Documents vs. Monuments
The fundamental distinction Foucault makes between his own archaeology and “traditional history” has to do with the difference between documents and monuments. 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 as a kind of lens onto the historical events in a country in which we are interested, or the discoveries leading up to a great invention. The document is supposed to tell us about these events, from which they are understood to be separate. By 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 existence, or start to relate to one another in new ways. 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.
History of Ideas vs. Archaeology
Throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault distinguishes his own method not only from historians in general, but especially from historians of ideas. Particularly in Part 4, Foucault spells out the major tendencies of historians of ideas. They tend to study the sudden emergence of something inventive or new; they are interested in continuity so that every event leads to or causes another; they try to eliminate contradiction in what they study by finding an underlying principle to cohere opposites; and they are interested in large and general categories like “science” or “culture.” Most importantly, historians of ideas approach discourse as a document. That means discourse is a record of something else, like the slow march of technological progress, rather than an object of study in its own right. In contrast, archaeologists study discourse as a “monument” in its own right, a totality worthy of its own study. In particular, Foucault wants to understand the rules and conditions under which discourse comes into being the way it is, with some things said in a certain way and some things not said at all. In contrast to the historian of ideas, the archaeologist does not resolve contradictions or make single narratives about progress, but instead explains all the discontinuities and gaps in the discourse.
Continuity vs. Discontinuity
For Foucault, “discontinuity” is a fact of the historical record. There are gaps in history, as well as gaps between histories of different things—the difference between a history of England and the history of electricity, for instance. But historians approach this discontinuity differently. Foucault says most historians have tried to convert or tame discontinuity into continuity. This means they search for underlying continuities or unities—great laws that transcend events, or artificial thematic or disciplinary categories to group dissimilar things together. In contrast, Foucault wants to tell the story of discontinuity itself, or the “dispersion” of documents. This means not unifying events under a single principle, but exploring all the different relations between very different and simultaneously unfolding timelines and domains.
Plethora vs. Rarity
Throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault contrasts plethora and rarity and explains that he is interested in rarity. Most other studies, Foucault claims, talk about a plethora or 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.
Original vs. Regular
The persistent focus of archaeology is the study of regularity, how statements accumulate over time. Foucault says the history of ideas is, instead, 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, they’re 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.
Discourse vs. Individuals
A central theme through The Archaeology of Knowledge is that discourse is not the product of individual choice or agency. Rather, discourse develops as if of its own accord, accumulating different statements and objects that form relations with one another over time. In turn, Foucault is not interested in who said something, but rather in the fact it was said at all. This is an assault on what Foucault calls the “sovereignty of consciousness,” the idea that humans are completely conscious of what they say and only say what they intend to say as an expression of their own will. In archaeology, there is no history of great men. This is not a history of kings or geniuses. It is a history of discourse and the rules that underlie what is sayable at a given time.
Interior vs. Exterior Meaning
Foucault rejects thinking of statements as “islands of coherence” that have meaning all on their own. In such a view, you would only have to look closely at a statement on its own terms to understand what it means. For Foucault, instead, statements are not like individual signs that refer to something particular in the world, but more like moves in a game, that make sense only because of the rules under which they are speakable. 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.
