The Archaeology of Knowledge is a comprehensive reason of Foucault's technique. Within this e book, he handles fundamental conditions like discourse, enunciative modalities, principles, strategies, statements, and so on. Corresponding to Lindgren (2000:294), archaeology is a method of historical research targeted at the assertions of discourses and affirmation processes, procedures whose primary goal is to expose the discursive guidelines that constitute various domains of knowledge.
In that sense, we ought to begin by defining what discourse is good for Foucault. Foucault (cited in Hall, 1997:44) identifies 'discourse' as:
[A] band of statements which give a language for talking about - a means of representing the knowledge about - a specific topic at a specific historical second. . . . Discourse is about the creation of knowledge through terms. But. . . since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings form and effect what we do - our carry out - all practices have a discursive aspect.
With the archaeology of knowledge, Foucault focuses on a new method, a organized articulation of this is and role of discourses. He argues that knowledge is established through discourse. His main interest is how we should study the data (from lecture notes). Related to this interest, he examines how we are made themes, how we are being themes. To answer these questions, he searches for the relationship between vitality and knowledge. He points out that discourse is a way of handling the social practices and establishments in a society. How could it be done then? For him, managing the social practices and corporations in a world is done by managing the data of the population. For the reason that sense, purpose of archaeological analysis is to disclose historical conditions that make knowledge possible and epistemic area where these conditions take place. In other words, regarding to archaeological evaluation, knowledge is historically constituted within an episteme and due to the rules defining discursive practices of the episteme. Foucault says:
By episteme, we indicate. . . the total set of relationships that unite, at confirmed period, the discursive methods that give go up to epistemological numbers, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the circulation of the thresholds, which might coincide, be subordinated one to the other, or be separated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may are present between epistemological figures or sciences in as far as they belong to neighbouring, but specific, discursive procedures. The episteme is not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the limitations of the most numerous sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a topic, a heart, or an interval; it is the totality of relationships that may be discovered, for confirmed period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the amount of discursive regularities (Archaeology 191)
In that point, he is interested in statements. The primary analytical factor of archaeology is the affirmation (Lindgren, 2000: 298). WITHIN THE Archaeology of Knowledge, with the concept of archaeology, he's paying attention to discourse and a scrutiny of the statement. For the reason that sense, there's a discussion in what Foucault's assertion includes. For example, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow (cited in Barrett, 2004: 176), Foucault will not package with all claims but he deals with statements that have autonomy and include genuine assertion. Foucault's 'assertion' is different from "the easy inscription of what's said" (Deleuze, 1988: 15). Regarding to Barrett (2004: 176), statements of Foucault are not proposition or phrase. Matching to him, the affirmation is much less a linguistic unit like the phrase, but as "a function" (Foucault, 98). This example is mainly expressed to understand how a declaration is known as. AZERT, which is formation of words on French typewriter, is not really a statement. On the other hand, placing this creation in the training reserve as "alphabetic development accepted by French typists" is a affirmation. In Foucault's words: ". . . the computer keyboard of an typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of words, A, Z, E, R, T, detailed in a typewriting manual, is the affirmation of the alphabetical order followed by French typewriters" (85-86).
With the technique of archaeology, he tries to determine the actual assertions as techniques that are at the mercy of certain rules, historically, and culturally driven rules that determine what statements are produced. INSIDE THE Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that the statement itself does not create meaning. Rather, statements generate a network of guidelines that determine what is meaningful once we can see in the AZERT example. Briefly, the statement allows "groups of signs to can be found, and enables rules or forms to become express" (Foucault, 99). The conditions of any affirmation point toward how says of real truth are constructed. For the reason that sense, we can declare that he is not enthusiastic about essential truth. He is interested in the idea of "truth production. " Thus, we can see this aim in Madness and Civilization, The Labor and birth of the Medical clinic, as well as the Order of Things.
In that sense, he will try to give us an idea about how precisely his work is different from traditional understanding record. His attempt can be described as strategy of discontinuity. Instead of looking for homogeneity in a discursive entity, Foucault looks at ruptures, breaks to comprehend the creation of meaning and knowledge. Thus, he argues that disciplines like sentence structure, medication, and sexuality have no positive unity. Finished. uniting them is the "rules of formation. " Rules of formation regulate how new claims can be made. Such an research of discontinuous discourse will not belong to the traditional history of ideas or of research:
. . . it is extremely an enquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge is constituted. . . This enterprise is not so much a brief history, in the traditional meaning of the word, as an "archaeology" (Order, xxi-xxii).
