The Archaeology of Knowledge
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Cover of the French edition
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| Author | Michel Foucault |
|---|---|
| Original title | L'archéologie du savoir |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Philosophy |
| Publisher | Éditions Gallimard |
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Publication date
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1969 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 275 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 435143715 |
The Archaeology of Knowledge (French: L'archéologie du savoir) is a 1969 methodological and historiographical treatise by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in which he promotes "archaeology" or the "archaeological method", an analytical method he implicitly used in his previous works Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), and The Order of Things (1966). It is Foucault's only explicitly methodological work.
Foucault's premise is that systems of thought and knowledge ("epistemes" or "discursive formations") are governed by rules (beyond those of grammar and logic) which operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought and language use in a given domain and period. Foucault also provides a philosophical treatment and critique of phenomenological and dogmatic structural readings of history and philosophy, portraying continuous narratives as naïve ways of projecting our own consciousness onto the past, thus being exclusive and excluding.
Foucault argues that the contemporary study of the history of ideas, although it targets moments of transition between historical worldviews, ultimately depends on continuities that break down under close inspection. The history of ideas marks points of discontinuity between broadly defined modes of knowledge, but the assumption that those modes exist as wholes fails to do justice to the complexities of discourse. Foucault argues that "discourses" emerge and transform not according to a developing series of unarticulated, common worldviews, but according to a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional relationships, which are defined as much by breaks and ruptures as by unified themes.
Foucault defines a "discourse" as a 'way of speaking'. Thus, his method studies only the set of 'things said' in their emergences and transformations, without any speculation about the overall, collective meaning of those statements, and carries his insistence on discourse-in-itself down to the most basic unit of things said: the statement (énoncé). During most of Archaeology, Foucault argues for and against various notions of what are inherent aspects of a statement, without arriving at a comprehensive definition. He does, however, argue that a statement is the rules which render an expression (that is, a phrase, a proposition, or a speech act) discursively meaningful. This concept of meaning differs from the concept of signification: Though an expression is signifying, for instance "The gold mountain is in California", it may nevertheless be discursively meaningless and therefore have no existence within a certain discourse. For this reason, the "statement" is an existence function for discursive meaning.
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