Archaeology of Knowledge

by Foucault, Michel (2002)

Abstract

In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas.

Key Passage

Archaeology does not describe disciplines. At most, such disciplines may, in their manifest deployment, serve as starting-points for the description of positivities; but they do not fix its limits: they do not impose definitive divisions upon it; at the end of the analysis they do not re-emerge in the same state in which they entered it; one cannot establish a bi-univocal relation between established disciplines and discursive formations. Let us take an example of this distortion. The linch-pin of Madness and Civilization was the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of a psychiatric discipline. This discipline had neither the same content, nor the same internal organization, nor the same place in medicine, nor the same practical function, nor the same methods as the traditional chapter on ‘diseases of the head’ or ‘nervous diseases’ to be found in eighteenth-century medical treatises. But on examining this new discipline, we discovered two things: what made it possible at the time it appeared, what brought about this great change in the economy of concepts, analyses, and demonstrations, was a whole set of relations between hospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures of social exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms of industrial labour and bourgeois morality, in short a whole group of relations that characterized for this discursive practice the formation of its statements; but this practice is not only manifested in a discipline possessing a scientific status and scientific pretensions; it is also found in operation in legal texts, in literature, in philosophy, in political decisions, and in the statements made and the opinions expressed in daily life. The discursive formation whose existence was mapped by the psychiatric discipline was not coextensive with it, far from it: it went well beyond the boundaries of psychiatry. (p.197)

Links to Reference

• https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=CPiTX_7QIAQC
• https://books.google.com.au/books?id=CPiTX_7QIAQC&dq=foucault+%22the+archaeology+of+knowledge%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjGprP7_9PsAhVz4nMBHejsDc4Q6wEwA3oECAAQAQ

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