The archaeology of knowledge summary. The Archaeology of Knowledge Part III, Chapters 4 and 5 Summary & Analysis 2022-12-15
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The Archaeology of Knowledge is a book written by French philosopher Michel Foucault, published in 1969. The book is a critique of the idea that knowledge is a unified, coherent body of information that is discovered and accumulated over time. Instead, Foucault argues that knowledge is produced and shaped by the social and historical context in which it is created.
Foucault begins the book by discussing the concept of "discursive formations," which refers to the systems of thought and language that define and shape the production of knowledge in a particular time and place. He argues that these discursive formations are not fixed or eternal, but are constantly changing and evolving, influenced by a variety of factors such as power relations, political and economic structures, and cultural values.
One of the key themes of The Archaeology of Knowledge is the idea that knowledge is not neutral or objective, but is shaped by the interests and agendas of those who produce it. Foucault asserts that knowledge is not a passive reflection of reality, but is actively constructed and shaped by the language, concepts, and categories that we use to understand and describe the world. This means that the way we think about and categorize knowledge is not natural or inherent, but is a product of the social and historical context in which it is produced.
Foucault also explores the role of power in shaping knowledge. He argues that knowledge is often used as a tool of power, to legitimize certain beliefs or practices, and to exclude or marginalize others. For example, he points to the way that scientific knowledge has been used to justify certain social policies, or to naturalize certain forms of inequality or oppression.
Overall, The Archaeology of Knowledge is a comprehensive and thought-provoking exploration of the social and historical context of knowledge production. It challenges the idea that knowledge is a unified, objective body of information, and instead suggests that it is shaped by the discursive formations, power relations, and cultural values of the societies in which it is produced. This has important implications for how we understand and use knowledge, and how we evaluate its validity and reliability.
Book Summary: The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences / Michel Foucault
Foucault's method treats knowledge in the sense of savoir, as 'the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance' as something that is known. Discourse is practice, and practice is us acting in an already existing world. The Formation of Objects 4. Why do some statements appear at one time when other statements that are imaginably possible do not? To further elaborate, it is in the latter period that knowledge broke off its old kinship with divinatio. Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves, of discovering whether… one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, … instead of reconstituting chains of inference as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy , instead of drawing up tables of differences as the linguists do , it would describe systems of dispersion. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas. Although the Archeology was written before Foucault's long, intensive engagement with issues of identity and power, it provides the theoretical ground for that later work.
The Archaeology of Knowledge Part III, Chapters 4 and 5 Summary & Analysis
I had to slog through this one just to make sure the main ideas I'm building off of for my thesis aren't being misrepresented a recurring nightmare of mine. The point is that statements about madness that make sense in the discourse of psychopathology do not make sense in, say, the discourse of economics or political theory. The statement is a necessity if we are to say anything about propositional content, grammar, or speech act, but it is not limited to any of these things. I have a hunch that an abridged version of this one would be all of 50-odd pages, though the journey through all the justification is all part of the fun, right? All that makes it manageable and accessible enough. In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. The Archeology of Knowledge is Foucault's attempt, after the fact, to describe theoretically the method he used in his first three books of history Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things.
So, the more one increases the number of divisions in such continuity, the more one shall approach to the true. For Foucault, exclusions are not being linked to repression. Historical causality is also problematized, as these new methods uncover what Foucault calls 'recurrent distributions,' the multiplicity of frameworks that must be applied to any one area of history: in the case of the history of science, for example, there are always 'several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies, for one and the same science. Change and Transformations 6. In analyzing discourse in and of itself, the notion that each statement has an author becomes irrelevant because the author is not a part of the discourse itself.
So, order is, at the same time, the code that governs our interaction with the world ordering codes and the ways devise of thinking about such codes reflections on order itself. To describe a formulation qua statement does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and what he says or wanted to say, or said without wanting to ; but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it. Thus, things and words were no longer seen as one text to be read but rather separated from one another. It is with homogeneities and those alone that archaeology is concerned. So why should this? The idea that discourse can be described in and of itself, not as a sign of what is known but as a precondition for knowledge, opens up limitless possibilities for showing that what we think we know is actually contingent on how we talk about it. II Order Foucault, again, presents the main questions that the book is after. What matters are these rules, the unspoken constraints on what it is possible to speak at a given time.
The Archaeology of Knowledge Conclusion Summary & Analysis
A professor recommended it to me in the early 90s, along with Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and Jane Flax's Thinking Fragments as the essential texts to read for literary theory. Foucault also rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant. In it, he defends archeology against charges that it is essentially structuralist and that it invests discourse with transcendence over other elements of history. Summary Foucault has strayed quite far from the basic element on which his methodology must operate: the statement. To each of the sciences of man it offers a background, which establishes it and provides it with a fixed ground and, as it were, a homeland; it determines the cultural area — the chronological and geographical boundaries — in which that branch of knowledge can be recognized as having validity; but it also surrounds the sciences of man with a frontier that limits them and destroys, from the outset, their claim to validity within the element of universality.
The Archaeology of Knowledge Part III: The Statement and the Archive Chapter 1: Defining the Statement Summary & Analysis
It does not seek after anything hidden in or missing from or lying beneath discourse. Because concepts shape how we see the world, in a real sense words are the objects that we see. Thus, discourse is not just a set of articulated propositions, nor is it the trace of an otherwise hidden psychology, spirit, or encompassing historical idea; it is the set of relations within which all of these other factors gain their sense their conditions of possibility. The task, then, is to define the 'principle of rarification' that allows some statements to be made instead of others. It is important to note that the historical a priori constituted by the positivity of discourse is not an a priori in the usual sense of a formal philosophical principle. For such a totality, the set of statements whether said or unsaid appears as a vast plethora of possible articulations.
Discourse then becomes the OoS looking at the things said, and the statement without collective memory. It's the clearest thing Foucault has ever written, while still dipping into the occasional grammatically-challenged albeit poetic run-on sentences and drama I have always known and loved. But in my head, he has the voice of the black bald guy who was on the 7UP commercials in the 1980s 'The uncola! First, the analysis for the hierarchy of analogies have undergone a change. The archaeological level of investigation is concerned with what made something possible p. What is a sign? VI The Retreat and Return of the Origin In this part, Foucault touches upon how man is cut off from his origins in modernity. V The Being of Language From the seventeenth-century, changes started to occur, as the arrangement of signs was to become binaries of a significant and signified. Marx by founding a purely relational analysis , Nietzsche by replacing original rational foundations with a moral genealogy , and Freud by showing that we are not transparent to ourselves all challenged this tradition of keeping history in a 'tranquilized sleep' by introducing a radical discontinuity to history and its human subject.
It is extremely wide-ranging and variable, tending to cross over almost every traditional historical unity from the book to the spirit of an age ; but it does so only because it has a very specific level of existence that has never before been analyzed in and of itself. The term gains more specificity, however, in the second-to-last chapter, 'Science and Knowledge. So this term seeing Archaeology of Knowledge on the syllabus was both exciting and terrifying. We are interested in the statement itself, not who happened to write it down, for the statement expresses a social logic rather than an individual belief. In fact, the two notions share a great deal in their focus on speech as a function rather than just a content. They continue on page 105 to state that archaeology and genealogy alternate and support each other. Chapter 6: Exchanging I The Analysis of Wealth In this chapter, Foucault approaches the concept of wealth during the Classical age, which was also thought in terms of resemblance and representation.
