Image of Continuity
In the opening pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes two competing tendencies in the work of contemporary historians. The first belongs to historians who study traditional topics like material things and political events. These historians, Foucault, says, tend to study continuity: how a stable structure or narrative underlies a series of events. He provides this image:
Beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars, and famines, there emerge other, apparently unmoving histories: the history of sea routes, the history of corn or of gold-mining, the history of drought and of irrigation, the history of crop rotation, the history of the balance achieved by the human species between hunger and abundance. (3-4)
Here, historians study things and processes that remain stable across time, or seem to be untouched by upheavals between historical periods. This is Foucault’s image of continuity.
Image of Discontinuity
In contrast to historians of continuity, historians who study ideas and knowledge—the emergence and spread of concepts—tend to study discontinuity: the sudden appearance of unexpected ideas. Here is Foucault’s image of the kind of ruptures this history studies:
Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogeneous manifestations of a single mind or of a collective mentality, beneath the stubborn development of a science striving to exist and to reach completion at the very outset, beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions. (4)
This is an image of something new emerging suddenly out of something old. As Foucault will explain in Part 4 of the book, he thinks this picture is also wrong. Invention is rarely a sudden event like these historians suggest.
Image of Dispersion
Foucault advocates a historical method that he calls archaeology, which is about dispersion rather than continuity. This means not reducing the complexity of discourse, but describing all its complication and the principles that produce it. Here is Foucault’s image of dispersion:
Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these elements, which are certainly not organized as a progressively deductive structure, nor as an enormous book that is being gradually and continuously written, nor as the œuvre of a collective subject, one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations. (41)
Instead of a book or a linear structure, Foucault studies regularity, how different objects accumulate over time through repetition and spread in discourse. This is more like studying a network than a mathematical formula.
