The Archeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault contents part I introduction 3

Part V Conclusion

CONCLUSION

—Throughout this book, you have been at great pains to dissociate yourself from ^`structuralism^', or at least from what is ordinarily under-stood by that term. You have tried to show that you used neither the methods nor the concepts of structuralism; that you make no reference to the procedures of linguistic description; that you are not concerned with formalization. But what do these differences amount to, if not that you have failed to avail yourself of what is most positive, most rigor­ous, and most revealing in structural analysis? That the domain that you have tried to deal with is not susceptible to this kind of enterprise, and that its richness has constantly eluded the schemata in which you wished to enclose it? And with apparent unconcern, you are now trying to disguise the impotence of your method; you are now present-ing as an explicitly intended difference the unconquerable distance that separates you, and will always separate you, from a true structural analysis.

For you have not managed to deceive us. It is true that in the void left by the methods that you have chosen not to use, you have precipitated a whole series of notions that seem quite alien to the concepts now accepted by those who describe languages, myths, or works of literature; you have spoken of formations, positivities, knowledge, discursive practices: a whole panoply of terms whose uniqueness and

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marvellous powers you were proud to point out at every step. But would you have invented so many oddities if you had not tried to apply, in a domain that was irreducible to them, some of the funda­mental themes of structuralism — and those very themes that constitute its most debatable and philosophically dubious postulates? It is as if you had used not the empirical, serious work of structural analysis, but two or three themes that are really extrapolations rather than necessary principles.

You have tried to reduce the dimensions proper to discourse, ignore its specific irregularity, hide what initiative and freedom it possesses, and make up for the imbalance that it sets up within the language (longue): you have tried to close this openness. Like a certain form of linguistics, you have tried to dispense with the speaking subject; you believed that one could cut off from discourse all its anthropological references, and treat it as if it had never been formulated by anyone, as if it had not come about in particular circumstances, as if it were not imbued with representations, as if it were addressed to no one. Lastly, you have applied to it a principle of simultaneity: you have refused to see that discourse, unlike the language (longue) perhaps, is essentially historical, that it was made up not of available elements, but of real, successive events, that it cannot be analysed outside the time in which it occurred.
—You are quite right: I misunderstood the transcendence of dis-course; in describing it, I refused to refer it to a subjectivity; I did not give primary consideration, as if it ought to be its general form, to its diachronic character. But this was not intended to extend, beyond the domain of the language (longue), concepts and methods that had been tested within it. If I spoke of discourse, it was not to show that the mechanisms or processes of the language (longue) were entirely pre-served in it; but rather to reveal, in the density of verbal performances, the diversity of the possible levels of analysis; to show that in addition to methods of linguistic structuration (or interpretation), one could draw up a specific description of statements, of their formation, and of the regularities proper to discourse. If I suspended all reference to the speaking subject, it was not to discover laws of construction or forms that could be applied in the same way by all speaking subjects, nor was

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it to give voice to the great universal discourse that is common to all men at a particular period. On the contrary, my aim was to show what the differences consisted of, how it was possible for men, within the same discursive practice, to speak of different objects, to have contrary opinions, and to make contradictory choices; my aim was also to show in what way discursive practices were distinguished from one another; in short, I wanted not to exclude the problem of the subject, but to define the positions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity of discourse. Lastly, as you have observed, I did not deny history, but held in suspense the general, empty category of change in order to reveal transformations at different levels; I reject a uniform model of temporalization, in order to describe, for each discursive practice, its rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation, its own forms of derivation, and its specific modes of connexion over various successions.

So I did not wish to carry the structuralist enterprise beyond its legitimate limits. And you must admit that I never once used the word ^{`</sup>structure<sup>'</sup> in The Order of Things. But let us leave off our polemics about <sup>`}structuralism^'; they hardly survive in areas now deserted by serious workers; this particular controversy, which might have been so fruiftul, is now acted out only by mimes and tumblers.

