Archive-Foucault-ArchaeologyKnowledge-intro apriori

Notes on Foucault Archaeology Knowledge: Introduction; The Historic a Priori and the Archive

---

The Historic a Priori and the Archive

Summary: Foucault description of the archive (different perspective on the archive than the traditional one)

Introduction: history and documents

history

• Foucault distinguishes between: rapidly changing history & unmoving histories, history & history of ideas

• rapidly changing history

(governments, wars, famines) and

• unmoving histories

(history of sea routes, history of corn or gold-mining, history of drought and irrigation, history of crop rotation, history of balance achieved by the human species between hunger and abundance)

• history

looks for continuities of long unities of time: centuries, periods 

• history of ideas

looks for discontinuities, ruptures in history. 

both disciplines (history and history of ideas) are questioning the document. history has altered is position in relation to the document: it is NOT its primary concern the interpretation of the document, but to work within and develop the document "history now organizes the document

Analysis of history

• Old questions of analysis

(What link should be made between disparate events? How can a causal succession be established between them? What continuity or overall significance do they possess? Is it possible to define a totality, or must one be content with reconstituting connexions?)

are replaced by

• new questions

(Which strata should be isolated from others? What types of series should be established? What criteria of periodization should be adopted for each of them? What system of relations may be established between them? What series of series may be established? In what large-scale chronological table may distinct series of events be determined?)

• history ≠ collective memory, based on documents to keep memories alive
• history = work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs) that exists in every time and place, in every society

• "history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself units, totalities, series, relations" p.7 

• "history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked" 

• history defines relationship between facts and events

• Since history exist, documents that are record these data are existing

documents

• documents have always been used, questioned

• Is the document sincere or deliberately misleading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or manipulated

• documents always try to reconstruct the history

• document = language of a voice that became silent

• interpretation of history is always time dependent

• documents reveal the history. The documents have to be organized and questioned

• the document is always interpertated differently

documents and monuments

• earlier: in the past history aimed at memorizing the monuments of the past and transform them into documents (in order to give a speech to those silent monuments) 
• nowadays:  today's history transforms the documents into monuments

The definitions of the archive:

• The archive is the system of statements (a systems that establish statements as events and things)
• "it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing"

• • what does it means to turn a statement as a thing?
  • what can a statement be?
  • what is a statement and a thing in an archive such as youtube

• "the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events
  • the system defines and what can be added to archive (youtube)

• "it is also that which determines that all these things ... are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities" p.145-146
• "it is the system of its functioning"
  • The way it functions defines it. If we have 2 archives with the same documents, but functioning differently, the materials or meanings that you gather from them will be distinct.

• "it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies their multiple duration"
  • grouping discourses into given sections - gives them a context, and therefore a meaning;

duration to the archive: the importance of a document has its own duration (?)

• "it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and space"

• "nor is it the welcoming oblivion that opens up all new speech to the operational field of its freedom"
  • it does not encompass all the speech - not everything fits within its space

• "it reveals the rules of a practice that enable statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification"
  •  ?? it reveals the rules  ?

• "It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" p.146
  • Alive nature of the archive.
  • The document kept in the archive is not a proof of the past, but a present and subjective view on that document.

• "The archive cannot be described in its totality ... It emerges in fragments, regions and levels"