Summary of Part 4
Part 4 of The Archaeology of Knowledge is, in large part, an effort by Foucault to distinguish the method he has spelled out in the previous two parts from the ways in which people at his time were currently going about doing the “history of ideas.” Each of the chapters in this Part distinguishes his own “archaeology” from the historians of ideas in some crucial manner. One distinction offered in Chapter 1 is that the history of ideas tends to move between two “roles,” one of describing “official” or scientific knowledge and one of studying informal knowledge or what non-specialists in a given society think they know at a given time. This is a movement between the study of “philosophy” and “non-philosophy.” Archaeology rejects any such division supplied in advance. Rather, it wants to explore what kinds of divisions emerge from studying the regularities and patterns across statements to begin with, to see which concepts and discourses emerge by congealing and accumulating over time.
Chapter 1 concludes with four preliminary “principles” that guide the more detailed comparison Foucault will make between archaeology and the history of ideas in the chapters to follow. First, archaeology does not study discourse in order to understand the events it represents, like reading documents from a war to understand the war. Rather, it wants to understand the conditions under which it made sense for the discourse to be written the way the way it was. This is what it means to treat discourse as a monument rather than a document. Second, its aim is not general truths, but the specificity of discourse; it likes discontinuity, or how one thing is not another, more than continuity, or false groupings that make disparate documents seem to be similar. Third, it is not interested in psychology or what motivates individuals to say a specific thing, because archaeology is first and foremost a study of impersonal rules that belong to no one in particular. Fourth, it does not seek to understand the essence of some statement from the past because, again, it is interested in what is exterior to the statement, the rules that condition its existence to begin with.
The remaining chapters of Part 4 compare archaeology and the history of ideas through specific topics or themes. The first, in Chapter 2, are those of “The Original and the Regular.” Foucault says the history of ideas is interested in identifying whether something is “old or new, traditional or original, conforming to an average type or deviant.” Archaeology eschews this distinction. You can’t know whether a statement has never been said before; and even when someone says a statement that is identical to a statement someone else said 100 years ago, the statements will likely still different because they mean different things in different contexts. For Foucault, it is also 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. Even maintaining stability requires activity, because it means people have to keep saying similar things instead of something else. Saying the same thing is just as active as saying a new thing. In turn, 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.
Chapter 3 is on “Contradictions.” 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, archaeology seeks to identify, name, and analyze all the contradictions that exist in a discourse and the different levels to which they apply. For instance, there may be extrinsic contradictions that are actually competitions between two separate discursive formations. Or there may be intrinsic contradictions, which are within a discursive formation but merely indicate different sub-systems within the formation, for instance how different subfield in biology might approach something. Within intrinsic contradictions, there are further types of contradiction. There might be an “inadequation of objects,” which means different approaches to what is described; or a “divergence of enunciative modalities,” which means different vocabularies for talking about something; or “an incompatibility of concepts,” which means different subsystems have different concepts; or “an exclusion of theoretical options,” which means one subsystem supports a larger theory that another subsystem cannot. Looking more precisely at these contradictions and their types, archaeology intensifies our understanding of the complexity of a discourse, rather than trying to simplify it into something with no contradictions or just a single foundational one.
In Chapter 4, Foucault considers how the history of ideas and archaeology differ in their approach to comparing things. Archaeology does comparisons that are “always limited and regional” which means it is not interested in general or large categories like “a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture.” Instead, it considers how statements cut across different discourses, thus tracking diversity rather than unity. In doing so, it also make connections between discursive formations and “non-discursive domains” like institutions and political events. Following this preference for difference over similarity, Foucault also spells out five particular tasks for archaeology. The first is identifying “archaeological isomorphisms” or how similar rules produce different statements. The second is identifying an “archaeological model,” or whether different rules apply in the same way. The third is to show how different concepts can be positioned in a similar way in a larger system. Fourth, archaeology may show how one concept may play two or more different roles in different formations, what Foucault calls “archaeological shifts.” The fifth task is establishing “archaeological correlations,” which means how one discourse relates to or gets subsumed by another.