—It^'s no use trying to avoid these polemics: you won^'t escape the problem so easily. For the problem does not concern structuralism. I recognize the value of its insights of course: when it is a question of analysing a language (longue), mythologies, folk-tales, poems, dreams, works of literature, even films perhaps, structural description reveals relations that could not otherwise be isolated; it makes it possible to define recurrent elements, with their forms of opposition, and their criteria of individualization; it also makes it possible to lay down laws of construction, equivalences, and rules of transformation. And despite a number of reservations that I had at the beginning, I now have no difficulty in accepting that man^'s languages (longues), his unconscious, and his imagination are governed by laws of structure. But what I absolutely cannot accept is what you are doing: I cannot accept that one can analyse scientific discourses in their succession without referring them to something like a constituent activity, without recognizing

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even in their hesitations the opening of an original project or a funda­mental teleology, without discovering the profound continuity that links them, and leads them to the point at which we can grasp them; I cannot accept that one can analyse the development of reason in this way, and free the history of thought from all taint of subjectivity. Let us examine the problem more closely: I agree that one can speak, in terms of elements and rules of construction, of language (longue) in general — at least of that language of other times and places which is that of myths, or even of that nevertheless rather strange language which is that of our unconscious or of our literary works; but the language of our knowledge, that language which we are using here and now, the structural discourse itself that enables us to analyse so many other languages (langages), that language which, in its historical density, we regard as irreducible. You surely cannot forget that it is on the basis of that language, with its slow genesis, and the obscure development that has brought it to its present state, that we can speak of other discourses in terms of structures; it is that language which has given us the possi­bility and the right to do so; it forms the blind spot on the basis of which things around us are arranged as we see them today. I don^'t mind one dealing with elements, relations, and discontinuities when analysing Indo-European myths or the tragedies of Racine; and I can even accept that one should dispense, as far as one can, with a discus­sion of the speaking subjects; but I dispute that these successes give one the right to turn the analysis back on to the forms of discourse that made them possible, and to question the very locus in which we are speaking today. The history of those analyses in which subjectivity eludes one retains its own transcendence.
—It seems to me that the difference between us lies there (much more than in the over-discussed question of structuralism). As you know, I have no great liking for interpretation, but allow me, as a kind of game, to say what I understand you to have said earlier. ^'Of course^', you say, ^'we must now admit, despite all the attacks of the arriere-garde, that one formalizes deductive discourses; of course we have to admit that one describes, not so much the history of a soul, not so much a project of existence, as the architecture of a philosophical system; of course, whatever we think about it, we have to tolerate those analyses

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that link literary oeuvres, not to the lived experience of an individual, but to the structures of the language (longue). Of course, we have had to abandon all those discourses that once led us to the sovereignty of consciousness. But what we have lost over the last half-century, we are hoping to recover in the second degree, by means of the analysis of those analyses, or at least by the fundamental questioning that we apply to them. We will ask them where they came from, towards what histor­ical destination they are moving without being aware of it, what naivety blinds them to the conditions that make them possible, and what metaphysical enclosure encloses their rudimentary positivism. And so in the end it will not matter that the unconscious is not, as we believed and affirmed, the implicit edge of consciousness; it will not matter that a mythology is no longer a world-view, and that a novel is something other than the outer slope of a lived experience; for the reason that establishes all these new ^'truths^' is under strict supervision: neither itself, nor its past, nor that which makes it possible, nor that which makes it ours escapes the attribution of transcendence. For it is to it now — and we are determined never to abandon this — that we will now pose the question of the origin, the first constitution, the teleo­logical horizon, temporal continuity. It is that thought, which is now becoming ours, that we will maintain in historico-transcendental dom­inance. That is why, if we must tolerate all these structuralisms, whether we like it or not, we will not allow any taint to that history of thought that is our own history; we will not allow the unravelling of those transcendental threads that have hound it since the nineteenth century to the problem of origin and subjectivity. To whomsoever approaches that fortress in which we have taken refuge, and which we are determined to defend and to hold, we repeat, with a gesture that wards off all profanation: ^'Noli tangere^'.

