User:Silviolorusso/thematic2/foucault-archeology-intro

Notes on The Archaeology of Knowledge. And the Discourse on Language, by Michel Foucault (1972)

Introduction

Historians preferred the analysis of long periods.

Tools: invented and inherited: 

sedimentary strata

unmoving histories

Before

problem of historians: causality, continuity, significance, totality, connexions.

Now

isolation, periodization, system of relation. 

Histories of idea, science etc. : attention turned to disruptions, not to periods. 

Bachelard: epistemological acts and thresholds: interruptions 

displacements and transformations of concepts (Canguilhelm)

evolution of a concept: not only progressive refinement and abstraction, but fields of constitution, theoretical context, etc.

Microscopic and macroscopic scales in the history of sciences. 

Recurrent redistributions 

several pasts, several connexions, several hierarchies

historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge and they increase with every transformation. 

Guérolt, architectonic unities of systems: not descriptions of traditions, but with coherences, axioms of these. 

radical break is the one by a theoretical transformation that takes a science out of a past showing the ideological connotation of this period. 

the problem here is one of division, the rebuilding of foundations. 

this new form of history poses some questions: how concepts of discontinuity are specified? 

how you isolate unities?

 

What is an oeuvre? a concept? a text?

Conclusion: History of thought seeks for discontinuities while history finds stable structures. 

This interchange is only apparent

The questioning of the document.

History as a reconstitution of a past that the documents emanate

history doesn’t interpratate the document, doesn’t judge it, history classifies it, order it

history defines unities within the documentary material.

Memory

History not memory, history is society in connection to its documentation. 

In our time, history is what transform documents into monuments. 

History deploys elements, grouping them and connecting them.

Form totalities. 

history aspires to archeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument. 

Consequences:

- proliferation of discontinuities, emergence of long periods in history itself. 

how to constitute series? define the elements proper to each series. 

to fix the series boundaries. 

series of a series (tables)

-> number of strata, distinction of type of events, revealing of series 

in history of ideas: 

questioning of convergence and culmination, of teleology. Doubting about totalities.

-> different series, overlapping and juxtaposing. no linearity. multilevel.

- discountinuity: major role in historical disciplines.

Before

Discontinuity as something to be deleted

Now

Discontinuity as a basic element

Threefold role:

1. Deliberate operation by the historian

2. Result of his description: historian is trying to find the limits, the boundaries

3. Concept the historian never stops to specify: specific form and function

Paradoxical notion of discontinuity: instrument and object of research, 

Displacement of the discontinuous: it is not an external condition but a working concept. It determines the object and validate its analysis.

- No total history anymore

General history!

Total history: Vertical notion, it applies to economics society, etc.

Problem of general history:

What kind of relations could be legitimately described between different series?

not only what series but also what series of series

centre vs dispersion

- methodological problems characterize history.

building up coherent corpora  of documents

establishing a principle of choice

definition of the levels of analysis and relevant elements

specification of a method of analysis

delimitation of groups or sub-groups

determination of relations 

methodological field of history need attention. Why?

1. became to much free from “divenir” and from previous questions

2. it intersects with problems of other fields, problem labelled structuralism

structure vs development

Epistemological mutation of history.

first phase: Marx

difficulty in developing a theory of discontinuity. Why?

If history could remain the locus of continuity, it would provide a shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness.

Continuos history as the correlative of the founding subject.

In this system time is conceived in terms of totalization. 

Decentring operated by Marx by the analysis of relations between production, economy, class -> the search of a total history

the organization of a world-view and a system of values. 

rationality as the “telos” (purpose) of mankind

decentring of the subject (his desire, his thoughts, his actions) by anthropologists, etc. -> continuos history as a development, internal dynamic

consciousness turned upon itself

uninterrupted patience and vivacity of a moment

anthropologize Marx

People don’t lament the disappearance of history, but of a certain kind o history, the one related to the subject.

people lament “development”, the possibility of reanimating through the project

ideological use of history

the treasure of the bygone was sacralized

Past enterprises by Foucault tried to measure the mutations in the field of history. Objective of this book.

Observations:

- not transfer a structuralist method to the field of history. aim is to uncover the principles and and the consequences of the history’s transformation. 

- define a method of historical analysis freed of the anthropological theme. (but consequent to)

The book does not belong in the first instance to the debate on structure