I think your post is going right to the heart of the matter: as a
methodological tool, the archive should be read in lits relations
Foucault's project of developping, through discourse analysis, an
"analytique' of power-knowledge relations. And an archive is then what
has been constituted by and through such an analysis.
I would supplement it by a remark. While a willingness to get out of exegesis (the practice of trying to find the truth of a text in it's concealed origin - a good representative of this form of analysis being, in France, Paul Ricoeur), I think a similar will to do away with "formalism" or "structuralism" in the analysis of "things said and written' is equally at stake in the development of this discourse analysis project. At the time when Foucault pronounces is inaugural lesson at the College de France (significantly intitled L'ordre du discours), this 'domain' of research was widely dominated by the works of Saussure (linguistic), Levi-Straus (mythology), Barthes (semiology - not to be confused with semiotics), Freud and Lacan (pyschoanalysis) and Kristeva (textual analysis grounded in the marxist base/superstructure metaphor) - to name but a few of he most prominent and to forget all of those who took up their work.
Note: Foucault was not the only one, and probably not the first one to take up this enterprise. Derrida was arguably the first to attack this domination by submitting that this way of thinking posed a great theoretical difficulty. In essence, he remarked that this structuralist thinking had reduced the «structurality of the structure» by bringing it back to an originary centre whose founction was to orient and organize it. Indeed, for him a structure with no center had been thus far something 'unthought' or, rather, 'unthinkable' Indeed, he goes on, the claasic conceptualisation in terms of structure opens a space in which elements can vary or be substituted, the center of this space is always itself substracted to these variations:
michael bibby a écrit :
I would supplement it by a remark. While a willingness to get out of exegesis (the practice of trying to find the truth of a text in it's concealed origin - a good representative of this form of analysis being, in France, Paul Ricoeur), I think a similar will to do away with "formalism" or "structuralism" in the analysis of "things said and written' is equally at stake in the development of this discourse analysis project. At the time when Foucault pronounces is inaugural lesson at the College de France (significantly intitled L'ordre du discours), this 'domain' of research was widely dominated by the works of Saussure (linguistic), Levi-Straus (mythology), Barthes (semiology - not to be confused with semiotics), Freud and Lacan (pyschoanalysis) and Kristeva (textual analysis grounded in the marxist base/superstructure metaphor) - to name but a few of he most prominent and to forget all of those who took up their work.
Note: Foucault was not the only one, and probably not the first one to take up this enterprise. Derrida was arguably the first to attack this domination by submitting that this way of thinking posed a great theoretical difficulty. In essence, he remarked that this structuralist thinking had reduced the «structurality of the structure» by bringing it back to an originary centre whose founction was to orient and organize it. Indeed, for him a structure with no center had been thus far something 'unthought' or, rather, 'unthinkable' Indeed, he goes on, the claasic conceptualisation in terms of structure opens a space in which elements can vary or be substituted, the center of this space is always itself substracted to these variations:
«On a donc toujours pensé que le centre, qui par définition est unique, constituait, dans une structure, cela même qui, commandant la structure, échappe à la structuralité. C’est pourquoi, pour une pensée classique de la structure,le centre peut être dit, paradoxalement, dans la structure et hors de la structure (…) Le centre n’est pas le centre.» (Derrida, La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,1967, p.410)
michael bibby a écrit :
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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