But I have obstinately gone on. Not that I am either certain of victory or sure of my weapons. But because it seemed to me that, for the moment, the essential task was to free the history of thought from its subjection to transcendence. For me, the problem was certainly not how to structuralize it, by applying to the development of knowledge or to the genesis of the sciences categories that had proved themselves in the domain of language (longue). My aim was to analyse this history, in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map

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it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject; to open it up to a temporality that would not promise the return of any dawn. My aim was to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism; it had to be freed from that circle of the lost origin, and rediscovered where it was imprisoned; it had to be shown that the history of thought could not have this role of revealing the transcendental moment that rational mechanics has not possessed since Kant, mathematical idealities since Husserl, and the meanings of the perceived world since Merleau-Ponty – despite the efforts that had been made to find it here.

And I think that really, despite the element of doubt introduced by our apparent dispute over structuralism, we understood each other perfectly. I mean, each of us understood perfectly what the other was trying to do. It is quite normal that you should defend the rights of a continuous history, open both to the application of a teleology and to the endless processes of causality; but it was not to protect it from a structural invasion that failed to recognize its movement, spontaneity, and internal dynamism; in fact, you were trying to preserve the powers of a constituent consciousness, since it was really they that were in question. But this defence was to take place elsewhere, and not in the same place as the discussion itself: for if you recognize the right of a piece of empirical research, some fragment of history, to challenge the transcendental dimension, then you have ceded the main point. Hence a series of shifts or displacements. To treat archaeology as a search for the origin, for formal a prioris, for founding acts, in short, as a sort of historical phenomenology (when, on the contrary, its aim is to free history from the grip of phenomenology), and then to object that it fails in its task, and that it never discovers more than a series of empir­ical facts. Then to contrast archaeological description, and its concern to establish thresholds, ruptures, and transformations, with the true work of historians, which is to reveal continuities (when this ceased to be the concern of historians decades ago); and then to reproach it for its lack of concern for empiricities. And then to regard it as an enter-prise whose aim is to describe cultural totalities, to homogenize the most obvious differences, and to rediscover the universality of con­strictive forms (when its aim is to define the unique specificity of

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discursive practices), and then to object to differences, changes, and mutations. Lastly, to regard it as an importation of structuralism into the domain of history (when its methods and concepts cannot possibly be confused with structuralism) and then to show that it cannot function as a true structural analysis.

This whole play of displacements and misunderstandings is perfectly coherent and necessary. It brought with it a secondary benefit: being able to approach from an oblique angle all those forms of structuralism that had to be tolerated, and that could no longer be resisted; and to say to them: ^`You see what you^'ll expose yourselves to if you touch those domains that are still ours; your methods may have some validity else-where, but they would soon be brought to recognize their limitations; all the concrete content that you would like to analyse would elude them; you would be forced to give up your prudent empiricism; and, against your will, you. would fall into a strange ontology of structure. So be prudent enough to keep to those domains which you have no doubt conquered, but which we will pretend to have conceded to you, since we have fixed their boundaries.^' But the major benefit, of course, is that it conceals the crisis in which we have been involved for so long, and which is constantly growing more serious: a crisis that concerns that transcendental reflexion with which philosophy since Kant has identified itself; which concerns that theme of the origin, that promise of the return, by which we avoid the difference of our present; which concerns an anthropological thought that orders all these questions around the question of man^'s being, and allows us to avoid an analysis of practice; which concerns all humanist ideologies; which, above all, concerns the status of the subject. It is this discussion that you would like to suppress, and from which you hope, I think, to divert attention, by pursuing the pleasant games of genesis and system, synchrony and development, relation and cause, structure and history. Are you sure you are not practising a theoretical metathesis?

