The Archeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault contents part I introduction 3



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7. REMARKS AND CONSEQUENCES


We must now take up once more a number of remarks to be found in the preceding analyses, reply to some of the questions that they inevit­ably raise, and above all examine the objection that threatens to present itself, for the paradox of the enterprise is now apparent.

At the outset I questioned those pre-established unities according to which one has traditionally divided up the indefinite, repetitive, pro­lific domain of discourse. My intention. was not to deny all value to these unities or to try to forbid their use; it was to show that they required, in order to be defined exactly, a theoretical elaboration. How-ever — and it is here that all the preceding analyses appear so problem­atic — was it necessary to superpose upon these unities, which may in fact have been rather uncertain, another category of less visible, more abstract, and certainly far more problematical unities? But in cases when their historical limits and the specificity of their organization are fairly easy to perceive (witness General Grammar or Natural History), these discursive formations present far more difficult problems of loca­tion than the book, or the oeuvre. Why, then, proceed to such dubious regroupings at the very moment when one is challenging those that once seemed the most obvious? What new domain is one hoping to

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discover? What hitherto obscure or implicit relations? What transform­ations that have hitherto remained outside the reach of historians? In short, what descriptive efficacy can one accord to these new analyses? I shall try to answer all these questions later. But for the moment I must reply to a question that is primary in relation to these later analyses, and terminal in relation to the preceding ones: on the question of the discursive formations that I have tried to define, can one really speak of unities? Is the re-division that I am proposing capable of individual­izing wholes? And what is the nature of the unity thus discovered or constructed?



We set out with an observation: with the unity of a discourse like that of clinical medicine, or political economy, or Natural History, we are dealing with a dispersion of elements. This dispersion itself — with its gaps, its discontinuities, its entanglements, its incompatibilities, its replacements, and its substitutions — can be described in its uniqueness if one is able to determine the specific rules in accordance with which its objects, statements, concepts, and theoretical options have been formed: if there really is a unity, it does not lie in the visible, horizontal coherence of the elements formed; it resides, well anterior to their formation, in the system that makes possible and governs that forma-tion. But in what way can we speak of unities and systems? How can we affirm that we have properly individualized certain discursive groups or wholes? When in a highly random way we have uncovered, behind the apparently irreducible multiplicity of objects, statements, concepts, and choices, a mass of elements that were no less numerous or dis­persed, but which were heterogeneous with one another? When we have divided these elements into four distinct groups whose mode of articulation has scarcely been defined? And in what sense can one say that all these elements that have been uncovered behind the objects, statements, concepts, and strategies of discourses guarantee the existence of no less individualizable wholes such as oeuvres or books?
1. As we have seen — and there is probably no need to reiterate it — when one speaks of a system of formation, one does not only mean the juxtaposition, coexistence, or interaction of heterogeneous elements (institutions, techniques, social groups, perceptual organizations, relations between various discourses), but also the relation that is

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established between them — and in a well determined form — by dis-cursive practice. But what is to he done with those four systems or rather those four groups of relations? How can they all define a single system of formation?

In fact, the different levels thus defined are not independent of one another. I have shown that the strategic choices do not emerge directly from a world-view or from a predominance of interests peculiar to this or that speaking subject; but that their very possibility is determined by points of divergence in the group of concepts; I have also shown that concepts were not formed directly against the approximative, confused, and living background of ideas, but on the basis of forms of coexist­ence between statements; and, as we have seen, the modalities of enun­ciation were described on the basis of the position occupied by the subject in relation to the domain of objects of which he is speaking. In this way, there exists a vertical system of dependences: not all the positions of the subject, all the types of coexistence between state­ments, all the discursive strategies, are equally possible, but only those authorized by anterior levels; given, for example, the system of forma-tion that governed, in the eighteenth century, the objects of Natural History (as individualities possessing characters, and therefore classifi­able; as structural elements capable of variation; as visible, analysable surfaces; as a field of continuous, regular differences), certain modal­ities of enunciation are excluded (for example, the decipherment of signs), others are implied (for example, description according to a particular code); given, too, the different positions that the discoursing subject may occupy (as an observing subject with instrumental medi­ation, as a subject selecting out of the perceptual plurality only the elements of the structure, as a subject transcribing these elements into a coded vocabulary, etc.), there are a number of coexistences between the statements that are excluded (as, for example, the erudite reactiva­tion of the already-said, or the exegetic commentary of a sacralized text), others on the other hand that are possible or required (such as the integration of totally or partially analogous statements into a clas­sificatory table). The levels are not free from one another therefore, and are not deployed according to an unlimited autonomy: between the primary differentiation of objects and the formation of discursive strategies there exists a whole hierarchy of relations.

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But relations are also established in a reverse direction. The lower levels are not independent of those above them. Theoretical choices exclude or imply, in the statements in which they are made, the forma-tion of certain concepts, that is, certain forms of coexistence between statements: thus in the texts of the Physiocrats, one will not find the same modes of integrating quantitative data and measurements as in the analyses of the Utilitarists. It is not that the Physiocratic option can modify the group of rules that govern the formation of economic concepts in the eighteenth century; but it can implement some of these rules and exclude others and consequently reveal certain concepts (like that, for example, of the net product) that appear nowhere else. It is not the theoretical choice that governs the formation of the concept; but the choice has produced the concept by the mediation of specific rules for the formation of concepts, and by the set of relations that it holds with this level.


