The Archeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault contents part I introduction 3

3. CONTRADICTIONS

The history of ideas usually credits the discourse that it analyses with coherence. If it happens to notice an irregularity in the use of words, several incompatible propositions, a set of meanings that do not adjust to one another, concepts that cannot be systematized together, then it regards it as its duty to find, at a deeper level, a principle of cohesion that organizes the discourse and restores to it its hidden unity. This law of coherence is a heuristic rule, a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research: not to multiply contradictions uselessly; not to be taken in by small differences; not to give too much weight to changes, disavowals, returns to the past, and polemics; not to suppose that men^'s discourse is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been sub­jected to, or the conditions in which they live; but to admit that if they speak, and if they speak among themselves, it is rather to overcome these contradictions, and to find the point from which they will be able to be mastered. But this same coherence is also the result of research: it defines the terminal unities that complete the analysis; it discovers the internal organization of a text, the form of development of an indi­vidual oeuvre, or the meeting-place of different discourses. In order to reconstitute it, it must first be presupposed, and one will only be sure of finding it if one has pursued it far enough and for long enough. It

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appears as an optimum: the greatest possible number of contradictions resolved by the simplest means.

But a great many means are used and, by that very fact, the coher­ences found may differ considerably. By analysing the truth of proposi­tions and the relations that unite them, one can define a field of logical non-contradiction: one will then discover a systematicity; one will rise from the visible body of sentences to that pure, ideal architecture that the ambiguities of grammar and the overloading of words with mean­ings have probably concealed as much as expressed. But one can adopt the contrary course, and, by following the thread of analogies and symbols, rediscover a thematic that is more imaginary than discursive, more affective than rational, and less close to the concept than to desire; its force animates the most opposed figures, but only to melt them at once into a slowly transformable unity; what one then dis-covers is a plastic continuity, the movement of a meaning that is embodied in various representations, images, and metaphors. These coherences may be thematic or systematic, explicit or not: they can be sought at the level of representations that were conscious in the speak-ing subject, but which his discourse — for circumstantial reasons or because of an inadequacy in the very form of his language (langage) — failed to express; it can also be sought in structures that would have constrained the author the more he constructed them, and which would have imposed on him, without his realizing it, postulates, oper­ational schemata, linguistic rules, a set of affirmations and fundamental beliefs, types of images, or a whole logic of the fantastic. Lastly, there are coherences that one establishes at the level of an individual — his biography, or the unique circumstances of his discourse — but one can also establish them in accordance with broader guide-lines, one can give them the collective, diachronic dimensions of a period, a genera] form of consciousness, a type of society, a set of traditions, an imagin­ary landscape common to a whole culture. In all these forms, a coher­ence discovered in this way always plays the same role: it shows that immediately visible contradictions are merely surface reflections; and that this play of dispersed light must be concentrated into a single focus. Contradiction is the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness, thought and the text, the ideality and the contingent

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body of expression. In any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can.

At the end of this work, only residual contradictions remain — acci­dents, defects, mistakes — or, on the contrary, as if the entire analysis had been carried out in secrecy and in spite of itself, the fundamental contradiction emerges: the bringing into play, at the very origin of the system, of incompatible postulates, intersections of irreconcilable influences, the first diffraction of desire, the economic and political conflict that opposes a society to itself, all this, instead of appearing as so many superficial elements that must be reduced, is finally revealed as an organizing principle, as the founding, secret law that accounts for all minor contradictions and gives them a firm foundation: in short, a model for all the other oppositions. Such a contradiction, far from being an appearance or accident of discourse, far from being that from which it must be freed if its truth is at last to be revealed, constitutes the very law of its existence: it is on the basis of such a contradiction that discourse emerges, and it is in order both to translate it and to overcome it that discourse begins to speak; it is in order to escape that contradiction, whereas contradiction is ceaselessly reborn through dis-course, that discourse endlessly pursues itself and endlessly begins again; it is because contradiction is always anterior to the discourse, and because it can never therefore entirely escape it, that discourse changes, undergoes transformation, and escapes of itself from its own continuity. Contradiction, then, functions throughout discourse, as the principle of its historicity.

The history of ideas recognizes, therefore, two levels of contradic­tion: that of appearances, which is resolved in the profound unity of discourse; and that of foundations, which gives rise to discourse itself. In relation to the first level of contradiction, discourse is the ideal figure that must be separated from their accidental presence, from their too visible body; in relation to the second, discourse is the empirical figure that contradictions may take up and whose apparent cohesion must be destroyed, in order to rediscover them at last in their irruption and violence. Discourse is the path from one contradiction to another: if it gives rise to those that can be seen, it is because it obeys that which it hides. To analyse discourse is to hide and reveal contradic­tions; it is to show the play that they set up within it; it is to manifest

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how it can express them, embody them, or give them a temporary appearance.

