Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Part II: The Discursive Regularities

1. THE UNITIES OF DISCOURSE

The use of concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation present all historical analysis not only with ques­tions of procedure, but with theoretical problems. It is these problems that will be studied here (the questions of procedure will be examined in later empirical studies – if the opportunity, the desire, and the courage to undertake them do not desert me). These theoretical prob­lems too will be examined only in a particular field: in those disciplines – so unsure of their frontiers, and so vague in content – that we call the history of ideas, or of thought, or of science, or of knowledge.

But there is a negative work to be carried out first: we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity. They may not have a very rigorous conceptual structure, but they have a very precise function. Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin; tradition enables us to isolate the new against a back-ground of permanence, and to transfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals. Then there is the notion of influence, which provides a support - of too magical a kind to be very amenable to analysis - for the facts of transmission and communi­cation; which refers to an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delimitation nor theoretical definition) the phenomena of resemblance or repetition; which links, at a distance and through time - as if through the mediation of a medium of propagation - such defined unities as individuals, oeuvres, notions, or theories. There are the notions of development and evolution: they make it possible to group a succession of dispersed events, to link them to one and the same organ­izing principle, to subject them to the exemplary power of life (with its adaptations, its capacity for innovation the incessant correlation of its different elements, its systems of assimilation and exchange), to dis-cover, already at work in each beginning, a principle of coherence and the outline of a future unity, to master time through a perpetually reversible relation between an origin and a term that are never given, but are always at work. There is the notion of 'spirit', which enables us to establish between the simultaneous or successive phenomena of a given period a community of meanings, symbolic links, an interplay of resemblance and reflexion, or which allows the sovereignty of collect­ive consciousness to emerge as the principle of unity and explanation. We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognized from the outset; we must oust those forms and obscure forces by which we usually link the discourse of one man with that of another; they must be driven out from the darkness in which they reign. And instead of according them unqualified, spontaneous value, we must accept, in the name of methodological rigour, that, in the first instance, they concern only a population of dispersed events.

We must also question those divisions or groupings with which we have become so familiar. Can one accept, as such, the distinction between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc., and which tend to create certain great historical individualities? We are not even sure of ourselves when we use these distinctions in our own world of discourse, let alone when we are analysing groups of state­ments which, when first formulated, were distributed, divided, and characterized in a quite different way: after all, 'literature' and 'politics' are recent categories, which can be applied to medieval culture, or even classical culture, only by a retrospective hypothesis, and by an interplay of formal analogies or semantic resemblances; but neither literature, nor politics, nor philosophy and the sciences articulated the field of discourse, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, as they did in the nineteenth century. In any case, these divisions - whether our own, or those contemporary with the discourse under examination - are always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types: they, in turn., are facts of discourse that deserve to be analysed beside others; of course, they also have complex relations with. each other, but they are not intrinsic, autochthonous, and. universally recognizable characteristics.

But the unities that must be suspended above all are those that emerge in the most immediate way: those of the book and the oeuvre. At first sight, it would seem that one could not abandon these unities without extreme artificiality. Are they not given in the most definite way? There is the material individualization of the book, which occu­pies a determined space, which has an. economic value, and which itself indicates, by a number of signs, the limits of its beginning and its end; and there is the establishment of an oeuvre, which we recognize and delimit by attributing a certain number of texts to an author. And yet as soon as one looks at the matter a little more closely the difficulties begin. The material unity of the book? Is this the same in the case of an anthology of poems, a collection of posthumous fragments, Desargues' Traite des Coniques, or a volume of Michelet's Histoire de France? Is it the same in the case of Mallarme's Un Coup de des, the trial of Gilles de Rais, Butor's San Marco, or a Catholic missal? In other words, is not the material unity of the volume a weak, accessory unity in relation to the discursive unity of which it is the support? But is this discursive unity itself homo­geneous and uniformly applicable? A novel by Stendhal and a novel by Dostoevsky do not have the same relation. of individuality as that between two novels belonging to Balzac's cycle La Comedic humaine; and the relation between Balzac's novels is not the same as that existing between Joyce's Ulysses and the Odyssey. The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. And this network of references is not the same in the case of a mathematical treatise, a textual commentary, a histor­ical account, and an episode in a novel cycle; the unity of the book, even in the sense of a group of relations, cannot be regarded as identi­cal in each case. The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

The problems raised by the oeuvre are even more difficult. Yet, at first sight, what could be more simple? A collection of texts that can be designated by the sign of a proper name. But this designation (even leaving to one side problems of attribution) is not a homogeneous function: does the name of an author designate in the same way a text that he has published under his name, a text that he has presented under a pseudonym, another found after his death in the form of an unfinished draft, and another that is merely a collection of jottings, a notebook? The establishment of a complete oeuvre presupposes a number of choices that are difficult to justify or even to formulate: is it enough to add to the texts published by the author those that he intended for publication but which remained unfinished by the fact of his death? Should one also include all his sketches and first drafts, with all their corrections and crossings out? Should one add sketches that he himself abandoned? And what status should be given to letters, notes, reported conversations, transcriptions of what he said made by those present at the time, in short, to that vast mass of verbal traces left by an individual at his death, and which speak in an endless confusion so many different languages (Iangages)?' In any case, the name `Mallarme' does not refer in the same way to his themes (translation exercises from French into English), his translations of Edgar Allan Poe, his poems, and his replies to questionnaires; similarly, the same relation does not exist between the name Nietzsche on the one hand and the youthful

4- ((footnote))

' The English word 'language' translates the French 'langue' (meaning the 'natural' languages: French, English, etc.) and 'langage' (meaning either 'language in general' or 'kinds of language': philosophical, medical language, etc.). Where the meaning would otherwise be unclear, I have added the original French word in brackets. (Te)

autobiographies, the scholastic dissertations, the philological articles, Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, the letters, the last postcards signed 'Dionysos' or 'Kaiser Nietzsche', and the innumerable notebooks with their jumble of laundry bills and sketches for aphorisms. In fact, if one speaks so undiscriminately and unreflectingly of an author's oeuvre, it is because one imagines it to be defined by a certain expressive function. One is admitting that there must be a level (as deep as it is necessary to imagine it) at which the oeuvre emerges, in all its fragments, even the smallest, most inessential ones, as the expression of the thought, the experience, the imagination, or the unconscious of the author, or, indeed, of the historical determinations that operated upon him. But it is at once apparent that such a unity, far from being given immediately, is the result of an operation; that this operation is interpretative (since it deciphers, in the text, the transcription of something that it both conceals and manifests); and that the operation that determines the opus, in its unity, and consequently the oeuvre itself, will not be the same in the case of the author of Le Theatre et son Double (Artaud) and the author of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein), and therefore when one speaks of an oeuvre in each case one is using the word in a different sense. The oeuvre can be regarded neither as an immediate unity, nor as a certain unity, nor as a homogeneous unity.

One last precaution must be taken to disconnect the unquestioned continuities by which we organize, in advance, the discourse that we are to analyse: we must renounce two linked, but opposite themes. The first involves a wish that it should never be possible to assign, in the order of discourse, the irruption of a real event; that beyond any apparent beginning, there is always a secret origin - so secret and so fundamental that it can never be quite grasped in itself. Thus one is led inevitably, through the naivety of chronologies, towards an ever-receding point that is never itself present in any history; this point is merely its own void; and from that point all beginnings can never be more than recommencements or occultation (in one and the same gesture, this and that). To this theme is connected another according to which all manifest discourse is secretly based on an 'already-said'; and that this 'already-said' is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text that has already been written, but a 'never-said', an incorporeal discourse, a voice as silent as a breath, a writing that is merely the hollow of its own mark. It is supposed therefore that every-thing that is formulated in discourse was already articulated in that semi-silence that precedes it, which continues to run obstinately beneath it, but which it covers and silences. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this 'not-said' is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said. The first theme sees the historical analysis of discourse as the quest for and the repetition of an origin that eludes all historical determination; the second sees it as the interpretation of 'hearing' of an 'already-said' that is at the same time a 'not-said'. We must renounce all those themes whose function is to ensure the infinite continuity of discourse and its secret presence to itself in the interplay of a constantly recurring absence. We must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased, and hidden, far from all view, in the dust of books. Discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs.

These pre-existing forms of continuity, all these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspense. They must not be rejected definitively of course, but the tranquillity with which they are accepted must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a construction the rules of which must be known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinized: we must define in what conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them are legitimate; and we must indicate which of them can never be accepted in any circumstances. It may be, for example, that the notions of 'influence' or 'evolution' belong to a criticism that puts them - for the foreseeable future - out of use. But need we dispense for ever with the 'oeuvre', the 'book', or even such unities as 'science' or 'literature'? Should we regard them as illusions, illegitimate constructions, or ill-acquired results? Should we never make use of them, even as a temporary support, and never provide them with a definition? What we must do, in fact, is to tear away from them their virtual self-evidence, and to free the problems that they pose; to recognize that they are not the tranquil locus on the basis of which other questions (concerning their structure, coherence, systematicity, transformations) may be posed, but that they themselves pose a whole cluster of questions (What are they? How can they be defined or limited? What distinct types of laws can they obey? What articulation are they capable of? What sub-groups can they give rise to? What specific phenomena do they reveal in the field of discourse?) We must recognize that they may not, in the last resort, be what they seem at first sight. In short, that they require a theory, and that this theory can-not be constructed unless the field of the facts of discourse on the basis of which those facts are built up appears in its non-synthetic purity.