2. These systems of formation must not be taken as blocks of immobility, static forms that are imposed on discourse from the out-side, and that define once and for all its characteristics and possibilities. They are not constraints whose origin is to be found in the thoughts of men, or in the play of their representations; but nor are they determin­ations which, formed at the level of institutions, or social or economic relations, transcribe themselves by force on the surface of discourses. These systems — I repeat — reside in discourse itself; or rather (since we are concerned not with its interiority and what it may contain, but with its specific existence and with its conditions) on its frontier, at that limit at which the specific rules that enable it to exist as such are defined. By system of formation, then, I mean a complex group of relations that function as a rule: it lays down what must be related, in a particular discursive practice, for such and such an enunciation to be made, for such and such a concept to be used, for such and such a strategy to be organized. To define a system of formation in its specific individuality is therefore to characterize a discourse or a group of statements by the regularity of a practice.

As a group of rules for a discursive practice, the system of formation is not a stranger to time. It does not concentrate everything that may appear through an age-old series of statements into an initial point that

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is, at the same time, beginning, origin, foundation, system of axioms, and on the basis of which the events of real history have merely to unfold in a quite necessary way. What it outlines is the system of rules that must be put into operation if such and such an object is to be transformed, such and such a new enumeration appear, such and such a concept he developed, whether metamorphosed or imported, and such and such a strategy he modified — without ever ceasing to belong to this same discourse; and what it also outlines is the system of rules that has to be put into operation if a change in other discourses (in other practices, in institutions, in social relations, and in economic processes) is to be transcribed within a given discourse, thus constitut­ing a new object, giving rise to a new strategy, giving place to new enunciations or new concepts. A discursive formation, then, does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes it for decades or centuries; it determines a regularity proper to temporal processes; it presents the principle of articulation between a series of discursive events and other series of events, transformations, mutations, and pro­cesses. It is not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondence between several temporal series.



This mobility of the system of formation appears in two ways. First at the level of the elements that are being related to one another: these in fact may undergo a number of intrinsic mutations that are integrated into discursive practice without the general form of its regularity being altered; thus, throughout the nineteenth century, criminal juris-prudence, demographic pressure, the demand for labour, the forms of public assistance, the status and juridical conditions of internment, were continually changing; yet the discursive practice of psychiatry continued to establish the same group of relations between these elem­ents; in this way, the system preserved the characteristics of its indi­viduality; through the same laws of formation, new objects appear (new types of individuals, new classes of behaviour are characterized as pathological), new modalities of enunciation are put into operation (quantitative notations and statistical calculations), new concepts are outlined (such as those of degeneracy, perversion, neurosis), and of course new theoretical structures can be built. But, inversely, the dis-cursive practices modify the domains that they relate to one another. It is no use establishing specific relations that can be analysed only at their

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own level — the effect of these relations is not confined to discourse alone: it is also felt in the elements that they articulate upon one another. The hospital field, for example, did not remain unaffected when clinical discourse was put into relation with the laboratory: the body of rules that governed its working, the status accorded the hos­pital doctor, the function of his observation, the level of analysis that can be carried out in it, were necessarily modified.
3. What are described as 'systems of formation' do not constitute the terminal stage of discourse, if by that term one means the texts (or words) as they appear, with their vocabulary, syntax, logical structure, or rhetorical organization. Analysis remains anterior to this manifest level, which is that of the completed construction: in defining the principle of distributing objects in a discourse, it does not take into account all their connexions, their delicate structure, or their internal sub-divisions; in seeking the law of the dispersion of concepts, it does not take into account all the processes of elaboration, or all the deduct­ive series in which they may figure; if analysis studies the modalities of enunciation, it questions neither the style nor the succession. of the sentences; in short, it leaves the final placing of the text in dotted out-line. But we must be clear on one point: if analysis stands back in relation to this final construction, it is not to turn away from the discourse and to appeal to the silent work of thought; nor is it to turn away from the systematic and to reveal the 'living' disorder of attempts, trials, errors, and new beginnings.
In this respect, the analysis of discursive formations is opposed to many customary descriptions. One is used, in fact, to consider that discourses and their systematic ordering are not only the ultimate state, the final result of a long and often sinuous development involving language (longue) and thought, empirical experience and categories, the lived and ideal necessities, the contingency of events and the play of formal constraints. Behind the visible facade of the system, one posits the rich uncertainty of disorder; and beneath the thin surface of discourse, the whole mass of a largely silent development (devenir): a 'presystematic' that is not of the order of the system; a 'prediscursive' that belongs to an essential silence. Discourse and system produce each other — and

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conjointly — only at the crest of this immense reserve. What are being analysed here are certainly not the terminal states of discourse; they are the preterminal regularities in relation to which the ultimate state, far from constituting the birth-place of a system, is defined by its variants. Behind the completed system, what is discovered by the analysis of formations is not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet uncaptured state; it is an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple relations. Moreover, these relations cannot be the very web of the text — they are not by nature foreign to discourse. They can certainly be qualified as 'prediscursive', but only if one admits that this prediscursive is still discursive, that is, that they do not specify a thought, or a consciousness, or a group of representations which, a posteriori, and in a way that is never quite necessary, are transcribed into a discourse, but that they characterize certain levels of discourse, that they define rules that are embodied as a particular practice by dis-course. One is not seeking, therefore, to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from the exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the pure recollection of the moment, from superficial multiplicity to profound unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse.

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