For archaeological analysis, contradictions are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered. They are objects to be described for themselves, without any attempt being made to discover from what point of view they can be dissipated, or at what level they can be radicalized and effects become causes. Let us take a simple example, one that has already been mentioned several times: in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus^'s fixist principle was contradicted, not so much by the discovery of the Peloria, which changed only its modes of application, but by a number of ^'evolutionist^' affirmations that are to be found in the works of Buffon, Diderot, Bordeu, Maillet, and many others. Archaeological analysis does not consist in showing that beneath this opposition, at a more essential level, everyone accepted a number of fundamental theses (the continuity and pleni­tude of nature, the correlation between recent forms and climate, the almost imperceptible transition from the non-living to the living); nor does it consist in showing that such an opposition reflects, in the particular domain of Natural History, a more general conflict that divides all eighteenth-century knowledge and thought (the conflict between the theme of an ordered creation, acquired once and for all, deployed without irreducible secret, and the theme of a prolific nature, endowed with enigmatic powers, gradually deploying itself through history, and overturning all spatial orders in obedience to the onward thrust of time). Archaeology tries to show how the two affirmations, fixist and ^'evolutionist^', share a common locus in a certain description of species and genera: this description takes as its object the visible structure of organs (that is, their form, size, number, and arrangement in space); and it can limit that object in two ways (to the organism as a whole, or to certain elements, determined either by importance or by taxonomic convenience); one then reveals, in the second case, a regular table, containing a number of definite squares, that in a way constitutes the programme of all possible creation (so that, whether present, still to come, or already disappeared, the ordering of the species and genera is definitively fixed) ; and in the first case, groups of kinship that remain indefinite and open, that are separated from one another, and that tolerate an indeterminate number of new forms, however close they

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may be to preexisting forms. By deriving in this way the contradiction between two theses from a certain domain of objects, from its delimita­tions and divisions, one does not discover a point of conciliation. But neither does one transfer it to a more fundamental level; one defines the locus in which it takes place; it reveals the place where the two branches of the alternative join; it localizes the divergence and the place where the two discourses are juxtaposed. The theory of structure is not a common postulate, a basis of general belief shared by Linnaeus and Buffon, a solid, fundamental affirmation that throws back to the level of a subsidiary debate the conflict of evolutionism and fixism; it is the principle of their incompatibility, the law that governs their deriv­ation and their coexistence. By taking contradictions as objects to be described, archaeological analysis does not try to discover in their place a common form or theme, it tries to determine the extent and form of the gap that separates them. In relation to a history of ideas that attempts to melt contradictions in the semi-nocturnal unity of an overall figure, or which attempts to transmute them into a general, ab­stract, uniform principle of interpretation or explanation, archaeology describes the different spaces of dissension.

It ceases, therefore, to treat contradictions as a general function operating, in the same way, at all levels of discourse, and which analysis should either suppress entirely or lead back to a primary, constitutive form: for the great game of contradiction — present under innumerable guises, then suppressed, and finally restored in the major conflict in which it culminates — it substitutes the analysis of different types of contradiction, different levels in accordance with which it can be mapped, different functions that it can exercise.

Different types first of all. Some contradictions are localized only at the level of propositions and assertions, without in any way affecting the body of enunciative rules that makes them possible: thus in the eighteenth century the thesis of the animal character of fossils was opposed by the more traditional thesis of their mineral nature; the consequences that can be drawn from these two theses are certainly very numerous and far-reaching; but it can be shown that they originated in the same discursive formation, at the same point, and in accordance with the same conditions of operation of the enunciative function; they are contradictions that are archaeologically derived, and

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which constitute a terminal state. Others, on the contrary, go beyond the bounds of a discursive formation, and they oppose theses that do not belong to the same conditions of enunciation: thus Linnaeus^'s fixism is contradicted by Darwin^'s evolutionism, but only to the extent that one neutralizes the difference between Natural History, to which the first belongs, and biology, to which the second belongs. They are extrinsic contradictions that reflect the opposition between distinct dis-cursive formations. For archaeological description (ignoring, for the moment, any possible procedural differences), this opposition consti­tutes the terminus a quo, whereas derived contradictions constitute the terminus ad quem of analysis. Between these two extremes, archaeological description describes what might be called intrinsic contradictions: those that are deployed in the discursive formation itself, and which, originating at one point in the system of formations, reveal sub-systems: hence, to keep to the example of eighteenth-century Natural History, the contradiction between ^`methodical^' analyses and ^'system­atic^' analyses. The opposition here is not a terminal one: they are not two contradictory propositions about the same object, they are not two incompatible uses of the same concept, but two ways of forming statements, both characterized by certain objects, certain positions of subjectivity, certain concepts, and certain strategic choices. Yet these systems are not primary ones: for it can be shown to what extent they both derive from a single positivity, that of Natural History. It is these intrinsic oppositions that are relevant to archaeological analysis.