—Let us suppose that our dispute is where you say it is; let us suppose that our aims are to attack or to defend the last bastion of transcendental thought, and let us admit that this discussion is in fact situated in the crisis you describe: what then is the title of your dis-course? Where does it come from and from where does it derive its
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right to speak? How could it be legitimated? If you have done nothing more than carry out an empirical inquiry devoted to the appearance and transformation of discourses, if you have described groups of statements, epistemological figures, the historical forms of a body of knowledge, how can you escape the naivety of all positivisms? And how could your enterprise prevail against the question of origin, and the necessary recourse to a constituent subject? But if you claim that you are opening up a radical interrogation, if you wish to place your discourse at the level at which we place ourselves, you know very well that it will enter our game, and, in turn, extend the very dimension that it is trying to free itself from. Either it does not reach us, or we claim it. In any case, you have promised to tell us what these discourses are that you have been pursuing so obstinately for the past ten years, without ever bothering to define their status. In short, what are they: history or philosophy?

—I admit that this question embarrasses me more than your earlier objections. I am not entirely surprised by it; but I would have preferred to leave it in suspense a little longer. This is because, for the moment, and as far ahead as I can see, my discourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks, is avoiding the ground on which it could find support. It is a discourse about discourses: but it is not trying to find in them a hidden law, a concealed origin that it only remains to free; nor is it trying to establish by itself, taking itself as a starting-point, the general theory of which they would be the concrete models. It is trying to deploy a dispersion that can never be reduced to a single system of differences, a scattering that is not related to absolute axes of reference; it is trying to operate a decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre. The role of such a discourse is not to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover, in the depths of things said, at the very place in which they are silent, the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of the truth. On the contrary, its task is to make differences: to constitute them as objects, to analyse them, and to define their concept. Instead of travelling over the field of discourses in order to recreate the suspended totalizations for its own use, instead of seeking in what has been said that other

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hidden discourse, which nevertheless remains the same (and instead of playing endlessly with allegory and tautology), it is continually making differentiations, it is a diagnosis. If philosophy is memory or a return of the origin, what I am doing cannot, in any way, be regarded as philosophy; and if the history of thought consists in giving life to half-effaced figures, what I am doing is not history either.
—From what you have just said, one must at least deduce that your archaeology is not a science. You allow it to fluctuate, with the uncertain status of a description. Yet another of those discourses that would like to be taken as a discipline still in its early stages, no doubt; which gives their authors the double advantage of not having to estab­lish their explicit, rigorous scientificity, and of opening up for it a future generality that frees it from the hazards of its birth; yet another of those projects that justify themselves on the basis of what they are not, always leaving their essential task, the moment of their verifica­tion, and the definitive establishment of their coherence until later; yet another of those foundations, so many of which have been announced since the nineteenth century: for we know very well that, in the mod-ern theoretical field, what one is pleased to invent are not demonstrable systems, but disciplines for which one opens up possibilities, outlines a programme, and leaves its future development to others. But no sooner have they been outlined than they disappear together with their authors. And the field that they were supposed to tend remains sterile for ever.
—It is true that I have never presented archaeology as a science, or even as the beginnings of a future science. And I have tried to draw up a survey — and in the process to make a good many corrections — of the work that I had done in certain fields of concrete research, rather than produce plans for some future building. The word archaeology is not supposed to carry any suggestion of anticipation; it simply indicates a possible line of attack for the analysis of verbal performances: the specification of a level — that of the statement and the archive; the determination and illumination of a domain — the enunciative regular­ities, the positivities; the application of such concepts as rules of forma-tion, archaeological derivation, and historical a priori. But in almost all

