The concept of the Archive is linked closely with the
methods & practices of Archaeological description; its
formation with their formation, its development with
their development. To delineate the Archive would be
to carry out an archaeological description- a point
which is, evidently, not lost on Foucault, judgeing by
his concluding remarks which draw out the implications
Archaeological analysis has for itself (and its
self-understanding).
Archaeological analysis concerns itself with rules of
formulation: ?these rules [- fixed and determined in,
through, and by such an analysis-] define not the dumb
existence of a reality [- a pre/extra-linguistic
reality, outside of time, a 'platonic realm'-] but the
ordering of objects?, that is, the analytic
arrangement of space. ??Words and things? is the
entirely serious title of the problem? which the
enterprise of archaeological analysis addresses
itself, ?a task that consists of not- of no longer-
treating discourse as a group of signs (signifying
elements referring to contents or representations) but
as practices that systematically form the objects of
which they speak.?
Helpfully, Foucault provides us with an example drawn
from his own ?empirical investigations?, an example
which is exemplary in that it is where the problem of
?unities of discourse? first takes shape: ?mental
illness was constituted by all that was said in all
the statements that named it, divided it up, described
it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated
its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave
it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses
that were to be taken as its own.?
By writing a history of insanity, therefore, Foucault
was doing nothing less than rewriting history. And if
the fields of histiography themselves figure in an
archaeological description, it is only to the extent
that it systematically forms the objects- in this
case, subject-positions and object-relations set up
and maintained by discursive practices- of which it
speaks in, through, and by the very act and fact of
its enunciation, of its ?being said?- its emergence at
the level of ?things said? and at the same time of its
being said (coextensive with it), disappearing along
with the act that gives rise to it: ?I accept that my
discourse may disappear with the figure that has born
it do far.?
"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... . The role of
such a discourse is not to dissipate oblivion, to
rediscover, in the depths of things said, at the very
place in whcih they are silent, the moment of their
birth... ; 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 difference: to
constitute them as objects, to analyse them, and to
define their concept. [...] 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."
A hypothesis: the apothesosis of the 'text as
monument' is bound up, in the first instance and last
analysis, with the text-based practice of christian
morality. This tendency- let us be loose in the use of
our words and allow our analysis, for the time being
at least, to fluctuate with the uncertain status of
'description'- was re-activated through the protestant
re-formation (the return to the text, initialized by
the figure of Luther, and culminating with the
publication of the King James bible). A time which is
still very much our own; whose horizons are those of
language itself, and which we are yet to trace, in
langauge, the outter edge of- indeed, it could even be
asked whether as much would constitute, by its action,
a break from, or an extension of, the
strategic-intention which, propelled by an anxiety
particular to it, looks to the text for a touchstone
to the truth.
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methods & practices of Archaeological description; its
formation with their formation, its development with
their development. To delineate the Archive would be
to carry out an archaeological description- a point
which is, evidently, not lost on Foucault, judgeing by
his concluding remarks which draw out the implications
Archaeological analysis has for itself (and its
self-understanding).
Archaeological analysis concerns itself with rules of
formulation: ?these rules [- fixed and determined in,
through, and by such an analysis-] define not the dumb
existence of a reality [- a pre/extra-linguistic
reality, outside of time, a 'platonic realm'-] but the
ordering of objects?, that is, the analytic
arrangement of space. ??Words and things? is the
entirely serious title of the problem? which the
enterprise of archaeological analysis addresses
itself, ?a task that consists of not- of no longer-
treating discourse as a group of signs (signifying
elements referring to contents or representations) but
as practices that systematically form the objects of
which they speak.?
Helpfully, Foucault provides us with an example drawn
from his own ?empirical investigations?, an example
which is exemplary in that it is where the problem of
?unities of discourse? first takes shape: ?mental
illness was constituted by all that was said in all
the statements that named it, divided it up, described
it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated
its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave
it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses
that were to be taken as its own.?
By writing a history of insanity, therefore, Foucault
was doing nothing less than rewriting history. And if
the fields of histiography themselves figure in an
archaeological description, it is only to the extent
that it systematically forms the objects- in this
case, subject-positions and object-relations set up
and maintained by discursive practices- of which it
speaks in, through, and by the very act and fact of
its enunciation, of its ?being said?- its emergence at
the level of ?things said? and at the same time of its
being said (coextensive with it), disappearing along
with the act that gives rise to it: ?I accept that my
discourse may disappear with the figure that has born
it do far.?
"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... . The role of
such a discourse is not to dissipate oblivion, to
rediscover, in the depths of things said, at the very
place in whcih they are silent, the moment of their
birth... ; 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 difference: to
constitute them as objects, to analyse them, and to
define their concept. [...] 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."
A hypothesis: the apothesosis of the 'text as
monument' is bound up, in the first instance and last
analysis, with the text-based practice of christian
morality. This tendency- let us be loose in the use of
our words and allow our analysis, for the time being
at least, to fluctuate with the uncertain status of
'description'- was re-activated through the protestant
re-formation (the return to the text, initialized by
the figure of Luther, and culminating with the
publication of the King James bible). A time which is
still very much our own; whose horizons are those of
language itself, and which we are yet to trace, in
langauge, the outter edge of- indeed, it could even be
asked whether as much would constitute, by its action,
a break from, or an extension of, the
strategic-intention which, propelled by an anxiety
particular to it, looks to the text for a touchstone
to the truth.
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