And I, in turn, will do no more than this: of course, I shall take as my starting-point whatever unities are already given (such as psycho-pathology, medicine, or political economy) ; but I shall not place myself inside these dubious unities in order to study their internal configur­ation or their secret contradictions. I shall make use of them just long enough to ask myself what unities they form; by what right they can claim a field that specifies them in space and a continuity that indi­vidualizes them in time; according to what laws they are formed; against the background of which discursive events they stand out; and whether they are not, in their accepted and quasi-institutional indi­viduality, ultimately the surface effect of more firmly grounded unities. I shall accept the groupings that history suggests only to subject them at once to interrogation; to break them up and then to see whether they can be legitimately reformed; or whether other groupings should be made; to replace them in a more general space which, while dissi­pating their apparent familiarity, makes it possible to construct a theory of them.

Once these immediate forms of continuity are suspended, an entire field is set free. A vast field, but one that can be defined nonetheless: this field is made up of the totality of all effective statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events and in the occurrence that is proper to them. Before approaching, with any degree of cer­tainty, a science, or novels, or political speeches, or the oeuvre of an author, or even a single book, the material with which one is dealing is, in its raw, neutral state, a population of events in the space of discourse in general. One is led therefore to the project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it. This description is easily distinguishable from an analysis of the language. Of course, a linguistic system can be established (unless it is constructed artificially) only by using a corpus of statements, or a collection of discursive facts; but we must then define, on the basis of this grouping, which has value as a sample, rules that may make it possible to construct other statements than these: even if it has long since disappeared, even if it is no longer spoken, and can be reconstructed only on the basis of rare fragments, a language (longue) is still a system for possible statements, a finite body of rules that author­izes an infinite number of performances. The field of discursive events, on the other hand, is a grouping that is always finite and limited at any moment to the linguistic sequences that have been formulated; they may be innumerable, they may, in sheer size, exceed the capacities of recording, memory, or reading: nevertheless they form a finite group-ing. The question posed by language analysis of some discursive fact or other is always: according to what rules has a particular statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could other similar statements be made? The description of the events of discourse poses a quite different question: how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?

It is also clear that this description of discourses is in opposition to the history of thought. There too a system of thought can be reconsti­tuted only on the basis of a definite discursive totality. But this totality is treated in such a way that one tries to rediscover beyond the state­ments themselves the intention of the speaking subject, his conscious activity, what he meant, or, again, the unconscious activity that took place, despite himself, in what he said or in the almost imperceptible fracture of his actual words; in any case, we must reconstitute another discourse, rediscover the silent murmuring, the inexhaustible speech that animates from within the voice that one hears, re-establish the tiny, invisible text that runs between and sometimes collides with them. The analysis of thought is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what was being said in what was said? The analysis of the discursive field is orientated in a quite different way; we must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes. We do not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another discourse; we must show why it could not be other than it was, in what respect it is exclusive of any other, how it assumes, in the midst of others and in relation to them, a place that no other could occupy. The question proper to such an analysis might be formu­lated in this way: what is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?

We must ask ourselves what purpose is ultimately served by this suspension of all the accepted unities, if, in the end, we return to the unities that we pretended to question at the outset. In fact, the system­atic erasure of all given unities enables us first of all to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence, and to show that discontinu­ity is one of those great accidents that create cracks not only in the geology of history, but also in the simple fact of the statement; it emerges in its historical irruption; what we try to examine is the inci­sion that it makes, that irreducible - and very often tiny - emergence. However banal it may be, however unimportant its consequences may appear to be, however quickly it may be forgotten after its appearance, however little heard or however badly deciphered we may suppose it to be, a statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust. It is certainly a strange event: first, because on the one hand it is linked to the gesture of writing or to the articulation of speech, and also on the other hand it opens up to itself a residual existence in the field of a memory, or in the materiality of manuscripts, books, or any other form of recording; secondly, because, like every event, it is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, and reactivation; thirdly, because it is linked not only to the situations that provoke it, and to the consequences that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in accordance with a quite different modality, to the statements that precede and follow it.

But if we isolate, in relation to the language and to thought, the occurrence of the statement/event, it is not in order to spread over everything a dust of facts. It is in order to be sure that this occurrence is not linked with synthesizing operations of a purely psychological kind (the intention of the author, the form of his mind, the rigour of his thought, the themes that obsess him, the project that traverses his existence and gives it meaning) and to be able to grasp other forms of regularity, other types of relations. Relations between statements (even if the author is unaware of them; even if the statements do not have the same author; even if the authors were unaware of each other's exist­ence) ; relations between groups of statements thus established (even if these groups do not concern the same, or even adjacent, fields; even if they do not possess the same formal level; even if they are not the locus of assignable exchanges); relations between statements and groups of statements and events of a quite different kind (technical, economic, social, political). To reveal in all its purity the space in which discursive events are deployed is not to undertake to re-establish it in an isolation that nothing could overcome; it is not to close it upon itself; it is to leave oneself free to describe the interplay of relations within it and outside it.

The third purpose of such a description of the facts of discourse is that by freeing them of all the groupings that purport to be natural, immediate, universal unities, one is able to describe other unities, but this time by means of a group of controlled decisions. Providing one defines the conditions clearly, it might be legitimate to constitute, on the basis of correctly described relations, discursive groups that are not arbitrary, and yet remain invisible. Of course, these relations would never be formulated for themselves in the statements in question (unlike, for example, those explicit relations that are posed and spoken in discourse itself, as in the form of the novel, or a series of mathemat­ical theorems). But in no way would they constitute a sort of secret discourse, animating the manifest discourse from within; it is not therefore an interpretation of the facts of the statement that might reveal them, but the analysis of their coexistence, their succession, their mutual functioning, their reciprocal determination, and their independent or correlative transformation.

However, it is not possible to describe all the relations that may emerge in this way without some guide-lines. A provisional division must be adopted as an initial approximation: an initial region that analysis will subsequently demolish and, if necessary, reorganize. But how is such a region to be circumscribed? On the one hand, we must choose, empirically, a field in which the relations are likely to be numerous, dense, and relatively easy to describe: and in what other region do discursive events appear to be more closely linked to one another, to occur in accordance with more easily decipherable rela­tions, than in the region usually known as science? But, on the other hand, what better way of grasping in a statement, not the moment of its formal structure and laws of construction, but that of its existence and the rules that govern its appearance, if not by dealing with rela­tively unformalized groups of discourses, in which the statements do not seem necessarily to be built on the rules of pure syntax? How can we be sure of avoiding such divisions as the cruvre, or such categories as 'influence', unless, from the very outset, we adopt sufficiently broad fields and scales that are chronologically vast enough? Lastly, how can we be sure that we will not find ourselves in the grip of all those over-hasty unities or syntheses concerning the speaking subject, or the author of the text, in short, all anthropological categories? Unless, perhaps, we consider all the statements out of which these categories are constituted - all the statements that have chosen the subject of discourse (their own subject) as their 'object' and have undertaken to deploy it as their field of knowledge?

This explains the de facto privilege that I have accorded to those dis-courses that, to put it very schematically, define the 'sciences of man'. But it is only a provisional privilege. Two facts must be constantly borne in mind: that the analysis of discursive events is in no way limited to such a field; and that the division of this field itself cannot be regarded either as definitive or as absolutely valid; it is no more than an initial approximation that must allow relations to appear that may erase the limits of this initial outline.

2. DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS

I have undertaken, then, to describe the relations between statements. I have been careful to accept as valid none of the unities that would normally present themselves to anyone embarking on such a task. I have decided to ignore no form of discontinuity, break, threshold, or limit. I have decided to describe statements in the field of discourse and the relations of which they are capable. As I see it, two series of prob­lems arise at the outset: the first, which I shall leave to one side for the time being and shall return to later, concerns the indiscriminate use that I have made of the terms statement, event, and discourse; the second concerns the relations that may legitimately he described between the statements that have been left in their provisional, visible grouping.

There are statements, for example, that are quite obviously con­cerned - and have been from a date that is easy enough to determine - with political economy, or biology, or psychopathology; there are others that equally obviously belong to those age-old continuities known as grammar or medicine. But what are these unities? How can we say that the analysis of headaches carried out by Willis or Charcot belong to the same order of discourse? That Petty's inventions are in continuity with Neumann's econometry? That the analysis of judge-ment by the Port-Royal grammarians belongs to the same domain as the discovery of vowel gradations in the Indo-European languages? What, in fact, are medicine, grammar, or political economy? Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through time? Do they conceal other unities? And what sort of links can validly be recognized between all these statements that form, in such a familiar and insistent way, such an enigmatic mass?

