[I]n our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities.
In this quote, Foucault distinguishes archaeology from previous approaches to history. Previous historians approached discourse as a “document” or record of something else they were studying. You might read discourse in order to track the events of a war or the steps leading up to a scientific discovery. In this case, discourse documents some other monument, such as politics or science. Instead, Foucault approaches discourse as a monument in itself. That means studying how the discourse came into being and the rules underlying how and when things can be said.
If the history of thought could remain the locus of uninterrupted continuities, if it could endlessly forge connections that no analysis could undo without abstraction, if it could weave, around everything that men say and do, obscure syntheses that anticipate for him, prepare him, and lead him endlessly towards his future, it would provide a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness.
Most historians like to tell straightforward stories connecting the dots in the historical record. This event caused that event, which led to this outcome. Foucault rejects this kind of history of “continuity,” but he understands its attraction. Such a simple, causational history privileges the agency of individuals, or the “sovereignty of consciousness.” That’s because you can say how the actions willed by one individual, such as a king or inventor, changed the course of history. In contrast, Foucault thinks the history of discourse is not made by individuals, but by social forces and orders much larger than one person.
Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation.
In this quote, Foucault defines the important concept of the discursive formation. Instead of looking for ways of grouping statements under a common theme, Foucault argues we should look for what he calls “systems of dispersion.” This is his term for how statements are not cohered around something in common, but instead create differences that run in all sorts of directions. Statements are connected in terms of “regularity,” when a certain kind of statement keeps showing up in a particular time and place. Then the question becomes why this statement keeps showing up, why it has become what Foucault calls a relatively stable “discursive formation.”
Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.
Foucault views discourse as being conditioned by rules and orders prior to any statement. That means that when something is said, it is manifesting a larger structure of what it is possible to say at a given time. In turn, statements do not belong to individuals, as if someone sits back and decides what to say. Rather, the regularity of statements belongs to the rules of discourse. In turn, Foucault decenters individual agency in discursive formation.
We set out with an observation: with the unity of a discourse like that of clinical medicine, or political economy, or natural history, we are dealing with a dispersion of elements. This dispersion itself—with its gaps, its discontinuities, its entanglements, its incompatibilities, its replacements, and its substitutions—can be described in its uniqueness if one is able to determine the specific rules in accordance with which its objects, statements, concepts, and theoretical options have been formed: if there really is a unity, it does not lie in the visible, horizontal coherence of the elements formed; it resides, well anterior to their formation, in the system that makes possible and governs that formation.
This quote comes at the end of Part 2, as Foucault summarizes the process he has undertaken in “The Discursive Regularities.” First, he has recast discourse as about dispersion instead of continuity. Then, he has found ways of looking at the rules that dictate what is said and where and when, which explains diversity rather than unity in the discourse. To the extent that statements nonetheless go together, this is not a unity based on surface appearances, like a common theme or a common author, but based instead on being motivated by the same rules.
A statement is not confronted (face to face, as it were) by a correlate—or the absence of a correlate—as a proposition has (or has not) a referent, or as a proper noun designates someone (or no one). It is linked rather to a ‘referential’ that is made up not of ‘things’, ‘facts’, ‘realities’, or ‘beings’, but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it. The referential of the statement forms the place, the condition, the field of emergence, the authority to differentiate between individuals or objects, states of things and relations that are brought into play by the statement itself; it defines the possibilities of appearance and delimitation of that which gives meaning to the sentence, a value as truth to the proposition.
A referent is what a word stands for or represents, like the actual tree in the world denoted by the word “tree.” 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 (because doctors are authorized to study hallucinations). Statements are not descriptions of the world, but products of the rules for describing the world. The rules are what matter.
[T]he analysis of statements and discursive formations opens up a quite contrary direction: it wishes to determine the principle according to which only the ‘signifying’ groups that were enunciated could appear. It sets out to establish a law of rarity.
Most other 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. 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. Absences are as much produced as presences, and just as important to study.
The analysis of statements operates therefore without reference to a cogito. It does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his sovereign freedom, or who, without realizing it, subjects himself to constraints of which he is only dimly aware. In fact, it is situated at the level of the ‘it is said’…
For Foucault, a “cogito” is a thinking subject. The commonsense understanding of discourse is that it is produced by thinking subjects: someone thinks something, and then sits down and writes it. In contrast, Foucault thinks statements refer not to the wills of individuals but a larger set of rules that determine what it is even possible to think or say in the first place. In turn, the speaker of a statement is an “empty function” that does not have to be assigned to any one person. We are interested in the statement itself, not who happened to write it down, for the statement expresses a social logic rather than an individual belief. Discourse has autonomy from individuals.
To describe a group of statements not as the closed, plethoric totality of a meaning, but as an incomplete, fragmented figure; to describe a group of statements not with reference to the interiority of an intention, a thought, or a subject, but in accordance with the dispersion of an exteriority; to describe a group of statements, in order to rediscover not the moment or the trace of their origin, but the specific forms of an accumulation, is certainly not to uncover an interpretation, to discover a foundation, or to free constituent acts; nor is it to decide on a rationality, or to embrace a teleology. It is to establish what I am quite willing to call a positivity.
Statements do not refer to the world, but to the rules under which they are speakable. This means their “referent” is outside the statement itself. Statements are organized by rules not spoken in the statement itself. Thus, the proper task of Foucault’s archaeology is exploring the “exteriority” of statements—the conditions under which they emerge and the rules of discourse that constrain and facilitate them—rather than what is inside of the statement itself. Foucault calls this a “positivity” because it is the positive manifestation of rules: what is visible has been governed by a system before appearing.
Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument.
Here again Foucault makes a distinction between document and monument, but at the end of Archaeology of Knowledge, we are in a better position to understand what he means. These are really two names for two different approaches to discourse. If we approach discourse as a document, we think it is a record of something else. Thus, we read discourse to understand the events of a country’s history we are interested in, or the discoveries leading up to a great invention. In contrast, if we approach discourse as a monument, we are studying the discourse itself and are interested in its own history, as different concepts come in and out of being or become related to one another. In either case, the “monument” is the name of what historians are really studying. For traditional historians, this monument is a sequence of events, recorded in discourse. For archaeologists, the monument is the discourse itself.
It ceases, therefore, to treat contradictions as a general function operating, in the same way, at all levels of discourse, and which analysis should either suppress entirely or lead back to a primary, constitutive form: for the great game of contradiction—present under innumerable guises, then suppressed, and finally restored in the major conflict in which it culminates—it substitutes the analysis of different types of contradiction, different levels in accordance with which it can be mapped, different functions that it can exercise.
The “It” in this quote is archaeology, and Foucault is discussing how it is different from the traditional history of ideas. 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.
