The Archeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault contents part I introduction 3

Part IV Archaeological Description

1. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

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We can now reverse the procedure; we can go downstream, and, once we have covered the domain of discursive formations and statements, once we have outlined their general theory, we can proceed to possible domains of application. We can examine what use is served by this analysis that I have rather solemnly called ^'archaeology^'. Indeed, we must: for, to be frank, as they are at the moment, things are rather disturbing. I set out with a relatively simple problem: the division of discourse into great unities that were not those of oeuvres, authors, books, or themes. And with the sole purpose of establishing them, I have set about constructing a whole series of notions (discursive for­mations, positivity, archive), I have defined a domain (statements, the enunciative field, discursive practices), I have tried to reveal the speci­ficity of a method that is neither formalizing nor interpretative; in short, I have appealed to a whole apparatus, whose sheer weight and, no doubt, somewhat bizarre machinery are a source of embarrassment. For two or three reasons: there exist already enough methods for describing and analysing language (langage) for it not to be presumptu­ous to wish to add another. And, anyway, I was suspicious of such unities of discourse as the ^'book^' and the ^'oeuvre^' because I suspected

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them of not being as immediate and self-evident as they appeared: is it reasonable to replace them by unities that one has established with so much effort, after so much groping, and in accordance with principles so obscure that it has taken hundreds of pages to elucidate them? And are the things that all these instruments finally delimit, those ^'dis-courses^' whose identity they map out, the same as those figures (called ^'psychiatry^', or 'political economy^', or ^'Natural History^') for which I empirically set out, and which have provided me with a pretext for developing this strange arsenal? It is n.ow of the utmost importance that I should measure the descriptive efficacy of the notions that I have tried to define. I must discover whether the machine works, and what it can produce. What, then, can this ^'archaeology^' offer that other descrip­tions are unable to provide? What are the rewards for such a heavy enterprise?

And now a suspicion occurs to me. I have behaved as if I were discovering a n.ew domain, as if, in order to chart it, I needed new measurements and guide-lines. But, in fact, was I not all the time in that very space that has long been known as ^'the history of ideas^'? Was it not to that space that I was implicitly referring, even when on two or three occasions I tried to keep my distance? And if I had not forced myself to turn away from it, would I not have found in it, already prepared, already analysed, all that I was looking for? Perhaps I am a historian of ideas after all. But an ashamed, or, if you prefer, a pre-sumptuous historian of ideas. One who set out to renew his discipline from top to bottom; who wanted., no doubt, to achieve a rigour that so many other, similar descriptions have recently acquired; but who, unable to modify in any real way that old form of analysis, to make it cross the threshold of scientificity (or finding that such a meta-morphosis is always impossible, or that h.e did not have the strength to effect that transformation himself), declares that h.e had been doing, and wanted to do, something quite different. All this new fog just to hide what remained in the same landscape, fixed to an old patch of ground cultivated to the point of exhaustion. I cannot be satisfied until I have cut myself off from ^'the history of ideas^', until I have shown in what way archaeological analysis differs from the descriptions of ^'the history of ideas^'.

It is not easy to characterize a discipline like the history of ideas: it is

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an uncertain object, with badly drawn frontiers, methods borrowed from here and there, and an approach lacking in. rigour and stability. And it seems to possess two roles. On the one hand, it recounts the by-ways and margins of history. Not the history of the sciences, but that of imperfect, ill-based knowledge, which could never in the whole of its long, persistent life attain the form of scientificity (the history of alchemy rather than chemistry, of animal spirits or phrenology rather than physiology, the history of atomistic themes rather than physics). The history of those shady philosophies that haunt literature, art, the sciences, law, ethics, and even man^'s daily life; the history of those age-old themes that are never crystallized in a rigorous and individual system, but which have formed the spontaneous philosophy of those who did not philosophize. The history not of literature but of that tangential rumour, that everyday, transient writing that never acquires the status of an oeuvre, or is immediately lost: the analysis of sub-literatures, almanacs, reviews and newpapers, temporary successes, anonymous authors. Thus defined — but one can see at once how difficult it is to fix precise limits for it — the history of ideas is con­cerned with all that insidious thought, that whole interplay of repre­sentations that flow anonymously between men; in the interstices of the great discursive monuments, it reveals the crumbling soil on which they are based. It is the discipline of fluctuating languages (langages), of shapeless works, of unrelated themes. The analysis of opinions rather than of knowledge, of errors rather than of truth, of types of mentality rather than of forms of thought.