First hypothesis - and the one that, at first sight, struck me as being the most likely and the most easily proved: statements different in form, and dispersed in time, form a group if they refer to one and the same object. Thus, statements belonging to psychopathology all seem to refer to an object that emerges in various ways in individual or social experience and which may be called madness. But I soon realized that the unity of the object 'madness' does not enable one to individualize a group of statements, and to establish between them a relation that is both constant and describable. There are two reasons for this. It would certainly be a mistake to try to discover what could have been said of madness at a particular time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its silent, self-enclosed truth; mental illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it, traced its developments, indi­cated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own. Moreover, this group of statements is far from referring to a single object, formed once and for all, and to preserving it indefinitely as its horizon of inexhaustible ideality; the object presented as their correla­tive by medical statements of the seventeenth or eighteenth century is not identical with the object that emerges in legal sentences or police action; similarly, all the objects of psychopathological discourses were modified from Pinel or Esquirol to Bleuler: it is not the same illnesses that are at issue in each of these cases; we are not dealing with the same madmen.

One might, perhaps one should, conclude from this multiplicity of objects that it is not possible to accept, as a valid unity forming a group of statements, a 'discourse, concerning madness'. Perhaps one should confine one's attention to those groups of statements that have one and the same object: the discourses on melancholia, or neurosis, for example. But one would soon realize that each of these discourses in turn constituted its object and worked it to the point of transforming it altogether. So that the problem arises of knowing whether the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed. Would not the typical relation that would enable us to individualize a group of statements concerning madness then be: the rule of simultaneous or successive emergence of the vari­ous objects that are named, described, analysed, appreciated, or judged in that relation? The unity of discourses on madness would not be based upon the existence of the object 'madness', or the constitution of a single horizon of objectivity; it would be the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given period of time: objects that are shaped by measures of discrimination and repres­sion, objects that are differentiated in daily practice, in law, in religious casuistry, in medical diagnosis, objects that are manifested in patho­logical descriptions, objects that are circumscribed by medical codes, practices, treatment, and care. Moreover, the unity of the discourses on madness would be the interplay of the rules that define the transform­ations of these different objects, their non-identity through time, the break produced in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence. Paradoxically, to define a group of statements in terms of its individuality would be to define the dispersion of these objects, to grasp all the interstices that separate them, to measure the distances that reign between them - in other words, to formulate their law of division.

Second hypothesis to define a group of relations between state­ments: their form and type of connexion. It seemed to me, for example, that from the nineteenth century, medical science was charac­terized not so much by its objects or concepts as by a certain style, a certain constant manner of statement. For the first time, medicine no longer consisted of a group of traditions, observations, and hetero­geneous practices, but of a corpus of knowledge that presupposed the same way of looking at things, the same division of the perceptual field, the same analysis of the pathological fact in accordance with the visible space of the body, the same system of transcribing what one perceived in what one said (same vocabulary, same play of metaphor); in short, it seemed to me that medicine was organized as a series of descriptive statements. But, there again, I had to abandon this hypoth­esis at the outset and recognize that clinical discourse was just as much a group of hypotheses about life and death, of ethical choices, of thera­peutic decisions, of institutional regulations, of teaching models, as a group of descriptions; that the descriptions could not, in any case, be abstracted from the hypotheses, and that the descriptive statement was only one of the formulations present in medical discourse. I also had to recognize that this description has constantly been displaced: either because, from Bichat to cell pathology, the scales and guide-lines have been displaced; or because from visual inspection, auscultation and palpation to the use of the microscope and biological tests, the infor­mation system has been modified; or, again, because, from simple anatomoclinical correlation to the delicate analysis of physiopathologi­cal processes, the lexicon of signs and their decipherment has been entirely reconstituted; or, finally, because the doctor has gradually ceased to be himself the locus of the registering and interpretation of information, and because, beside him, outside him, there have appeared masses of documentation, instruments of correlation, and techniques of analysis, which, of course, he makes use of, but which modify his position as an observing subject in relation to the patient.

All these alterations, which may now lead to the threshold of a new medicine, gradually appeared in medical discourse throughout the nineteenth century. If one wished to define this discourse by a codified and normative system of statement, one would have to recognize that this medicine disintegrated as soon as it appeared and that it really found its formulation only in Bichat and Laennec. If there is a unity, its principle is not therefore a determined form of statements; is it not rather the group of rules, which, simultaneously or in turn, have made possible purely perceptual descriptions, together with observations mediated through instruments, the procedures used in laboratory experiments, statistical calculations, epidemiological or demographic observations, institutional regulations, and therapeutic practice? What one must characterize and individualize is the coexistence of these dispersed and heterogeneous statements; the system that governs their division, the degree to which they depend upon one another, the way in which they interlock or exclude one another, the transformation that they undergo, and the play of their location, arrangement, and replacement.

Another direction of research, another hypothesis: might it not be possible to establish groups of statements, by determining the system of permanent and coherent concepts involved? For example, does not the Classical analysis of language and grammatical facts (from Lancelot to the end of the eighteenth century) rest on a definite number of concepts whose content and usage had been established once and for all: the concept of judgement defined as the general, normative form of any sentence, the concepts of subject and predicate regrouped under the more general category of noun, the concept of verb used as the equivalent of that of logical copula, the concept of word defined as the sign of a representation, etc.? In this way, one might reconstitute the conceptual architecture of Classical grammar. But there too one would soon come up against limitations: no sooner would one have succeeded in describ­ing with such elements the analyses carried out by the Port-Royal authors than one would no doubt be forced to acknowledge the appearance of new concepts; some of these may be derived from the first, but the others are heterogeneous and a few even incompatible with them. The notion of natural or inverted syntactical order, that of complement (introduced in the eighteenth century by Beauzee), may still no doubt be integrated into the conceptual system of the Port-Royal grammar. But neither the idea of an originally expressive value of sounds, nor that of a primitive body of knowledge enveloped in words and conveyed in some obscure way by them, nor that of regularity in the mutation of consonants, nor the notion of the verb as a mere name capable of designating an action or operation, is compatible with the group of concepts used by Lancelot or Duclos. Must we admit therefore that grammar only appears to form a coherent figure; and that this group of statements, analyses, descriptions, principles and con-sequences, deductions that has been perpetrated under this name for over a century is no more than a false unity? But perhaps one might discover a discursive unity if one sought it not in the coherence of concepts, but in their simultaneous or successive emergence, in the distance that separates them and even in their incompatibility. One would no longer seek an architecture of concepts sufficiently general and abstract to embrace all others and to introduce them into the same deductive structure; one would try to analyse the interplay of their appearances and dispersion.

Lastly, a fourth hypothesis to regroup the statements, describe their interconnexion and account for the unitary forms under which they are presented: the identity and. persistence of themes. In 'sciences' like economics or biology, which are so controversial in character, so open to philosophical or ethical options, so exposed in certain cases to polit­ical manipulation, it is legitimate in the first instance to suppose that a certain thematic is capable of linking, and animating a group of dis-courses, like an organism with its own needs, its own internal force, and its own capacity for survival. Could one not, for example, consti­tute as a unity everything that has constituted the evolutionist theme from Buffon to Darwin? A theme that in the first instance was more philosophical, closer to cosmology than to biology; a theme that dir­ected research from afar rather than named, regrouped, and explained results; a theme that always presupposed more than one was aware of, but which, on the basis of this fundamental choice, forcibly trans-formed into discursive knowledge what had been outlined as a hypothesis or as a necessity. Could one not speak of the Physiocratic theme in the same way? An idea that postulated, beyond all demonstra­tion and prior to all analysis, the natural character of the three ground rents; which consequently presupposed the economic and political primacy of agrarian property; which excluded all analysis of the mech­anisms of industrial production; which implied, on the other hand, the description of the circulation of money within a state, of its distribu­tion between different social categories, and of the channels by which it flowed back into production; which finally led Ricardo to consider those cases in which this triple rent did not appear, the conditions in which it could form, and consequently to denounce the arbitrariness of the Physiocratic theme?

But on the basis of such an attempt, one is led to make two inverse and complementary observations. In one case, the same thematic is articulated on the basis of two sets of concepts, two types of analysis, two perfectly different fields of objects: in its most general formula-tion, the evolutionist idea is perhaps the same in the work of Benoit de Maillet, Borden or Diderot, and in that of Darwin; but, in fact, what makes it possible and coherent is not at all the same thing in either case. In the eighteenth century, the evolutionist idea is defined on the basis of a kinship of species forming a continuum laid down at the outset (interrupted only by natural catastrophes) or gradually built up by the passing of time. In the nineteenth century the evolutionist theme con­cerns not so much the constitution of a continuous table of species, as the description of discontinuous groups and the analysis of the modes of interaction between an organism whose elements are interdepend­ent and an environment that provides its real conditions of life. A single theme, but based on two types of discourse. In the case of Physiocracy, on the other hand, Quesnay's choice rests exactly on the same system of concepts as the opposite opinion held by those that might be called utilitarists. At this period the analysis of wealth involved a relatively limited set of concepts that was accepted by all (coinage was given the same definition; prices were given the same explanation; and labour costs were calculated in the same way). But, on the basis of this single set of concepts, there were two ways of explaining the formation of value, according to whether it was analysed on the basis of exchange, or on that of remuneration for the day's work. These two possibilities contained within economic theory, and in the rules of its set of concepts, resulted, on the basis of the same elements, in two different options.