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its dimensions and over almost all its crests, the enterprise is related to the sciences, and to analyses of a scientific type, or to theories subject to rigorous criteria. First of all, it is related to the sciences that are constituted and establish their norms in the knowledge archaeologic-ally described: for the archaeological enterprise, these sciences are so many science-objects, as morbid anatomy, philology, political economy, and biology have already been. It is also related to scientific forms of analysis, but is distinguished from them either in level, domain, or methods, and juxtaposed to them by characteristic lines of division; by seizing, out of the mass of things said, upon the statement defined as a function of realization of the verbal performance, it distinguishes itself from a search whose privileged field is linguistic competence: while such a description constitutes a generative model, in order to define the acceptability of statements, archaeology tries to establish rules of for-mation, in order to define the conditions of their realization; between these two modes of analysis, there are, therefore, a number of analo­gies, but there are also a number of differences (in particular, concern-ing the possible level of formalization) ; in any case, for archaeology, a generative grammar plays the role of a related analysis. Moreover, in their deployment and in the fields that they cover, archaeological descrip­tions are articulated upon other disciplines; in seeking to define, out-side all reference to a psychological or constituent subjectivity, the different positions of the subject that may be involved in statements, archaeology touches on a question that is being posed today by psy­choanalysis; in trying to reveal the rules of formation of concepts, the modes of succession, connexion, and coexistence of statements, it touches on the problem of epistemological structures; in studying the formation of objects, the fields in which they emerge and are specified, in studying too the conditions of appropriation of discourses, it touches on the analysis of social formations. For archaeology, these are so many correlative spaces. Lastly, in so far as it is possible to constitute a general theory of productions, archaeology, as the analysis of the rules proper to the different discursive practices, will find what might. be called its enveloping theory.

If I situate archaeology among so many other, already constituted, discourses, it is not in order to give it some kind of status by association that it would be incapable of acquiring in isolation; it is not in order to

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give it a definitive place in an unmoving constellation; but in order to reveal, with the archive, the discursive formations, the positivities, the statements, and their conditions of formation, a specific domain. A domain that has not so far been made the object of any analysis (at least, of what is most specific and most irreducible to interpretations and formalizations about it); but a domain that has no means of guar­anteeing — at the still rudimentary stage of mapping at which I am at present — that it will remain stable and autonomous. After all, it may be that archaeology is doing nothing more than playing the role of an instrument that makes it possible to articulate, in a less imprecise way than in the past, the analysis of social formations and epistemological descriptions; or which makes it possible to relate an analysis of the positions of the subject to a theory of the history of the sciences; or which makes it possible to situate the place of intersection between a general theory of production and a generative analysis of statements. Lastly, it may turn out that archaeology is the name given to a part of our contemporary theoretical conjuncture. Whether this conjuncture is giv-ing rise to an individualizable discipline, whose initial characteristics and overall limits are being outlined here, or whether it is giving rise to a set of problems whose present coherence does not mean that it will not be taken up later elsewhere, in a different way, at a higher level, or using different methods, I am in no position at the moment to decide. And, to tell you the truth, it is probably not up to me to decide. I accept that my discourse may disappear with the figure that has borne it so far.

—You make curious use of the freedom that you question in others. For you give yourself the whole field of a free space that you even refuse to qualify. But are you forgetting the care with which you enclosed the discourse of others within systems of rules? Are you forgetting all those constraints that you described so meticulously? Have you not deprived individuals of the right to intervene personally in the positivities in which their discourses are situated? You have linked their slightest words to obligations that condemn their slightest innovations to conformity. You make revolution very easy for yourself, but very difficult for others. It might he better if you had a clearer awareness of the conditions in which you speak, and a greater con­fidence in the real action of men and in their possibilities.

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—I^'m afraid you are making a double mistake: about the discursive practices that I have tried to define and about the role that you yourself accord to human freedom. The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated (without, however, constituting its centre), rules that it puts into operation (without it having invented or formulated them), relations that provide it with a support (without it being either their final result or their point of convergence). It is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density; to show that to speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks; to translate what one knows, and something other than to play with the structures of a language (longue); to show that to add a statement to a pre-existing series of statements is to perform a complicated and costly gesture, which involves conditions (and not only a situation, a context, and motives), and rules (not the logical and linguistic rules of construction); to show that a change in the order of discourse does not presuppose ^`new ideas^', a little inven­tion and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a prac­tice, perhaps also in neighbouring practices, and in their common articulation. I have not denied – far from it – the possibility of chan­ging discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it.