He points out this with a good metaphor.
The report is not the lucky tool of a history that is mainly and fundamentally storage area. . . record, in its traditional form, undertook to 'memorize' the monuments of days gone by, [and] transform them into documents. . . Inside our time, record is that which transforms documents into monuments. For the reason that area where, before, history deciphered the traces kept by men, it now deploys scores of elements that contain to be grouped, made relevant, positioned in relation to one another to form totalities; it could be said, to experiment with on words a little, that inside our time background aspires to the health of archaeology, to the intrinsic information of the monument (Archaeology, 7).
The main goal is to study the file not what document represents. Quite simply, reason for archaeological analaysis can be mentioned in three game titles:
- To show discontinuities in the history of thought.
- He considers these discontinuities as normal not a stigmata.
- . . . the theme and opportunity of a total history commence to fade away, and we see the emergence of something completely different that might be called a general history. The job of a complete history is one that seeks to reconstitute the entire form of your civilization. . . The situation that now presents itself -- and which identifies the task of an over-all history -- is to know what form of relationship may be legitimately referred to between these different series. . . not only what series, but also what 'series of series' -- or, quite simply, what 'dining tables' it is possible to draw up. A total description attracts all phenomena around a single centre. . . an over-all history, on the other hand, would deploy the space of dispersion (9-10).
In other words, the reason is to find rules working within different series. What we witness is not continuity without interruption but dispersion. We have to examine objects, statements, and theme. He prefers to consider concepts, styles, and paradigms at all degrees of discourse; the "discursive regularities. " These constitute discursive information. Job of archaeology is to review this. Accountable of the said is not the article writer; it is record. Foucault summarizes this as:
Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the ongoing, insensible transition that relates discourses, over a gentle slope, from what precedes them, surrounds them, or comes after them. . . its problem is to identify discourses in their specificity; showing in what way the set of rules that they put into operation is irreducible to any other. . . it is not a 'doxology'; but a differential evaluation of the modalities of discourse (139).
Secondly, to get started to comprehend a discursive development, we must question the presenter: who's speaking? The purpose of this analysis is to look at conventional and proven discourses and corporations, such as remedies. After we ascertain who is speaking, we should examine the document to see who they are speaking for.
The third group of rules of formation of any discursive creation is the ones that relate with the 'development of concepts. ' An effort to explain regularity in the process of the emergence of ideas has nothing to do with an effort to spell it out a chronological or hierarchical process. Rather, the guidelines of development of ideas would describe the organization of the bottom of statements where these claims show up and circulate. This organization, regarding to Foucault, entails 'forms of succession', 'varieties of coexistence', and 'steps of involvement' (56-58).
As far when i concerned from the book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, it is presented the strategy of archaeology found in Madness and Civilization, The Labor and birth of the Center, plus the Order of Things.
For example, while he examines the madness in Madness and Civilization, he studies the emergence of the discourse called psychiatry. He discovers that what made this self-discipline possible at the time it came out was a whole set of relationships between hospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures of sociable exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms of labor and bourgeois morality. In a nutshell, he examines external relations that characterized for this discursive practice the formation of its statements.
As the title suggest, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Individual Sciences investigate the history and the historical origins of the 'human being sciences', having an interest in linguistics, biology and economics. Furthermore, the book has a shutting chapter on 'history, sociology, psychoanalysis and ethnology' (O' Farrell, 2005:39).
Another example for archaeological examination can be The Order of Discourse. This reserve corresponds to a summary of Foucault's archaeological evaluation. Within the reserve, there's a discussion about techniques, rules and rules, which control, control, and plan effects of discourse.
In THE ANNALS of Sexuality, amount 1: An Advantages, Foucault targets the discourses predicated on analysis, figures, classification, and specs centered around sex by turning ugly the traditional notion. He examines truth about sex indicated in a vocabulary that is dependant on power and knowledge.