It would probably be wrong therefore to seek in the existence of these themes the principles of the individualization of a discourse. Should they not be sought rather in the dispersion of the points of choice that the discourse leaves free? In the different possibilities that it opens of reanimating already existing themes, of arousing opposed strategies, of giving way to irreconcilable interests, of making it pos­sible, with a particular set of concepts, to play different games? Rather than seeking the permanence of themes, images, and opinions through time, rather than retracing the dialectic of their conflicts in order to individualize groups of statements, could one not rather mark out the dispersion of the points of choice, and define prior to any option, to any thematic preference, a field of strategic possibilities?

I am presented therefore with four attempts, four failures - and four successive hypotheses. They must now be put to the test. Concerning those large groups of statements with which we are so familiar - and which we call medicine, economics, or grammar - I have asked myself on what their unity could be based. On a full, tightly packed, continuous, geographically well-defined field of objects? What appeared to me were rather series full of gaps, intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations. On a definite, normative type of statement? I found formulations of levels that were much too different and functions that were much too heterogeneous to be linked together and arranged in a single figure, and to simulate, from one period to another, beyond individual oeuvres, a sort of great uninterrupted text. On a well-defined alphabet of notions? One is con-fronted with concepts that differ in structure and in the rules govern-ing their use, which ignore or exclude one another, and which cannot enter the unity of a logical architecture. On the permanence of a thematic? What one finds are rather various strategic possibilities that permit the activation of incompatible themes, or, again, the estab­lishment of the same theme in different groups of statement. Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these elements, which are certainly not organized as a progressively deductive structure, nor as an enormous book that is being gradually and continuously written, nor as the oeuvre of a collect­ive subject, one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized trans-formations. Such an analysis would not try to isolate small islands of coherence in order to describe their internal structure; it would not try to suspect and to reveal latent conflicts; it would study forms of div-ision. Or again.: instead of reconstituting chains of inference (as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy), instead of draw-ing up tables of differences (as the linguists do), it would describe systems of dispersion.

Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation - thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences, and in any case inadequate to the task of designating such a dispersion, such as 'science', 'ideology', 'theory', or 'domain of objectivity'. The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected we shall call the rules of formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division.

This, then, is the field to be covered; these the notions that we must put to the test and the analyses that we must carry out. I am well aware that the risks are considerable. For an initial probe, I made use of certain fairly loose, but familiar, groups of statement: I have no proof that I shall find them again at the end of the analysis, nor that I shall discover the principle of their delimitation and individualization; I am not sure that the discursive formations that I shall isolate will define medicine in its overall unity, or economics and grammar in the overall curve of their historical destination; they may even introduce unexpected boundaries and divisions. Similarly, I have no proof that such a description will be able to take account of the scientificity (or non-scientificity) of the discursive groups that I have taken as an attack point and which presented themselves at the outset with a certain pretension to scientific rationality; I have no proof that my analysis will not be situated at a quite different level, constituting a description that is irreducible to epistemology or to the history of the sciences. More-over, at the end of such an enterprise, one may not recover those unities that, out of methodological rigour, one initially held in suspense: one may be compelled to dissociate certain euvres, ignore influences and traditions, abandon definitively the question of origin, allow the com­manding presence of authors to fade into the background; and thus everything that was thought to be proper to the history of ideas may disappear from view. The danger, in short, is that instead of providing a basis for what already exists, instead of going over with bold strokes lines that have already been sketched, instead of finding reassurance in this return and final confirmation, instead of completing the blessed circle that announces, after innumerable stratagems and as many nights, that all is saved, one is forced to advance beyond familiar terri­tory, far from the certainties to which one is accustomed, towards an as yet uncharted land and unforeseeable conclusion. Is there not a danger that everything that has so far protected the historian in his daily journey and accompanied him until nightfall (the destiny of rationality and the teleology of the sciences, the long, continuous labour of thought from period to period, the awakening and the progress of consciousness, its perpetual resumption of itself, the uncompleted, but uninterrupted movement of totalizations, the return to an ever-open source, and finally the historico-transcendental thematic) may disap­pear, leaving for analysis a blank, indifferent space, lacking in both interiority and promise?

3. THE FORMATION OF OBJECTS

We must now list the various directions that lie open to us, and see whether this notion of `rules of formation' - of which little more than a rough sketch has so far been provided - can be given real content. Let us look first at the formation of objects. And in order to facilitate our analysis, let us take as an example the discourse of psychopathology from the nineteenth century onwards - a chronological break that is easy enough to accept in a first approach to the subject. There are enough signs to indicate it, but let us take just two of these: the estab­lishment at the beginning of the century of a new mode of exclusion and confinement of the madman in a psychiatric hospital; and the possibility of tracing certain present-day notions back to Esquirol, Heinroth, or Pinel (paranoia can be traced back to monomania, the intelligence quotient to the initial notion of imbecility, general par­alysis to chronic encephalitis, character neurosis to non-delirious madness); whereas if we try to trace the development of psycho-pathology beyond the nineteenth century, we soon lose our way, the path becomes confused, and the projection of Du Laurens or even Van Swieten on the pathology of Kraepelin or Bleuler provides no more than chance coincidences. The objects with which psychopathology has dealt since this break in time are very numerous, mostly very new, but also very precarious, subject to change and, in some cases, to rapid disappearance: in addition to motor disturbances, hallucinations, and speech disorders (which were already regarded as manifestations of madness, although they were recognized, delimited, described, and analysed in a different way), objects appeared that belonged to hitherto unused registers: minor behavioural disorders, sexual aberrations and disturbances, the phenomena of suggestion and hypnosis, lesions of the central nervous system, deficiencies of intellectual or motor adapta­tion, criminality. And on the basis of each of these registers a variety of objects were named, circumstances scribed, analysed, then rectified, re-defined, challenged, erased. Is it possible to lay down the rule to which their appearance was subject? Is it possible to discover according to which non-deductive system these objects could be juxtaposed and placed in succession to form the fragmented field - showing at certain points great gaps, at others a plethora of information - of psychopathology? What has ruled their existence as objects of discourse?

(a) First we must map the first surfaces of their emergence: show where these individual differences, which, according to the degrees of ration­alization, conceptual codes, and types of theory, will be accorded the status of disease, alienation, anomaly, dementia, neurosis or psychosis, degeneration, etc., may emerge, and then be designated and analysed. These surfaces of emergence are not the same for different societies, at different periods, and in different forms of discourse. In the case of nineteenth-century psychopathology, they were probably constituted by the family, the immediate social group, the work situation, the religious community (which are all normative, which are all suscep­tible to deviation, which all have a margin of tolerance and a threshold beyond which exclusion is demanded, which all have a mode of desig­nation and a mode of rejecting madness, which all transfer to medicine if not the responsibility for treatment and cure, at least the burden of explanation); although organized according to a specific mode, these surfaces of emergence were not new in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it was no doubt at this period that new surfaces of appear­ance began to function: art with its own normativity, sexuality (its deviations in relation to customary prohibitions become for the first time an object of observation, description, and analysis for psychiatric discourse), penality (whereas in previous periods madness was care-fully distinguished from criminal conduct and was regarded as an excuse, criminality itself becomes - and subsequent to the celebrated `homicidal monomanias' - a form of deviance more or less related to madness). In these fields of initial differentiation, in the distances, the discontinuities, and the thresholds that appear within it, psychiatric discourse finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it the status of an object - and therefore of making it manifest, nameable, and describable.

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b)We must also describe the authorities of delimitation: in the nineteenth century, medicine (as an institution possessing its own rules, as a group of individuals constituting the medical profession, as a body of knowledge and practice, as an authority recognized by public opinion, the law, and government) became the major authority in society that delimited, designated, named, and established madness as an object; but it was not alone in this: the law and penal law in particu­lar (with the definitions of excuse, non-responsibility, extenuating circumstances, and with the application of such. notions as the crime passionel, heredity, danger to society), the religious authority (in so far as it set itself up as the authority that divided the mystical from the pathological, the spiritual from the corporeal, the supernatural from the abnormal, and in so far as it practised the direction of conscience with a view to understanding individuals rather than carrying out a casuistical classification of actions and circumstances), literary and art criticism (which in the nineteenth century treated the work less and less as an object of taste that had to be judged, and more and more as a language that had to be interpreted and in which the author's tricks of expression had to be recognized).