Then different levels. An intrinsic archaeological contradiction is not a fact, purely and simply, that it is enough to state as a principle or explain as an effect. It is a complex phenomenon that is distributed over different levels of the discursive formation. Thus, for systematic Natural History and methodical Natural History, which were in con-stant opposition for a good part of the eighteenth century, one can recognize: an inadequation of the objects (in the one case one describes the general appearance of the plant; in the other certain predetermined variables; in the one case, one describes the totality of the plant, or at least its most important parts, in the other one describes a number of elements chosen arbitrarily for their taxonomic convenience; some-times one takes account of the plant^'s different states of growth and maturity, at others one confines one^'s attention to a single moment, a

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stage of optimum visibility); a divergence of enunciative modalities (in the case of the systematic analysis of plants, one applies a rigorous perceptual and linguistic code, and in accordance with a constant scale; for methodical description, the codes are relatively free, and the scales of mapping may oscillate); an incompatibility of concepts (in the ^'sys­tems^', the concept of generic character is an arbitrary, though mislead-ing mark to designate the genera; in the methods this same concept must include the real definition of the genus); lastly, an exclusion of theoretical options (systematic taxonomy makes ^'fixism^' possible, even if it is rectified by the idea of a continuous creation in time, gradually unfolding the elements of the tables, or by the idea of natural cata­strophes having disturbed by our present gaze the linear order of natural proximities, but excludes the possibility of a transformation that the method accepts without absolutely implying it).

Functions. These forms of opposition do not all play the same role in discursive practice: they are not, in a homogeneous way, obstacles to overcome or a principle of growth. In any case, it is not enough to seek in them the cause either of the deceleration or the acceleration of history; time is not introduced into the truth and ideality of discourse on the basis of the empty, general form of opposition. These opposi­tions are always particular functional stages. Some of them bring about an additional development of the enunciative field: they open up sequences of argumentation, experiment, verification, and various inferences; they make possible the determination of new objects, they arouse new enunciative modalities, they define new concepts or modify the field of application of those that already exist: but without anything being modified in the system of positivity of the discourse (this was the case in the discussions of the eighteenth-century naturalists on the frontier between the mineral and the vegetal, or on the boundaries of life or nature and the origin of fossils); such additive processes may remain decisively open or closed by a demonstration that refutes them or a discovery that puts them out of operation. Others induce a reorganization of the discursive field: they pose the question of the possible translation of one group of statements into another, of the point of coherence that might articulate one on another, of their integration in a more general space (thus the system/method opposition among eighteenth-century naturalists induces a series of attempts to recreate both of them in a

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single form of description, to give to the method the rigour and. regu­larity of the system, to coincide the arbitrariness of the system with the concrete analyses of the method); they are not new objects, new con­cepts, new enunciative modalities that are added in a linear fashion to the old; but objects of another (more general or more particular) level, concepts that have another structure and another field of application, enunciations of another type, without, however, altering the rules of formation. Other oppositions play a critical role: they put into operation the existence of the ^`acceptability^' of the discursive practice; they define the point of its effective impossibility and of its historical reflexion (thus the description., in Natural History itself, of organic similarities and functions that operate, through anatomical variables, in definite conditions of existence, no longer permits, as an autonomous discursive formation at least, a Natural. History that is a taxonomic science of beings on the basis of their visible ch.aracters).

A discursive formation is not, therefore, an ideal, continuous, smooth text that runs beneath the multiplicity of contradictions, and resolves them in the calm unity of coherent thought; nor is it the surface in which, in a thousand different aspects, a contradiction is reflected that is always in retreat, but everywhere dominant. It is rather a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described. Archaeological analysis, then, erects the primacy of a contradiction that has its model in the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a single proposition. But the reason for this is not to even out oppositions in th.e general forms of thought and to pacify them by force, by a recourse to a constructing a priori. On the contrary, its purpose is to map, in a particular discursive practice, the point at which they are constituted, to define the form that they assume, the relations that they have with each other, and the domain that they govern. In short, its purpose is to maintain discourse in all its many irregularities; and consequently to suppress the theme of a con­tradiction uniformly lost and rediscovered, resolved and forever rising again, in the undifferentiated element of the Logos.

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