And now I should like to ask you a question: how do you see change, or, let us say, revolution, at least in the scientific order and in the field of discourses, if you link it with the themes of meaning, project, origin and return, constituent subject, in short with the entire thematic that ensures for history the universal presence of the Logos? What possibility do you accord it if you analyse it in accordance with dynamic, biological, evolutionist metaphors in which the difficult, specific problem of historical mutation is usually dissolved? More precisely still: what political status can you give to discourse if you see

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in it merely a thin transparency that shines for an instant at the limit of things and thoughts? Has not the practice of revolutionary discourse and scientific discourse in Europe over the past two hundred years freed you from this idea that words are wind, an external whisper, a beating of wings that one has difficulty in hearing in the serious matter of history? Or must we conclude that in order to refuse this lesson, you are determined to misunderstand discursive practices, in their own existence, and that you wished to maintain, in spite of that lesson, a history of the mind, of rational knowledge, ideas, and opinions? What is that fear which makes you reply in terms of consciousness when someone talks to you about a practice, its conditions, its rules, and its historical transformations? What is that fear which makes you seek, beyond all boundaries, ruptures, shifts, and divisions, the great historico-transcendental destiny of the Occident?

It seems to me that the only reply to this question is a political one. But let us leave that to one side for today. Perhaps we will take it up again soon in another way.

This book was written simply in order to overcome certain pre­liminary difficulties. I know as well as anyone how ^'thankless^' is the task that I undertook some ten years ago. I know how irritating it can he to treat discourses in terms not of the gentle, silent, intimate con­sciousness that is expressed in them, but of an obscure set of anonym­ous rules. How unpleasant it is to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice where one is used to seeing, in all its pure transparency, the expression of genius and freedom. How provocative it is to treat as a set of transformations this history of discourses which, until now, has been animated by the reassuring metaphors of life or the intentional continuity of the lived. How unbearable it is, in view of how much of himself everyone wishes to put, thinks he is putting of ^'himself into his own discourse, when he speaks, how unbearable it is to cut up, analyse, combine, rearrange all these texts that have now returned from silence, without ever the transfigured face of the author appearing: ^'What! All those words, piled up one after another, all those marks made on all that paper and presented to innumerable pairs of eyes, all that concern to make them survive beyond the gesture that articulated them, so much piety expended in preserving them and inscribing them in men^'s memories — all that and nothing remaining of the poor

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hand that traced them, of the anxiety that sought appeasement in them, of that completed life that has nothing but them to survive in? Is not discourse, in its most profound determination, a ^"trace^"? And is its murmur not the place of insubstantial immortalities? Must we admit that the time of discourse is not the time of consciousness extrapolated to the dimensions of history, or the time of history present in the form of consciousness? Must I suppose that in my discourse I can have no survival? And that in speaking I am not banishing my death, but actu­ally establishing it; or rather that I am abolishing all interiority in that exterior that is so indifferent to my life, and so neutral, that it makes no distinction between my life and my death?^'

I understand the unease of all such people. They have probably found it difficult enough to recognize that their history, their econom­ics, their social practices, the language (langue) that they speak, the mythology of their ancestors, even the stories that they were told in their childhood, are governed by rules that are not all given to their consciousness; they can hardly agree to being dispossessed in addition of that discourse in which they wish to be able to say immediately and directly what they think, believe, or imagine; they prefer to deny that discourse is a complex, differentiated practice, governed by analysable rules and transformations, rather than be deprived of that tender, con-soling certainty of being able to change, if not the world, if not life, at least their ^'meaning^', simply with a fresh word that can come only from themselves, and remain for ever close to the source. So many things have already eluded them in their language (langage): they have no wish to see what they say go the same way; at all costs, they must preserve that tiny fragement of discourse — whether written or spoken — whose fragile, uncertain existence must perpetuate their lives. They cannot bear (and one cannot but sympathize) to hear someone saying: ^'Discourse is not life: its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don^'t imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.^'