Summary of Part 3
In the previous Part, Foucault argued we should focus history on the conditions and rules under which statements come into existence, discovering the unspoken organization of knowledge within a particular society at a particular time. But what is a statement, in the first place? And how do we move from studying statements, which are visible to us, to studying organizations and rules of knowledge, which are invisible? That is the task of Part 3, “The Statement and the Archive,” to spell out. As in previous chapters, he begins Chapter 1, “Defining the Statement,” by considering all the things a statement is not, or all the ways in which a statement cannot be defined. It cannot be defined grammatically, as if a statement is a specific kind of sentence. Nor is it a particular kind of proposition or speech act. At the same time, it is not simply a material object, like a tablet bearing writing. This is because a statement, as Foucault defines it, is not really an object at all. It is, instead, “a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space.” In other words, a statement manifests different rules for ordering different concepts. A statement is what enables something like “madness” and “doctor” to appear in the same sentence.
Chapter 2 explores this “Enunciative Function” further. He spells out four aspects of statements, that is, ways of organizing different concepts together. First, 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. This means, second, that statements do not belong to those who speak them. For if statements refer to the rules for their enunciation, then they are not formulated by individuals in a strict sense. 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.
Third, a statement only makes sense in the particular “domain” in which it emerges. This domain is larger than what we usually think of as “context,” or the particular situation in which something was said. Instead, it refers to the entire discourse in which a statement makes sense. The point is that statements about madness that make sense in the discourse of psychopathology do not make sense in, say, the discourse of economics or political theory. Fourth, although statements are independent of a particular speaker, they are nonetheless material and “bound up with what surrounds and supports it.” Statements always come through some medium, and that matters: the same sentence means different things whether spoken in a conversation or printed in a novel. But Foucault rejects a kind of radical materialism in which every instance of a sentence is unique, as if a statement in this edition of the book is necessarily different from its printing in that book; or as if the statement is necessarily different if I speak it instead of you. Instead, statements have what he calls “repeatable materiality.” This is because it is not isolated to a particular origin, but instead manifests a larger set of rules for what is speakable.
Now that we know what statements are, Chapter 3 tells us how to describe them. Foucault gives us three steps. First, “fix the vocabulary,” or understand all the words and concepts that a statement brings together. Second, identify the associated field of the statement, or the conditions under which it is made. Third, spell out these conditions, or the familiar and thus often unspoken or taken-for-granted common sense that makes it so a statement makes sense and is understood. After listing these three steps, Foucault relates them to the project of the previous Part, on discursive formations, in order to show how a study of statements leads to a study of discursive formations. He says the study of discursive formation and the analysis of the statement proceed “correlatively,” which means one influences the others. Statements belong to a discursive formation by way of the laws that govern it; in identifying the rules governing the statement, we are identifying a discursive formation as well. When a number of statements belong to the same discursive formation—or follow the same set of rules—Foucault walls that grouping a “discourse.”
In Chapter 4, Foucault contrasts his description of statements with the ways in which others tend to study discourse. Most other studies, Foucault claims, look for something that people talked about all the time. They then try to figure out why everyone was talking about it, hoping to arrive at the common principle underlying this excess of discourse. In contrast, Foucault is interested in principles that explain “rarity,” too. In a historical period, there will usually be some things that are conspicuously not talked about. Foucault is just as interested in studying this absence of discourse. 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. Absences are as much produced as presences.
At least two consequences follow from this. For one, it means we cannot think of absences as “repression,” as if something shows up but is then hidden away. That would assume that one statement is hiding another statement. Instead, Foucault is interested in why it didn’t make sense for a statement to appear in the first place. This also means that one does not look beneath the statements that appear in order to find some hidden, repressed truth. Rather, the question is why it makes sense for statements to be exactly where they are. We can find a logic to what appears, what is already manifest. On a related note, a discussion of statements will have to get rid of any effort to locate origins in people, as if someone choses to say X instead of Y. Statements appear not according to the will of individuals, but according to a system of rules that is greater than and prior to individuals.
Rather than look for origins of statements, Foucault says we should look for how they accumulate and build upon one another. Rather than assume repression, Foucault asks us to look for what is already apparent and what logic can undergird this set of appearances. In Chapter 5, he expands this discussion of accumulation to the concept of the “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.
Analysis of Part 3
In this Part, Foucault continues to develop his own vocabulary or new definitions for historiographical concepts. Part of the power of his account is how he can slowly build up his system from statements to discourses to archives and define each term in relation to one another. Thus, by the time we get to a word like “archive,” we are prepared to accept the definition of “general system of the formation and transformation of statements” rather than the more traditional or intuitive understanding of a repository or library of books. If Foucault had simply presented this definition in the Introduction, it would not make any sense. But he has slowly built up the language he needs to present this much more counterintuitive, but conceptually more powerful, definition.
Nonetheless, a few more counterintuitive points may need further explanation. Let’s start with the idea that a statement has no origin, and that statements simply accumulate over time. Surely, one might think, there has to have been a first statement of its kind, some original enunciation? Here, we must distinguish, as Foucault does, between the sentence and the statement. Perhaps someone said a particular configuration of words at some point. But a statement is not a sentence, or some artifact like a note bearing someone’s handwriting. It is instead a “function,” which means the crystallization of different rules. Those rules can manifest the same statement in different authors.
This is what it means for the speaker to be an “empty function.” In order for there to be statements, there must be speakers. That is what makes this history instead of philosophy. We are not simply listing all the possible configurations of words in a language. That would be an exercise in what Foucault calls “idealism.” Instead, we are still studying the real world, in which statements are actually said, and in turn we are studying rules as they really exist. But because it is the rules of which a statement is a function, rather than the will or psychology of an individual, we do not have to look at the specific person who is speaking or dive into the biography of any one speaker. Statements express rules, not people.
With this, however, we must make a couple caveats. The first is the invisibility of rules. We are not talking about actual censorship or prohibition of speech, any more than we are talking about the sponsorship of speech, as if a speaker had been patronized by some authority to say something. These kinds of written laws on speech do not tell us about discourse; they tell us about the institutions that made those laws. Instead, the rules Foucault is interested in are the ones that are so powerful they don’t have to be written down. They are the “common sense” in a society, the ways people talk about things simply because that’s how they view the world. These rules are so pervasive they are invisible.
The second caveat is that although individuals don’t matter, that doesn’t mean the position of the speaker is completely beside the point. Remember Foucault cares about, among other things, the “authorities of delimitation,” or in whose mouths a statement can be put. If only doctors get to say something, then that matters. But again, this designation of a class of speakers is part of the function or rules of discourse, rather than a property of the individuals themselves. Social position is impersonal, in that it is not the essence of an individual, but rather a class within a larger social system. It is the system above all else, and certainly above the individual, that Foucault focuses on.
