The Original and the Regular
Foucault says that historians of ideas are obsessed with the “new” or “original,” how something is invented in discourse that is different from what came before. Ironically, Foucault thinks it is far more important to describe as much how discourse remains stable, rather than becoming new. That’s because, as counterintuitive as it seems, keeping things stable requires as much work as creating something new. People have to keep saying the same things for a period of time in order for the “regular” to be kept alive. For Foucault, it is therefore a mistake to assume innovation or originality is the exception rather than the rule, as if discourse is generally stable and then every once in a while something new pops on the scene. The task of archaeology is not to evaluate newness, but regularity: how a discourse groups together different concepts and how different concepts come to relate to or deviate from one another.
The Presence of Absence
Most other historical studies, Foucault claims, talk about an excess of discourse in relation to some object: the great abundance of what is said. They then try to find common principles underlying this excess. In contrast, Foucault is interested in principles that explain “rarity,” too. This means the fact that there is so much that is not said about something at a given time. Why do some statements appear at one time when other statements that are imaginably possible do not? How do we explain the great amount of exclusion? To answer these questions, Foucault says we have to find common rules or conditions that explain both what appears and what does not. In other words, an absence in discourse is still the positive manifestation of a rule. Ironically, absences are as much produced as presences.
The Utility of Failure
A central motif throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge is reversal: what other historians consider a liability or failure, Foucault exploits in order to do history differently. This begins with the “discontinuity” in the historical record, or gaps in history and the gap between histories of different things. Whereas this is of concern to others, Foucault wants to tell the story precisely of this discontinuity, or the “dispersion” of documents, which means not unifying events under a single principle, but exploring all the different relations between very different and simultaneously unfolding timelines and domains. In a similar fashion, Foucault is untroubled by “contradiction” in the historical record. 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, it seeks to identify, name, and analyze all the contradictions that exist in a discourse and the different levels to which they apply. In both cases—the discontinuity and the contradiction of the historical record—Foucault provides an ironic reversal: what others consider a liability or failure, he considers an opportunity to succeed in a new direction.
