Summary of Part 5
In the Conclusion to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault anticipates and addresses possible objections to his new historical method. He writes this final chapter as a sort of dialogue, in which someone writes a long critique of his method and he writes a lengthy rebuttal. In doing so, Foucault is able to further distinguish his “archaeology” not only from the history of ideas, which he rejected in the previous Part, but also larger trends in scholarship at his time.
The first methodology Foucault claims his archaeology does not reduce to is 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 the understanding of 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.
Moreover, Foucault argues that being too invested in old categories of history and individuals risks subordinating “the history of thought” to “transcendence.” By transcendence, Foucault means the imposition of a logical progression or master narrative, as if some God were directing the flow of history. In this case, “God” or history itself would be a transcendental subject, something that transcends all specific people, events, things, and discourses. The problem is that such a transcendental view of history cannot account for all the ways in which discourse develops unpredictably, without a script written in advance. Thus, it is the task of archaeology to describe discursive change in all its historical specificity without submitting it to a narrative of human agency or divine intervention.
Now, if there is no master logic to history, and if discourse develops without reference to any particular individual or human actor, then, Foucault realizes, some people might wonder on what grounds Foucault, an individual, is able to decide how to describe discourse. In the absence of a transcendental “truth,” Foucault describes his project as “radical,” “empirical,” and “positive.” That means it is based on studying statements as they appear, which could be “naïve” and overlook how the historian is a part of history, too, and perhaps biased according to his or her own experiences. However, Foucault acknowledges that he is embedded within discourse and therefore cannot have an “objective” position on the very object he studies. For Foucault, this is why his work is finally not “philosophy,” which would get at some more universal truth. He is, in the end, a historian. Rather than building up to big structures or transcendent ideas, he is breaking things up into smaller, specific parts: “continually making differentiations.”
If archaeology is not a philosophy, neither is it a science, according to Foucault. Although The Archaeology of Knowledge has been written to argue for a new method of doing history, it is not a total system of rules of deduction, for instance. But Foucault's archaeology does touch upon the traditional hard and soft sciences, and not just because it studies their discourses. It is also seeking to accomplish similar tasks as other disciplines of science. Like linguistics, it looks for grammars, although of a different sort: the conditions of discursive formation rather than rules for language as a whole. Like psychology, it studies the possible positions of subjects within discourse, but of course not to psychoanalyze an individual but to describe the discourse itself. Like epistemology, it studies the formation of knowledge, but not with an eye toward transcendent processes. And like sociology, it studies social formations, but not in the form of institutions like traditional sociology studies.
Foucault names a few different kinds of relation between his own archaeology of discourse and the other sciences. Linguistics and archaeology are “related analyses” because they are not searching for the same thing, although they sometimes operate in parallel ways. Psychology, epistemology, and sociology are “correlative spaces” which means they sometimes operate in conjunction with or tangential to archaeology. But archaeology may also aspire to be an “enveloping theory.” That means a “general theory of productions” in terms of how discourse is shaped in different domains. So archaeology might swallow up all the other sciences in its ultimate method.
The final pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge offer a reflection on the concept of freedom. On the one hand, Foucault acknowledges he has given himself—or his method—a great deal of freedom in being able to explore and cut across all sorts of different kinds of statements. At the same time, what his method has essentially exposed are the limits on human freedom, in terms of what it is possible to say at a given time. He explains that he is, indeed, trying to remove the “sovereignty of the subject” or the power of any one individual to change the course of history or discourse. That might be one reason people resist his method, because people want to believe in the power of individual agency. But in dissolving the illusion of this kind of agency, Foucault hopes to make it possible to conceive of the relative freedom of discourse, or its own capacity to change and with a force that cannot be tied down to any one utterance. It is only by seeing the relative autonomy of discourse that we can truly grasp the moving nature of history.
Analysis of Part 5
This final Part is stylistically different from the others, structured as a dialogue instead of a flowing treatise. Such a structure makes sense for an attempt to defend Foucault’s historiography from possible critiques. It allows Foucault to write the strongest possible version of a critique of his work, in the voice of a skeptic, rather than merely paraphrasing possible objections. This allows Foucault to demonstrate his receptivity to critique. After an entire book in which he has systematically dismissed the way everyone else is doing history, he opens himself up for strong debate.
And the debate is strong indeed. The tone of this exchange may be surprising, in how thoroughly it dissects possible shortcomings in Foucault’s method. This demonstrates that, for Foucault, the stakes are high. Doing history is serious business. It matters that it be done correctly. It is a sign of how much Foucault respects the very discipline he is trying to transform—how much he thinks this work is vitally important—that he stages this kind of interrogation. In essence, he is also re-framing the Parts that have come before. Now, it looks like his critiques of others were actually generous; he is not trying to be mean, but to get to the bottom of a crucial question. And all along, it is out of respect for the importance of a historical imagination that he has undertaken this study.
At the same time, this Part opens up to more philosophical questions that did not have to be touched upon in the pages before. The debate over structuralism is particularly important. At the time of Foucault’s writing, structuralism would have been most closely associated with the work of another French academic, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He looked for universal structures in human societies. Foucault is clearly interested in something like a structure, a set of rules, but he declines the ambition of universalism. For that would then not be history at all, but philosophy; not a story of a specific time and a specific place, but a theory of human nature.
In differentiating himself from Lévi-Strauss, Foucault is also breaking from the dominant academic trends of the early 20th century. He is instead marshaling in a new generation of study, one based not around universal structures, but local conditions; not on the agency of individuals or the power of authors, but the centrality of discourse. Later in the 20th century, people began to call this break “postmodernism.” The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward meta-narrative,” or a rejection of any master story that governs all histories, such as civilization’s march toward progress or good’s steady defeat of evil. These master narratives no longer make sense in the complicated, globalized, chaotic world of the 20th century. So, too, did Foucault already write in 1969 that there can be no “total” history, but only a “general” history that is regional and specific.
Yet despite all the tremendous prescience of Foucault’s writing, he ends The Archaeology of Knowledge on a humble note. He demotes his own freedom to the freedom of discourse. And in turn, he sends his method out into the world not as his exclusive property, but as a general strategy for understanding the past and the different shapes that concepts and ideas have taken. Perhaps a final reason for staging this conclusion as a dialogue is that Foucault hopes he has converted possible interlocutors to join him in his archaeological excavations of discursive monuments.