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c)Lastly, we must analyse the grids of specification: these are the systems according to which the different `kinds of madness' are div­ided, contrasted, related, regrouped, classified, derived from one another as objects of psychiatric discourse (in the nineteenth century, these grids of differentiation were: the soul, as a group of hierarchized, related, and more or less interpenetrable faculties; the body, as a three-dimensional volume of organs linked together by networks of dependence and communication; the life and history of individuals, as a linear succession of phases, a tangle of traces, a group of potential reactivations, cyclical repetitions; the interplays of neuropsychological correlations as systems of reciprocal projections, and as a field of circular causality).

Such a description is still in itself inadequate. And for two reasons. These planes of emergence, authorities of delimitation, or forms of specification do not provide objects, fully formed and armed, that the discourse of psychopathology has then merely to list, classify, name, select, and cover with a network of words and sentences: it is not the families - with their norms, their prohibitions, their sensitivity thresh-olds - that decide who is mad, and present the 'patients' to the psychi­atrists for analysis and judgement; it is not the legal system itself that hands over certain criminals to psychiatry, that sees paranoia beyond a particular murder, or a neurosis behind a sexual offence. It would be quite wrong to see discourse as a place where previously established objects are laid one after another like words on a page. But the above enumeration is inadequate for a second reason. It has located, one after another, several planes of differentiation in which the objects of dis-course may appear. But what relations exist between them? Why this enumeration rather than another? What defined and closed group does one imagine one is circumscribing in this way? And how can one speak of a 'system of formation' if one knows only a series of different, heterogeneous determinations, lacking attributable links and relations?

In fact, these two series of questions refer back to the same point. In order to locate that point, let us re-examine the previous example. In the sphere with which psychopathology dealt in the nineteenth cen­tury, one sees the very early appearance (as early as Esquirol) of a whole series of objects belonging to the category of delinquency: homicide (and suicide), crimes passionels, sexual offences, certain forms of theft, vagrancy - and then, through them, heredity, the neurogenic environment, aggressive or self-punishing behaviour, perversions, criminal impulses, suggestibility, etc. It would be inadequate to say that one was dealing here with the consequences of a discovery: of the sudden discovery by a psychiatrist of a resemblance between criminal and pathological behaviour, a discovery of the presence in certain delinquents of the classical signs of alienation, or mental derangement. Such facts lie beyond the grasp of contemporary research: indeed, the problem is how to decide what made them possible, and how these 'discoveries' could lead to others that took them up, rectified them, modified them, or even disproved them. Similarly, it would he irrele­vant to attribute the appearance of these new objects to the norms of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, to a reinforced police and penal framework, to the establishment of a new code of criminal justice, to the introduction and use of extenuating circumstances, to the increase in crime. No doubt, all these processes were at work; but they could not of themselves form objects for psychiatric discourse; to pursue the description at this level one would fall short of what one was seeking.

If, in a particular period in the history of our society, the delinquent was psychologized and pathologized, if criminal behaviour could give rise to a whole series of objects of knowledge, this was because a group of particular relations was adopted for use in psychiatric discourse. The relation between planes of specification like penal categories and degrees of diminished responsibility, and planes of psychological characterization (faculties, aptitudes, degrees of development or involution, different ways of reacting to the environment, character types, whether acquired, innate, or hereditary). The relation between the authority of medical decision and the authority of judicial decision (a really complex relation since medical decision recognizes absolutely the authority of the judiciary to define crime, to determine the circum­stances in which it is committed, and the punishment that it deserves; but reserves the right to analyse its origin and to determine the degree of responsibility involved). The relation between the filter formed by judicial interrogation, police information, investigation, and the whole machinery of judicial information, and the filter formed by the med­ical questionnaire, clinical examinations, the search for antecedents, and biographical accounts. The relation between the family, sexual and penal norms of the behaviour of individuals, and the table of patho­logical symptoms and diseases of which they are the signs. The relation between therapeutic confinement in hospital (with its own thresholds, its criteria of cure, its way of distinguishing the normal from the pathological) and punitive confinement in prison (with its system of punishment and pedagogy, its criteria of good conduct, improvement, and freedom). These are the relations that, operating in psychiatric discourse, have made possible the formation of a whole group of various objects.

Let us generalize: in. the nineteenth century, psychiatric discourse is characterized not by privileged objects, but by the way in which it forms objects that are in fact highly dispersed. This formation is made possible by a group of relations established between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification. One might say, then, that a discursive formation is defined (as far as its objects are concerned, at least) if one can establish such a group; if one can show how any particular object of discourse finds in it its place and law of emergence; if one can show that it may give birth simultaneously or successively to mutually exclusive objects, without having to modify itself.

Hence a certain number of remarks and consequences.

1.The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse, the historical conditions required if one is to 'say anything' about it, and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish with them relations of resemblance, proximity, distance, dif­ference, transformation - as we can see, these conditions are many and imposing. Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, or to be aware, for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground. But this difficulty is not only a negative one; it must not be attached to some obstacle whose power appears to be, exclusively, to blind, to hinder, to prevent discovery, to conceal the purity of the evidence or the dumb obstinacy of the things themselves; the object does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations.

2.These relations are established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of norms, tech­niques, types of classification, modes of characterization; and these relations are not present in the object; it is not they that are deployed when the object is being analysed; they do not indicate the web, the immanent rationality, that ideal nervure that reappears totally or in part when one conceives of the object in the truth of its concept. They do not define its internal constitution, but what enables it to appear, to juxtapose itself with other objects, to situate itself in relation to them, to define its difference, its irreducibility, and even perhaps its heterogeneity, in short, to be placed in a field of exteriority.

3.These relations must be distinguished first from what we might call 'primary' relations, and which, independently of all discourse or all object of discourse, may be described between institutions, tech­niques, social forms, etc. After all, we know very well that relations existed between the bourgeois family and the functioning of judicial authorities and categories in the nineteenth century that can he ana­lysed in their own right. They cannot always be superposed upon the relations that go to form objects: the relations of dependence that may be assigned to this primary level are not necessarily expressed in the formation of relations that makes discursive objects possible. But we must also distinguish the secondary relations that are formulated in discourse itself: what, for example, the psychiatrists of the nineteenth century could say about the relations between the family and criminal­ity does not reproduce, as we know, the interplay of real dependencies; but neither does it reproduce the interplay of relations that make pos­sible and sustain the objects of psychiatric discourse. Thus a space unfolds articulated with possible discourses: a system of real or primary relations, a system of reflexive or secondary relations, and a system of relations that might properly be called discursive. The problem is to reveal the specificity of these discursive relations, and their interplay with the other two kinds.

4.Discursive relations are not, as we can see, internal to discourse: they do not connect concepts or words with one another; they do not establish a deductive or rhetorical structure between propositions or sentences. Yet they are not relations exterior to discourse, relations that might limit it, or impose certain forms upon it, or force it, in certain circumstances, to state certain things. They are, in a sense, at the limit of discourse: they offer it objects of which it can speak, or rather (for this image of offering presupposes that objects are formed independ­ently of discourse), they determine the group of relations that dis-course must establish in order to speak of this or that object, in order to deal with them, name them, analyse them, classify them, explain them, etc. These relations characterize not the language (langue) used by dis-course, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice.

We can now complete the analysis and see to what extent it fulfils, and to what extent it modifies, the initial project.

Taking those group figures which, in an insistent but confused way, presented themselves as psychology, economics, grammar, medicine, we asked on what kind of unity they could be based: were they simply a reconstruc­tion after the event, based on particular works, successive theories, notions and themes some of which had been abandoned, others main­tained by tradition, and again others fated to fall into oblivion only to be revived at a later date? Were they simply a series of linked enterprises?

We sought the unity of discourse in the objects themselves, in their distribution, in the interplay of their differences, in their proximity or distance - in short, in what is given to the speaking subject; and, in the end, we are sent back to a setting-up of relations that characterizes discursive practice itself; and what we discover is neither a configur­ation, nor a form, but a group of rules that are immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity. We also used, as a point of reference, a unity like psychopathology: if we had wanted to provide it with a date of birth and precise limits, it would no doubt have been necessary to discover when the word was first used, to what kind of analysis it could be applied, and how it achieved its separation from neurology on the one hand and psychology on the other. What has emerged is a unity of another type, which does not appear to have the same dates, or the same surface, or the same articulations, but which may take account of a group of objects for which the term psychopathology was merely a reflexive, secondary, classificatory rubric. Psychopathology finally emerged as a discipline in a constant state of renewal, subject to constant discoveries, criticisms, and corrected errors; the system of formation that we have defined remains stable. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the objects that remain constant, nor the domain that they form; it is not even their point of emergence or their mode of characterization; but the relation between the surfaces on which they appear, on which they can be delimited, on which they can be analysed and specified.

