Foucault’s archeology is, according to Foucault, an archeology of knowledge.
The expression “archeology of knowledge” says and renders clear that knowledge is the objective of the archeological work; that is, knowledge is that toward which the archeological activity is directed in its searching, unearthing, and investigating.
Knowledge, as that toward which the archeological activity is directed, is therefore perceived as what lies beneath a surface and thus needs first to be unearthed or uncovered so that it could be laid bare and then interpreted.
Archeology, as a term and as an attempt at revealing and laying bare, appeared originally in Husserl’s phenomenology. For Husserl, phenomenological reflection carries out a certain form of archeological work by uncovering the knowledge obscured and concealed by wrong, confusing, and ambiguous interpretations and assumptions.
Yet there are, at least, two differences between Foucault’s and Husserl’s endeavors. Firstly, unlike the archeology of Husserl’s phenomenology, Foucault’s archeology does not assume that what it discovers or uncovers is either ahistorical or essential. Foucault’s archeology searches for the historical and the non-essential; an attempt that is itself historically conditioned.
Secondly, Foucault’s archeology is not carried out by a transcendental subject bringing about and rendering possible the significance, truth, and meaning of the world that it clearly sees through, but rather by a historical inquirer engaging with historically conditioned facts and aspects forming and deciding certain systems of knowledge in a given period.
How Does Foucault Carry Out His Archeology?
Foucault carries out his archeology by extensively reading and thoroughly analyzing the writings of a specific field at a specific time. The aim of this extensive reading and thorough analysis is to discover and determine the fundamental, basic, and grounding rules deciding and controlling how language is used and employed in these writings.
Foucault’s search is not for the formal rules of language such as logic and grammar, but rather for the material rules, which determine and govern the limits and extent of what can be said about and in this specific field at this specific time. Such rules indicate and reveal the extent and limits of speaking, understanding, conceiving, believing, imagining, and thinking within a specific mode of thought.
Such rules, for instance, reveal, render understandable, and bring closer to why the thinking holding sway in the seventeenth century could not have found any meaning, coherence, or justification in our modern conviction that criminals should be threatened and punished by imprisonment so that they could be rehabilitated.
What Is Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge?
Foucault’s archeology of knowledge is neither a totalizing theorizing of knowledge and knowing nor a systemizing philosophizing of the nature of knowledge, whose aim is to construct an account, into which what constitutes knowledge and renders knowing possible is brought together.
Foucault’s archeology of knowledge is a thinking that historicizes. Foucault’s archeology thinks and philosophizes historically; that is, it is a thinking that is turned toward history as the scope through which knowledge is uncovered and hence interpreted historically; a thinking arising from the conviction that language precedes, determines, decides, exceeds, limits, and speaks through the subject.
Foucault’s archeology of knowledge takes place and is announced in the space opened up by the thinking-philosophizing of Hegel. Yet the relation linking together Hegel’s thinking-philosophizing and Foucault’s archeology is neither simple nor straightforward, for Foucault refuses Hegel’s attempts at totalizing, synthesizing, and systemizing whilst at the same time accepting Hegel’s thinking-philosophizing of the historicality of experience and experiencing.
In other words, Foucault’s archeology of knowledge refuses and endeavors to distance itself from Hegel’s attempts at founding, rendering apparent, or reaching absolute Knowledge, complete Systems, conclusive necessities, and total syntheses.
This refusal of totalizing, systemizing, and synthesizing happens in the same place in which Foucault acknowledges and accepts Hegel’s realization that experience is historical and, by being historical, is itself governed and determined by non-subjective structures, which in turn render possible the emerging of new experiences, through which the disruption and evasion of past forms of experiencing first become possible.
Foucault distances his archeology of knowledge from Hegel’s attempts at synthesizing, totalizing, and systematizing by turning it toward what evades and disrupts philosophical unities, that is, the irreducible and what cannot be reduced to closed systems and complete totalities. In other words, Foucault’s search for the irreducible indicates his refusal of and resistance to Hegel’s attempts at bringing everything into a complete and closed system.
But despite Foucault’s endeavors to resist, challenge, and avoid Hegel’s attempts at systemizing, totalizing, and synthesizing, Foucault’s early projects and histories that preceded The Archeology of Knowledge, which are History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things, remain caught up in the same logic that they were trying to avoid, challenge, or resist.
In the literature discussing and commenting on Foucault’s early histories and projects, there is the argument that Foucault failed in his earlier histories to completely avoid the Hegelian attempts at systemizing, totalizing, and synthesizing.
In other words, Foucault’s early projects show and render clear the difficulty or perhaps even the impossibility of constructing a historical methodology that does not pass through the Hegelian paths, in which totalizing, systematizing, and synthesizing reside as dangers.
This is something that was clear and apparent even to Foucault himself. Hence, the dialectical method of ordering, laying bare, and interpreting historical change is something that Foucault needed and decided to renounce.
Only through this renunciation of the dialectical method could a historical reality be finally placed over against philosophical thought and its attempts at totalizing without being reduced to philosophy or its systems.
The Subject: Destabilized by Being Decentered
In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault sets forth his whole attempt in his three previous projects. The whole endeavor, Foucault says repeatedly, is to render available and present historical reports or accounts that do not revolve around the subject. The aim, Foucault says, is to show and confirm that there does not exist a transcendental subject from which historical value, purpose, and meaning flow and emerge.
This does not mean that humans do not take part in the bringing about and emergence of meaning, value, and purpose in their history; this only means that what humans can carry out or render possible is itself determined and decided by a certain discourse holding sway in a certain historical context that precedes, exceeds, and decides them.
Such discourses are not brought about or brought together by the subject, according to Foucault. Such discourses decide and delimit the place of the subject, the speaking of the subject, and the truth and authority of what the subject can say and hear.
Subjectivity remains a possibility within the histories decided and governed by discourse. What such histories lack is what Foucault calls “transcendental narcissism”.
Foucault’s turning toward discursive formations conveys and summarizes his attempts at escaping the systemization and totalization of Hegel. Discursive formations allow Foucault to destabilize and render decentered the subject and its opinions, philosophies, theories, and ideas.
Discursive formations prioritize language over the subject and, through this prioritization, allow language to disperse, scatter, and displace the subject, its unity, and functions.
The Archeological Understanding of Language
Language, thought and interpreted archeologically, is a site in which what is said neither flows from nor refers back to a centered subject or a self-contained cogito.
Language, put forth and interpreted archeologically, is composed of neither single words nor connected syllables, but rather of statements, placed over against each other and next to each other in such a way that brings about and renders possible the emergence of different and new meanings, functions, and roles when such placing and placed-ness change or become different.
This does not mean that what is said is not said by a subject, but rather that the subject itself merely fills a position through which certain functions and rules flow and therefore allow a certain saying to take place.
This does not also mean that such rules and functions are timeless and ahistorical determinations of meaning and significance. Rules are themselves historical interpretations and accounts of other statements, which are connected to each other, placed other against each, and thus interacting with each other. This is why, for Foucault, discourses are themselves historical.
Camus and Life
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus speaks of two kinds of suicide. The first one is the event of killing oneself; the second one is faith as a philosophical suicide.
In the writings and works of Camus, two forms of hope are placed over against each other: infinite hope and finite hope.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus thinks from out the question of suicide, toward and into happiness, whose dwelling place is the heart of Sisyphus. But how could that whose origin is the meaninglessness of existence and the possibility of rendering oneself forever absent encounter itself eventually as happiness and joy?