If we do the analysis of archaeological examination by discussing these works, we can loosen up the obvious components of the theoretical framework, which Foucault articulates in The Archaeology of Knowledge. From them, he derives and illustrates the foundation of the technique. This method is distinguished by its questions about of continuity and the seek out meaning in history. Dreyfus and Rabinow point out that archeological examination "implies that what seems like the continuous development of interpretation is crossed by discontinuous discursive formations" (1986: 106).
After The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault began more and more to be thinking about the partnership between knowledge and electric power, and exactly how this relationship can lead to the creation of particular 'truths' about the individual 'subject' (McHoul & Grace, 1993:57-58). In other words, Archaeology is not learning the history of ideas. Alternatively, it is an effort to focuse on the problem when a subject (the mad, for example) is constituted as a possible object of knowledge. He says:
Studying the history of ideas, as they evolve, is not my problem much as aiming to discern beneath them how one or another subject could take shape just as one subject of knowledge. Why for instance does madness become, at a given moment, an object of knoweldge corresponding to a certain type of knowledge? Utilizing the word "archaeology" rather than "history", I tied to designate this desynchronization between ideas about madness and the constitution of madness as an object.
Thus, as far as I understood from the quotation, electricity is no more the conventional power of organizations and/or leaders, but instead the settings of power that control buttons individuals and their knowledge, the mechanism by which power "reaches into to the very grain of people, touches their systems and inserts itself to their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning functions and day-to-day lives" (Electricity/Knowledge, 30). It really is in discourse that vitality is manifest to recognize the mad.
Briefly, with archaeological evaluation, he is up against the humanist concepts of home and objectivity. we can summaries this opposition under two game titles:
- He is against the thought of an autonomous individual. The subject for Foucault is not really a rational agent considering and acting under its self-imposed and self-created orders. Rather the topic is something of social set ups, epistemes, and discourses once we see in discourse of the madness. For instance, in Willpower and Punish, he examines new creations producing the criminal as a fresh kind of person.
- He is also against an objectivist epistemology, theory of knowledge. Our meaning, experiences, and truths are not simply prearranged to us as stable and fixed things. Rather they are constructed for us by the same cultural set ups, the epistemes, and discourse that give us our identity as we witness the identification of the mad or as we gain our erotic identity.
Thus, archaeology of knowledge is looking for the rules for the assertions in a specific discourse making us a particular subject. The problem with the archaeological method is that on the one hands, it allows the comparability of different discursive formations of different cycles, it helps suggesting the contingency by simply exhibiting that different age ranges had thought diversely. For example, he handles the development of medical practice during period 1760 to 1810 to express a fresh kind of medical thinking. Alternatively this technique cannot influence us to know more about the complexities that fabricate the transition from one way of thinking to an other. Later, he uses the concept of genealogy to explain what makes this move. He didn't reject archaeology but genealogy was given a superiority.
To summarize, importance of archaeology in discourse examination can be summarized with Foucault's words:
Archaeological research [of painting] could have another aim: it could try to discover whether space, distance, depth, color, light, proportions, quantities, and contours weren't, at the periods involved, considered, known as, enunciated, and conceptualized in a discursive practice; and if the knowledge that this discursive practice gives rise to had not been embodied perhaps in theories and speculations, in types of teaching and rules of practice, but also in techniques, techniques, and even in the gesture of the painter. It would not attempt to show that the painting is a certain way of 'so this means' or 'declaring' that is peculiar for the reason that it dispenses with words, It would try to show that, at least in another of its dimensions, it is discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects. . . . it would make an effort to explain the forming of a discursive practice and a body of groundbreaking knowledge that are indicated in habit and strategies, which give rise to a theory of contemporary society, and which operate the interference and mutual transformation of that habit and those strategies (193-195).
His method is important because Foucault calling into question the relationships among claims in accepted categories in discursive fields, literature, psychology, viewpoint, and politics, for example and the relationships among claims. By this way, we can study different subject positions and have questions about suppression and deception. Additionally, we can ask ourselves how exactly we can get pregnant of discursive unities in any form at all.
References
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Dreyfus, H. L. , & Rabinow, P. (Eds. ). (1986). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Foucault, M. (1967 [1961]). Madness and Civilization: A BRIEF HISTORY of Insanity in the Age of Reason (R. Howard, Trans. ). London: Tavistock Publications.
Foucault, M. (1972[1969]). The Archaeology of Knowledge (A. M. S. Smith, Trans. ). NY: Pantheon Literature.
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