In the descriptions for which I have attempted to provide a theory, there can be no question of interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the referent. In the example chosen, we are not trying to find out who was mad at a particular period, or in what his madness consisted, or whether his disturbances were identical with those known to us today. We are not asking ourselves whether witches were unrecognized and presecuted madmen and madwomen, or whether, at a different period, a mystical or aesthetic experience was not unduly medicalized. We are not trying to reconstitute what mad­ness itself might be, in the form in which it first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, deaf, scarcely articulated' experience, and in the form in which it was later organized (translated, deformed, travestied, perhaps even repressed) by discourses, and the oblique, often twisted play of their operations. Such a history of the referent is no doubt possible; and I have no wish at the outset to exclude any effort to uncover and free these 'prediscursive' experiences from the tyranny of the text. But what we are concerned with here is not to neutralize discourse, to make it the sign of something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity. What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced. from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and tradi­tions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in

5- ((footnote))

' This is written against an explicit theme of my book Madness and Civilization, and one that recurs particularly in the preface.

discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the condi­tions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.

However, to suppress the stage of 'things themselves' is not necessar­ily to return to the linguistic analysis of meaning. When one describes the formation of the objects of a discourse, one tries to locate the relations that characterize a discursive practice, one determines neither a lexical organization, nor the scansions of a semantic field: one does not question the meaning given at a particular period to such words as 'melancholia' or 'madness without delirium', nor the opposition of content between 'psychosis' and 'neurosis'. Not, I repeat, that such analyses are regarded as illegitimate or impossible; but they are not relevant when we are trying to discover, for example, how criminality could become an object of medical expertise, or sexual deviation a possible object of psychiatric discourse. The analysis of lexical contents defines either the elements of meaning at the disposal of speaking subjects in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken; it does not concern discursive practice as a place in which a tangled plurality - at once superposed and incomplete - of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears.

The sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any refer­ence to the living plenitude of experience. We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse - in which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light; and we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse itself. Since it is sometimes necessary to dot the 'i's of even the most obvious absences, I will say that in all these searches, in which I have still progressed so little, I would like to show that 'discourses', in the form in which they can he heard or read, are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, coloured chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (longue), the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects. `Words and things' is the entirely serious title of a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of not - of no longer - treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (longue) and to speech. It is this `more' that we must reveal and describe.

4. THE FORMATION OF ENUNCIATIVE MODALITIES

Qualitative descriptions, biographical accounts, the location, interpret­ation, and cross-checking of signs, reasonings by analogy, deduction, statistical calculations, experimental verifications, and many other forms of statement are to be found in the discourse of nineteenth-century doctors. What is it that links them together? What necessity binds them together? Why these and not others? Before attempting an answer to such questions, we must first discover the law operating behind all these diverse statements, and the place from which they come.

(a) First question: who is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort of language (langage)? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of the individuals who - alone - have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition., juridically defined or spontan­eously accepted, to proffer such a discourse? The status of doctor involves criteria of competence and knowledge; institutions, systems, pedagogic norms; legal conditions that give the right - though not without laying down certain limitations - to practise and to extend one's knowledge. It also involves a system of differentiation and relations (the division of attributions, hierarchical subordination, functional complementarity, the request for and the provision and exchange of information) with other individuals or other groups that also possess their own status (with the state and its representatives, with the judiciary, with different professional bodies, with religious groups and, at times, with priests). It also involves a number of charac­teristics that define its functioning in relation to society as a whole (the role that is attributed to the doctor according to whether he is con­sulted by a private person or summoned, more or less under compul­sion, by society, according to whether he practises a profession or carries out a function; the right to intervene or make decisions that is accorded him in these different cases; what is required of him as the supervisor, guardian, and guarantor of the health of a population, a group, a family, an individual; the payment that he receives from the community or from individuals; the form of contract, explicit or implicit, that he negotiates either with the group in which he practises, or with the authority that entrusts him with a task, or with the patient who requests advice, treatment, or cure). This status of the doctor is generally a rather special one in all forms of society and civilization: he is hardly ever an undifferentiated or interchangeable person. Medical statements cannot come from anybody; their value, efficacy, even their therapeutic powers, and, generally speaking, their existence as medical statements cannot be dissociated from the statutorily defined person who has the right to make them, and to claim for them the power to overcome suffering and death. But we also know that this status in western civilization was profoundly modified at the end of the eight­eenth century when the health of the population became one of the economic norms required by industrial societies.

(b) We must also describe the institutional sites from which the doctor makes his discourse, and from which this discourse derives its legitimate source and point of application (its specific objects and instruments of verification). In our societies, these sites are: the hospital, a place of constant, coded, systematic observation, run by a differentiated and hierarchized medical staff, thus constituting a quan­tifiable field of frequencies; private practice, which offers a field of less systematic, less complete, and far less numerous observations, but which sometimes facilitates observations that are more far-reaching in their effects, with a better knowledge of the background and environ­ment; the laboratory, an autonomous place, long distinct from the hospital, where certain truths of a general kind, concerning the human body, life, disease, lesions, etc., which provide certain elements of the diagnosis, certain signs of the developing condition, certain criteria of cure, and which makes therapeutic experiment possible; lastly, what might be called the 'library' or documentary field, which includes not only the hooks and treatises traditionally recognized as valid, but also all the observations and case-histories published and transmitted, and the mass of statistical information (concerning the social environment, climate, epidemics, mortality rates, the incidence of diseases, the centres of contagion, occupational diseases) that can be supplied to the doctor by public bodies, by other doctors, by sociologists, and by geographers. In this respect, too, these various 'sites' of medical dis-course were profoundly modified in the nineteenth century: the importance of the document continues to increase (proportionately diminishing the authority of the book or tradition); the hospital, which had been merely a subsidiary site for discourse on diseases, and which took second place in importance and value to private practice (in which diseases left in their natural environment were, in the eight­eenth century, to reveal themselves in their vegetal truth), then becomes the site of systematic, homogeneous observations, large-scale confrontations, the establishment of frequencies and probabilities, the annulation of individual variants, in short, the site of the appearance of disease, not as a particular species, deploying its essential features beneath the doctor's gaze, but as an average process, with its significant guide-lines, boundaries, and potential development. Similarly, it was in the nineteenth century that daily medical practice integrated the laboratory as the site of a discourse that has the same experimental norms as physics, chemistry, or biology.

(c) The positions of the subject are also defined by the situation that it is possible for him to occupy in relation to the various domains or groups of objects: according to a certain grid of explicit or implicit interrogations, he is the questioning subject and, according to a certain programme of information, he is the listening subject; according to a table of characteristic features, he is the seeing subject, and, according to a descriptive type, the observing subject; he is situated at an optimal perceptual distance whose boundaries delimit the wheat of relevant information; he uses instrumental intermediaries that modify the scale of the information, shift the subject in relation to the average or immediate perceptual level, ensure his movement from a superficial to a deep level, make him circulate in the interior space of the body - from manifest symptoms to the organs, from the organs to the tissues, and finally from the tissues to the cells. To these perceptual situations should be added the positions that the subject can occupy in the infor­mation networks (in theoretical teaching or in hospital training; in the system of oral communication or of written document: as emitter and receiver of observations, case-histories, statistical data, general theor­etical propositions, projects, and decisions). The various situations that the subject of medical discourse may occupy were redefined at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the organization of a quite different perceptual field (arranged in depth, manifested by successive recourse to instruments, deployed by surgical techniques or methods of autopsy, centred upon lesional sites), and with the establishment of new systems of registration, notation, description, classification, inte­gration in numerical series and in statistics, with the introduction of new forms of teaching, the circulation of information, relations with other theoretical domains (sciences or philosophy) and with other institutions (whether administrative, political, or economic).

If, in clinical discourse, the doctor is in turn the sovereign, direct questioner, the observing eye, the touching finger, the organ that deciphers signs, the point at which previously formulated descriptions are integrated, the laboratory technician, it is because a whole group of relations is involved. Relations between the hospital space as a place of assistance, of purified, systematic observation, and of partially proved, partially experimental therapeutics, and a whole group of perceptual codes of the human body - as it is defined by morbid anatomy; rela­tions between the field of immediate observations and the domain of acquired information; relations between the doctor's therapeutic role, his pedagogic role, his role as an intermediary in the diffusion of medical knowledge, and his role as a responsible representative of public health in the social space. Understood as a renewal of points of view, contents, the forms and even the style of description, the use of inductive or probabilistic reasoning, types of attribution of causality, i.n short, as a renewal of the modalities of enunciation, clinical medicine must not be regarded as the result of a new technique of observation - that of autopsy, which was practised long before the advent of the nineteenth century; nor as the result of the search for pathogenic causes in the depths of the organism - Morgagni was engaged in such a search in the middle of the eighteenth century; nor as the effect of that new institution, the teaching hospital - such institutions had already been in existence for some decades in Austria and Italy; nor as the result of the introduction of the concept of tissue in Bichat's Traite des membranes. But as the establishment of a relation, in medical discourse, between a number of distinct elements, some of which concerned the status of doctors, others the institutional and technical. site form which they spoke, others their position as subjects perceiving, observing, describing, teaching, etc. It can be said that this relation between dif­ferent elements (some of which are new, while others were already in existence) is effected by clinical discourse: it is this, as a practice, that establishes between them all. a system of relations that is not `really' given. or constituted a priori; and if there is a unity, if the modalities of enunciation that it uses, or to which it gives place, are not simply juxtaposed by a series of historical contingencies, it is because it makes constant use of this group of relations.

