The Archaeology of Knowledge is Foucault’s statement on historiography: how to do history. Over the course of five Parts, Foucault explains how he has been doing history, in particular how he has constructed a history of social structures by way of “discourse,” or the statements left in the historical record.
In Part 1, Foucault explains what he sees as the current crisis in the study of history. This is that history has recently had to confront discontinuity, including gaps in the historical record and gaps between histories of different things. It is no longer possible to construct a single history of a civilization, reading as a timeline of its important events. Rather, historians have to make decisions over what events even go together, and in doing so, which archives they will draw upon to tell their story. In fact, Foucault argues, historians need to stop paying so much attention to events at all. Instead, we should look at how people talk about the world at a particular time, in order to understand how social structures work at that time. And to understand how societies change, we should look at how the way people talk about them changes. This means treating documents not as records of what has happened, but rather as texts that indicate the assumptions underlying a larger social order. The ways things are talked about in historical documents tell us more than the events they refer to.
Part 2 of The Archaeology of Knowledge is on “Discursive Regularities,” or how to deal with a historical record that is fundamentally discontinuous. Foucault invites us to reject any pre-given way of organizing the documents of history, for instance according to theme, author, discipline, or “tradition.” These categories have to be proven, not assumed from the beginning. Instead, we should look at the mass of statements made in documents and see what patterns and connections naturally emerge. When a particular kind of statement keeps showing up, for instance, we should ask when, where, and under what conditions it shows up. Foucault calls this a “discursive formation,” and the task of history is to unpack the “rules of formation” under which a certain kind of statement has achieved regularity. Foucault lists the kinds of things we should pay attention to in learning these rules. Who gets to speak a statement? In what institutions or contexts are the statement intelligible? And how do these statements construct different concepts and relate them in a common “field”? By exploring such questions, we learn how a discourse emerges as if of its own force. This is not a history of geniuses who invented new concepts, but a history of how particular concepts and ideas emerge within particular social and cultural contexts, as many people begin to talk about the same thing in the same way.
Part 3 turns to the analysis of the “statement,” the fundamental unit of discourse analysis. Foucault argues that a statement is defined by its “function,” in particular the fact that it brings into existence rules for ordering different concepts. What matters are these rules, the unspoken constraints on what it is possible to speak at a given time. What does not matter is the particular individual who speaks a statement. No individual owns the rules of a discourse, just like no individual is in charge of the language of a society. As a related consequence, it does not matter where statements come from, but how statements “accumulate.” This means how statements begin to refer to and build on one another. By exploring statements in this way, we can explain how a social order transforms in terms of the ways in which a world is understood and organized at a given time.
In Part 4, Foucault expands his analysis to explain how this method, of studying statements in order to describe discursive formations, is different from the ways in which others are doing history, especially in the history of ideas. Foucault calls what he is doing, not history, but archaeology. Foucault considers 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 of what it is possible to think and speak at a given time. This means Foucault is not looking for coherent, singular narratives, or for general truths. He is interested as much in the gaps in discourse as in the continuities. And he is not interested in individuals, or the inventors and discoverers of ideas. He is interested in discourse, with its own autonomy and rules of organization.
In his Conclusion to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault answers possible critiques of his method. Most importantly, he explains that his archaeology is not just another “structuralism.” In structuralism, the elements of a society or language can be described in relation to a master system. The concern is that such an emphasis on a system makes it impossible to see historical change or the role of individuals within the system. Foucault says he eliminated neither individuals nor history, however. Instead, he proliferated the different subject positions that individuals can take in discourse, which means he actually enriched and deepened our understanding of individual speaking subjects. Rather than focus on any one individual, he looks at the conditions under which individuals speak in the first place. Similarly, Foucault does not reject historical change, but approaches change in terms of how discourses develop and accumulate. This may not be a history of dates and events, but it is still a history of social change.
