Yesterday, in the student union where I work, I bumped into an acquaintance
of mine, a professor of sociology. When it came up that I was teaching the
_Archaeology_, she replied, "I didn't know anyone assigned that book
anymore."
She had a point, there is probably good reason not to assign the
_Archaeology_. Its concepts--the discursive formation, esp--seem dated. If
you want a text whose concepts you can immediately plug in to your own work,
the _Archaeology_ is not for you.
When writing my dissertation I had a similar reaction from a senior academic when I started to use some of the methodological conceptualisations from AK and Discourse on Language for my historical work looking at discursive formations belonging to subcultural scenes as captured in an archive of enthusiast magazines. The comment I got was more like, 'Discourse was being used in the 1980s, why do you want to use it?' I read AK with a constellation of texts including Theatricum Philosophicum, an interview, and bits and pieces of others. I tried to abstract the general coordinates of what Foucault called 'eventalization' from his method. The primary goal was to move beyond an episodic historicity to capture a sense of the emergence of particular configurations of power relations over a 34 year period. It was painstaking work! Basically I was using Foucault's work in a radically different thematic context, but in a way that I hope is congruent with his method.
Ciao,
Glen.