One further remark. Having noted the disparity of the types of enunciation in clinical discourse, I have not tried. to reduce it by uncovering the formal structures, categories, modes of logical succes­sion, types of reasoning and induction, forms of analysis and synthesis that may have operated in a discourse; I did not wish. to reveal the rational organization that may provide statements like those of medi­cine with their element of intrinsic necessity. Nor did I wish to reduce to a single founding act, or to a founding consciousness the general horizon of rationality against which the progress of medicine grad­ually emerged, its efforts to model itself upon the exact sciences, the contraction of its methods of observation, the slow, difficult expulsion of the images or fantasies that inhabit it, the purification of its system of reasoning. Lastly, I have not tried to describe the empirical genesis, nor the various component elements of the medical mentality: how this shift of interest on the part of the doctors came about, by what theoretical or experimental model they were influenced, what phil­osophy or moral thematics defined the climate of their reflexion, to what questions, to what demands, they had to reply, what efforts were required of them to free themselves from traditional prejudices, by what ways they were led towards a unification and coherence that were never achieved, never reached, by their knowledge. In short, I do not refer the various enunciative modalities to the unity of the subject - whether it concerns the subject regarded as the pure founding author­ity of rationality, or the subject regarded as an empirical function of synthesis. Neither the 'knowing' (le 'connaitre'), nor the 'knowledge' (les 'connaissances').

In the proposed analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his dispersion.' To the various statuses, the various sites, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse. To th.e discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks. And if these planes are linked by a system of relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by the speci­ficity of a discursive practice. I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression - the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity. Thus conceived, dis-course is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of dis­tinct sites is deployed. I showed earlier that it was neither by 'words' nor by 'things' that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive

6- ((footnote))

In this respect, the term 'regard medical' used in my Naissance de In Clinique was not a very happy one.

formation should be defined; similarly, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.

5 THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS

Perhaps the family of concepts that emerges in the work of Linnaeus (hut also in that of Ricardo, and in the Grammaire de Port-Royal) may be organized into a coherent whole. Perhaps one might be able to restore the deductive architecture that it forms. In any case, the experiment is worth attempting - and it has been attempted several times. On the other hand, if one takes a broader scale, and chooses as guide-lines such disciplines as grammar, or economics, or the study of living beings, the set of concepts that emerges does not obey such rigorous conditions; their history is not the stone-by-stone construction of an edifice. Should this dispersion be left in its apparent disorder? Or should it be seen as a succession of conceptual systems, each possessing its own organization, and being articulated only against the perman­ence of problems, the continuity of tradition, or the mechanism of influences? Could a law not be found that would account for the successive or simultaneous emergence of disparate concepts? Could a system of occurrence not be found between them that was not a logical systematicity? Rather than wishing to replace concepts in a virtual deductive edifice, one would have to describe the organization of the field of statements where they appeared and circulated.

(a) This organization involves firstly forms of succession. And among them, the various orderings of enunciative series (whether the order of inferences, successive implications, and demonstrative reasonings; or the order of descriptions, the schemata of generalization or progressive specification to which. they are subject, the spatial distributions that they cover; or the order of the descriptive accounts, and the way in which the events of the time are distributed in the linear succession of the statements); the various types of dependence of the statements (which are not always either identical or superposable on the manifest succes­sions of the series of statements: this is the case in the dependences of hypothesis/verification, assertion/critique, general law/particular application; the various rhetorical schemata according to which groups of statements may he combined, (how descriptions, deductions, def­initions, whose succession characterizes the architecture of a text, are linked together). Take, for example, the case of Natural History in the Classical period: it does not use the same concepts as in the sixteenth century; certain of the older concepts (genus, species, signs) are used in different ways; new concepts (like that of structure) appear; and others (like that of organism) are formed later. But what was altered in the seventeenth century, and was to govern the appearance and recur­rence of concepts, for the whole of Natural History, was the general arrangement of the statements, their successive arrangement in particu­lar wholes; it was the way in which one wrote down what one observed and, by means of a series of statements, recreated a perceptual process; it was the relation and interplay of subordinations between describing, articulating into distinctive features, characterizing, and classifying; it was the reciprocal position of particular observations and general principles; it was the system of dependence between what one learnt, what one saw, what one deduced, what one accepted as prob-able, and what one postulated. In the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­turies, Natural History was not simply a form of knowledge that gave a new definition to concepts like 'genus' or 'character', and which intro­duced new concepts like that of 'natural classification' or 'mammal'; above all, it was a set of rules for arranging statements in series, an obligatory set of schemata of dependence, of order, and of successions, in which the recurrent elements that may have value as concepts were distributed.

(b) The configuration of the enunciative field also involves forms of coexistence. These outline first a field of presence (by which is understood all statements formulated elsewhere and taken up in a discourse, acknow­ledged to be truthful, involving exact description, well-founded rea­soning, or necessary presupposition); we must also give our attention to those that are criticized, discussed, and judged, as well as those that are rejected or excluded); in this field of presence, the relations estab­lished may be of the order of experimental verification, logical valid­ation, mere repetition, acceptance justified by tradition and authority, commentary, a search for hidden meanings, the analysis of error; these relations may be explicit (and sometimes formulated in types of specialized statements: references, critical discussions), or implicit and present in ordinary statements. Again, it is easy to see that the field of presence of Natural History in the Classical period does not obey the same forms, or the same criteria of choice, or the same principles of exclusion, as in the period when Aldrovandi was collecting in one and the same text everything that had been seen, observed, recounted, passed on innumerable times by word of mouth, and even imagined by the poets, on the subject of monsters. Distinct from this field of pres­ence one may also describe a field of concomitance (this includes statements that concern quite different domains of objects, and belong to quite different domains of objects, and belong to quite different types of discourse, but which are active among the statements studied here, either because they serve as analogical confirmation, or because they serve as a general principle and as premises accepted by a reasoning, or because they serve as models that can be transferred to other contents, or because they function as a higher authority than that to which at least certain propositions are presented and subjected): thus the field of concomitance of the Natural History of the period of Linnaeus and Buffon is defined by a number of relations with cosmology, the history of the earth, philosophy, theology, scripture and biblical exegesis, mathematics (in the very general form of a science of order); and all these relations distinguish it from both the discourse of the sixteenth-century naturalists and that of the nineteenth-century biologists. Lastly, the enunciative field involves what might be called a field of memory (statements that are no longer accepted or discussed, and which con­sequently no longer define either a body of truth or a domain of validity, but in. relation to which relations of filiation, genesis, trans-formation, continuity, and historical discontinuity can be established): thus the field of memory of Natural History, since Tournefort, seems particularly restricted and impoverished in its forms when compared with the broad, cumulative, and very specific field of memory pos­sessed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology; on the other hand, it seems much better defined and better articulated than the field of memory surrounding the history of plants and animals in the Renaissance: for at that time it could scarcely be distinguished from the field of presence; they had the same extension and the same form, and involved the same relations.

(c) Lastly, we may define the procedures of intervention that may be legit­imately applied to statements. These procedures are not in fact the same for all discursive formations; those that are used (to the exclu­sion of all others), the relations that link them and the unity thus created make it possible to specify each one. These procedures may appear: in techniques of rewriting (like those, for example, that enabled the naturalists of the Classical period to rewrite linear descriptions in classificatory tables that have neither the same laws nor the same configuration as the lists and groups of kinship established in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance); in methods of transcribing statements (articulated in the natural language) according to a more or less formalized and artificial language (the project, and to a certain extent the realization, of such a language is to be found in Linnaeus and Adanson); the modes of translating quantitative statements into quali­tative formulations and vice versa (the establishment of relations between purely perceptual measurements and descriptions); the means used to increase the approximation of statements and to refine their exactitude (structural analysis according to the form, number, arrangement, and size of the elements has made it possible, since Tournefort, to achieve a closer and above all more constant approxi­mation of descriptive statements); the way in which one delimits once again - by extension or restriction. - the domain of validity of state­ments (the enunciation of structural characters was restricted in the period between Tournefort and Linnaeus, then enlarged in that between Buffon and Jussieu); the way in which one transfers a type of statement from one field of application to another (like the transfer­ence from vegetal characterization to animal taxonomy; or from the description of superficial characters to the internal elements of the organism); the methods of systematizing propositions that already exist, because they have been previously formulated, but in a separated state; or again the methods of redistributing statements that are already linked together, but which one rearranges in a new systematic whole (as Adanson takes up the natural characterizations that had been made before, either by himself or by others, and placed them in a group of artificial descriptions, the schema of which he had previously worked out on the basis of some abstract combinatory).