But on the other hand the history of ideas sets out to cross the boundaries of existing disciplines, to deal with them from the outside, and to reinterpret them. Rather than a marginal domain, then, it consti­tutes a style of analysis, a putting into perspective. It takes account of the historical field of the sciences, of literature, of philosophy: but it describes the knowledge that has served as an empirical., unreflective basis for subsequent formalizations; it tries to rediscover the immediate experience that discourse transcribes; it follows the genesis, which, on the basis of received or acquired representations, gives birth to systems and ceuvres. It shows, on the other hand, how the great figures that are built up in this way gradually decompose: how the themes fall apart, pursue their isolated lives, fall into disuse, or are recomposed in a new

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way. The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconsti­tution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole inter-play of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific know-ledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.

It is clear how these two roles of the history of ideas are articu­lated one upon the other. In its most general form, it can be said that it continually describes — and in all the directions in which it oper­ates — the transition from non-philosophy to philosophy, from non-scientificity to science, from non-literature to the æuvre itself. It is the analysis of silent births, or distant correspondences, of permanences that persist beneath apparent changes, of slow formations that profit from innumerable blind complicities, of those total figures that grad­ually come together and suddenly condense into the fine point of the work. Genesis, continuity, totalization: these are the great themes of the history of ideas, and that by which it is attached to a certain, now traditional, form of historical analysis. In these conditions, it is normal that anyone who still practises history, its methods, its requirements and possibilities — this now rather shop-soiled idea — cannot conceive that a discipline like the history of ideas should be abandoned; or rather, considers that any other form of analysing discourses is a betrayal of history itself. But archaeological descrip­tion is precisely such an abandonment of the history of ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures, an attempt to practise a quite different history of what men have said. That some people do not recognize in this enterprise the history of their

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childhood, that they mourn its passing, and continue to invoke, in an age that is no longer made for it, that great shade of former times, certainly proves their fidelity. But such conservative zeal confirms me in my purpose and gives me the confidence to do what I set out to do.

Between archaeological analysis and the history of ideas there are a great many points of divergence. I shall try shortly to establish four differences that seem to me to be of the utmost importance. They concern the attribution of innovation, the analysis of contradictions, comparative descriptions, and the mapping of transformations. I hope that by examining these different points we will be able to grasp the specific qualities of archaeological analysis, and that we may be able to measure its descriptive capacity. For the moment, however, I should like to lay down a few principles.

1. 
   Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in dis-courses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be ^'allegorical^'.
   

2. 
   Archaeology does not seek to rediscover th.e continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them. It does not await the moment when, on the basis of what they were not yet, they became what they are; nor the moment when, the solidity of their figure crum­bling away, they will gradually lose their identity. On the contrary, its problem is to define discourses in their specificity; to show in what way the set of rules that they put into operation is irreducible to any other; to follow them the whole length of their exterior ridges, in order to underline them the better. It does not proceed, in slow pro-gression, from the confused field of opinion to the uniqueness of the
   

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system or the definitive stability of science; it is not a ^'doxology^'; but a differential analysis of the modalities of discourse.

3. 
   Archaeology is not ordered in accordance with the sovereign figure of the oeuvres; it does not try to grasp the moment in which the oeuvre emerges on the anonymous horizon. It does not wish to rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and the social are inverted into one another. It is neither a psychology, nor a soci­ology, nor more generally an anthropology of creation.. The oeuvre is not for archaeology a relevant division, even if it is a matter of replacing it in its total context or in the network of causalities that support it. It defines types of rules for discursive practices that run through indi­vidual oeuvres, sometimes govern them entirely, and dominate them to such an extent that nothing eludes them; but which sometimes, too, govern only part of it. The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d^'etre of an oeuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it.
   
4. 
   Lastly, archaeology does not try to restore what has been thought, wished, aimed at, experienced, desired by men in the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse; it does not set out to recapture that elusive nucleus in which the author and the oeuvre exchange identities; in which thought still remains nearest to one-self, in the as yet unaltered form of the same, and in which language (langage) has n.ot yet been deployed in the spatial, successive dispersion. of discourse. In other words, it does not try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity. It does not claim to efface itself in the ambiguous modesty of a reading that would bring back, in all its purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin. It is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exter­iority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object.
   

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