If Chapter 4 was about comparison, Chapter 5 is about change. As should be clear from the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault’s method “is much more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistributions.” This helps it better understand historical change, or what Foucault prefers to call “transformation.” He prefers this term because it suggests that different discourses morph rather than simply come and go like neat historical periods. Foucault says it is necessary, once again, to differentiate different “levels” on which this transformation can occur. For instance, does a statement, a concept, a strategy, or an entire formation transform? In breaking down these levels and isolating transformation, Foucault thinks we can better chart a constantly shifting network that does not reduce to simple categories of historical periods. There are no clean breaks between times, but only a process over which transformation occurs.
In the final chapter of Part 4, Foucault turns to what his archaeology would do to reorganize the history of science. To begin, Foucault reminds us that archaeology never takes for granted a given system of categories. So, for instance, it would not assume there is such a thing as biology and then proceed to do a history of biology. Rather, it would look at the emergence of related concepts in order to see how they come to be grouped together, perhaps, but not necessarily, becoming an entity we would recognize as “biology.” That means science is, like any other discourse, just one set of statements and strategies within the field of knowledge, rather than a unique or more “truthful” discourse. That being said, certain discourses come to be recognized as “science” or “scientific” because they pass through a special process of development. A science creates its own explicit rules for how to proceed and what counts as knowledge within its domain. This is called “epistemologization,” and Foucault says archaeology is primarily interested in the conditions and rules under which something comes to count as knowledge. Foucault offers the term “episteme” to those discursive practices that produce this sense of “science,” or that something counts as knowledge.
Analysis of Part 4
Part 4 is a systematic comparison of archaeology and the history of ideas, with each chapter providing a different point of comparison. In many ways, that makes this Part a kind of test of Foucault’s theory. In Parts 2 and 3, Foucault has laid out his method: how to do a history of discourse through statements. Now, he has to prove that his way of doing things is better than the ways others are using. If he can do that, then his method is not simply an alternative, but the better option.
The theme throughout these chapters is that Foucault’s archaeology seems to turn what is a liability in the history of ideas into a resource. This means, in turn, that archaeology does not ignore the difficulties of the historical archive, but instead studies that difficulty itself. Thus, contradiction is not a problem, but an object of description. And similarly, archaeology is not bored by “regularity” or periods of stability, but finds them as difficult and exciting to explain as sudden ruptures. In both cases, Foucault’s archaeology is in some ways a more “realistic” method. Historians of ideas are so committed to the illusion of unity—which must always be an illusion—that they ignore complexity. Archaeology is instead more comfortable with the realistic fact of discontinuity.
The true test of Foucault’s theory comes in the final chapter, on science. It is easier to digest his arguments about discourse when we are talking about a political discourse, for instance, or the domain of opinions. But with science, we tend to think things are driven more by facts and deductive logic and the pursuit of a general, and possible, truth. All this only brings out, however, how much science, too, is rule-bound. There are “correct” ways of running any experiment and collecting data and testing a hypothesis. There are results that are more intelligible as scientific than others, according to whether they follow these rules. And that means that science, too, operates as a discourse with its own rules. To say so does not mean we have to reject the claims of science as illusory. Rather, it is to describe how science itself describes the world in its own system of objects and regulations.
However compelling Foucault’s arguments are, they remain a bit weakened because, as in the Introduction, he never really offers any examples of his antagonists. He claims historians of ideas are interested in continuity and diffusing contradiction, for instance, but does not give us an example from another historian. We are left to wonder how much his version of the “other side” is a straw man. Moreover, it would perhaps be more persuasive if, after isolating where a particular study fell short, Foucault stepped in and demonstrated how his method would go further. Instead, we must take Foucault on his own word or else on the strength of the histories he himself has written.
Although less explicit than his historiographical arguments, lurking behind Foucault’s claims in this Part is a surprising theory of time and temporality. In arguing that stability requires as much work to maintain as apparent invention, Foucault is effectively saying that at any moment, the world could either be sustained or become different. Thus, at the same time that Foucault talks about the relative stability of discourse, he emphasizes the contingency of the world, or the fact that stability cannot be taken for granted. In this way, Foucault veers into philosophy but without drawing attention to it.
