a single contradiction. In contrast, “for archaeological analysis, contradictions are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered.” Instead, archaeology seeks to identify, name, and analyze all the contradictions that exist in a discourse and the different levels to which they apply.

What is epistemoligization?

This term comes up in Foucault’s discussion of how to do histories of science. There, Foucault argues that discourses come to be recognized as “science” or “scientific” because they pass through a special process of development. A science creates its own explicit rules for how to proceed and what counts as knowledge within its domain. This is called “epistemologization,” and Foucault says archaeology is primarily interested in the conditions and rules under which something comes to count as knowledge.

What, according to Foucault, is an archive?

For Foucault, the archive is a “system of statements,” or more specifically, the discursive practices that cause statements to achieve regularity. It is a “general system of the formation and transformation of statements,” or in other words, the archive is Foucault’s term for the conditions and rules of discourse itself. This is in sharp contrast to a sense of an archive as a library of all a culture’s documents, or a set of traditions. Ultimately, archaeology is the study of this archive, the description of how a monument of discourse organizes what is said at a particular time.

What does it mean to treat the “exteriority” of statements?

Statements do not refer to the world, but to the rules under which statements themselves are speakable. This means their “referent” is outside the statement itself. Statements are organized by rules not explicit in the statement itself. Thus, the proper task of Foucault’s archaeology is exploring the “exteriority” of statements—the conditions under which statements emerge and the rules of discourse that constrain and facilitate them—rather than inside of the statement itself.

What is the relation of discourse to individuals?

Foucault argues that discourse is independent of individuals. How statements in documents change over time cannot be controlled by the will of any one person. That means we decenter human agency in historical analysis. We do not need to know the biographies of speakers to analyze the shape of discourse itself.