These elements that I am proposing to analyse are of rather different kinds. Some constitute rules of formal construction, others rhetorical practices; some define the internal configuration of a text, others the modes of relation and interference between different texts; some are characteristic of a particular period, others have a distant origin and far-reaching chronological import. But what properly belongs to a discursive formation and what makes it possible to delimit the group of concepts, disparate as they may be, that are specific to it, is the way in which these different elements are related to one another: the way in which, for example, the ordering of descriptions or accounts is linked to the techniques of rewriting; the way in which the field of memory is linked to the forms of hierarchy and subordination that govern the statements of a text; the way in which the modes of approximation and development of the statements are linked to the modes of criticism, commentary and interpretation of previously formulated statements, etc. It is this group of relations that constitutes a system of conceptual formation.

The description of such a system could not be valid for a direct, immediate description of the concepts themselves. My intention is not to carry out an exhaustive observation of them, to establish the charac­teristics that they may have in common, to undertake a classification of them, to measure their internal coherence, or to test their mutual com­patibility; I do not wish to take as an object of analysis the conceptual architecture of an isolated text, an individual oeuvre, or a science at a particular moment in time. One stands back in relation to this manifest set of concepts; and one tries to determine according to what schemata (of series, simultaneous groupings, linear or reciprocal modification) the statements may be linked to one another in a type of discourse; one tries in this way to discover how the recurrent elements of statements can reappear, dissociate, recompose, gain in extension or determin­ation, be taken up into new logical structures, acquire, on the other hand, new semantic contents, and constitute partial organizations among themselves. These schemata make it possible to describe - not the laws of the internal construction of concepts, not their progressive and individual genesis in the mind of man - but their anonymous dispersion through texts, hooks, and oeuvres. A dispersion that character­izes a type of discourse, and which defines, between concepts, forms of deduction, derivation, and coherence, but also of incompatibility, intersection, substitution, exclusion, mutual alteration, displacement, etc. Such an analysis, then, concerns, at a kind of preconceptual level, the field in which concepts can coexist and the rules to which this field is subjected.

In order to define more precisely what I mean by 'preconceptual', I shall take the example of the four 'theoretical schemata', studied in my book The Order of Things, and which characterize General Grammar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These four schemata - attribu­tion, articulation, designation, and dervation - do not designate con­cepts that were in fact used by the Classical grammarians; nor do they make it possible to reconstitute, over and above different grammatical works, a sort of more general, more abstract, more impoverished system, but discover, by that very fact, the profound compatibility of these different, apparently opposed systems. They make it possible to describe:

1. How the different grammatical analyses can be ordered and deployed; and what forms of succession are possible between analyses of the noun, analyses of the verb, and analyses of the adjective, those that concern phonetics and those that concern syntax, those that con­cern the original language (longue), and those that project an artificial language (longue). These different orders are laid down by the relations of dependence that may be observed between the theories of attribution, articulation, designation, and derivation.

2.How General Grammar defines a domain of validity for itself (according to what criteria one may discuss the truth or falsehood of a proposition); how it constitutes a domain of normativity for itself (according to what criteria one may exclude certain statements as being irrelevant to the discourse, or as inessential and marginal, or as non-scientific); how it constitutes a domain of actuality for itself (comprising acquired solutions, defining present problems, situating concepts and affirmations that have fallen into disuse).

3.What relations General Grammar has with Mathesis (with Car­tesian and post-Cartesian algebra, with th.e project of a general science of order), with the philosophical analysis of representation and the theory of signs, with Natural History, the problems of characterization and taxonomy, with the Analysis of Wealth and the problems of the arbitrary signs of measurem.en.t and exchange: by marking out these relations one may determine the ways by which the circulation, the transfer and the modification of concepts, the alteration of their form or changes in their field of application, are made possible between one domain and another. The network formed by the four theoretical segments does not define the logical architecture of all the concepts used by grammarians; it outlines the regular space of their formation.

4.How the various conceptions of the verb 'to be', of the copula, of the verbal radical and the flexional ending (for a theoretical schema of attribution) were simultaneously or successively possible (under the form of alternative choice, modification, or substitution); the various conceptions of the phonetic elements, of the alphabet, of the name, of substantives and adjectives (for a theoretical schema of articulation); the various concepts of proper noun. and common noun, demonstrative, nominal root, syllable or expressive sonority (for the theoretical segment of designation); the various concepts of original and derived language (langage), metaphor and figure, poetic language (langage) (for the theoretical segment of derivation).

The 'preconceptual' level that we have uncovered refers neither to a horizon of ideality nor to an empirical genesis of abstractions. On the one hand, it is not a horizon of ideality, placed, discovered, or established by a founding gesture - and one that is so original that it eludes all chronological insertion; it is not an inexhaustible a priori at the confines of history, set back both because it eludes all beginning, all genetic restitution, and because it could never he contemporary with itself in an explicit totality. In fact one does not pose the question at the level of discourse itself, which is not external translation, but the locus of emergence of concepts; one does not attach the constants of discourse to the ideal structures of the concept, but one describes the conceptual network on the basis of the intrinsic regularities of discourse; one does not subject the multiplicity of statements to the coherence of concepts, and this coherence to the silent recollection of a meta-historical ideality; one establishes the inverse series: one replaces the pure aims of non-contradiction in a complex network of con­ceptual compatibility and incompatibility; and one relates this com­plexity to the rules that characterize a particular discursive practice. By that very fact, it is no longer necessary to appeal to the themes of an endlessly withdrawing origin and and inexhaustible horizon: the organization of a group of rules in the practice of discourse, even if it does not constitute an event so easy to situate as a formulation or a discovery, may he determined, however, in the element of history; and if it is inexhaustible, it is by that very fact that the perfectly describable system that it constitutes takes account of a very considerable set of concepts and a very large number of transformations that affect both these concepts and their relations. Instead of outlining a horizon that rises from the depths of history and maintains itself through history, the 'preconceptual' thus described is, on the contrary, at the most 'superficial' level (at the level of discourse), the group of rules that in fact operate within it.

Nor is it a genesis of abstractions, trying to rediscover the series of operations that have made it possible to constitute them: overall intu­itions, discoveries of particular cases, the disconnexion of imaginary themes, the encountering of theoretical or technical obstacles, succes-sive borrowings from traditional models, definition of the adequate formal structure, etc. In the analysis proposed here, the rules of forma-tion operate not only in the mind or consciousness of individuals, but in discourse itself; they operate therefore, according to a sort of uni­form anonymity, on all individuals who undertake to speak in this discursive field. On the other hand, one does not suppose them to be universally valid for every domain; one always describes them in par­ticular discursive fields, and one does not accord them at the outset indefinite possibilities of extension. The most one can do is to make a systematic comparison, from one region to another, of the rules for the formation of concepts: it is in this way that I have tried to uncover the identities and differences that may be presented by these groups of rules in the General Grammar, the Natural History, and the Analysis of Wealth of the Classical period. These groups of rules are specific enough in each of these domains to characterize a particular, well-individualized discursive formation; but they offer enough analogies for us to see these various formations form a wider discursive grouping at a higher level. In any case, the rules governing the formation of concepts, however generalized the concepts may be, are not the result, laid down in history and deposited in. the depth of collective customs, of operations carried out by individuals; they do not constitute the bare schema of a whole obscure work, in the course of which concepts would be made to emerge through illusions, prejudices, errors, and traditions. The preconceptual field allows the emergence of the dis-cursive regularities and constraints that have made possible the hetero­geneous multiplicity of concepts, and, beyond these the profusion of the themes, beliefs, and representations with which one usually deals when one is writing the history of ideas.

In order to analyse the rules for the formation of objects, one must neither, as we have seen, embody them in things, nor relate them to the domain of words; in order to analyse the formation of enunciative types, one must relate them neither to the knowing subject, nor to a psychological individuality. Similarly, to analyse the formation of con­cepts, one must relate them neither to the horizon of ideality, nor to the empirical progress of ideas.

6. THE FORMATION OF STRATEGIES

Such discourses as economics, medicine, grammar, the science of liv-ing beings give rise to certain organizations of concepts, certain regroupings of objects, certain types of enunciation, which form, according to their degree of coherence, rigour, and stability, themes or theories: the theme, in eighteenth-century grammar, of an original language (longue) from which all others derive, and of which all others carry within themselves a sometimes decipherable memory; a theory, in nineteenth-century philology, of a kinship between all the Indo-European languages, and of an archaic idiom that served as a common starting-point; a theme, in the eighteenth century, of an evolution of the species deploying in time the continuity of nature, and explaining the present gaps in the taxonomic table; a theory, propounded by the Physiocrats, of a circulation of wealth on the basis of agricultural pro­duction. Whatever their formal. level may be, I shall call these themes and theories `strategies'. The problem is to discover how they are dis­tributed in history. Is it necessity that links them together, makes them invisible, calls them to their right places one after another, and makes of them successive solutions to one and the same problem? Or chance encounters between ideas of different origin, influences, discoveries, speculative climates, theoretical models that the patience or genius of individuals arranges into more or less well-constituted wholes? Or can one find a regularity between them and define the common system of their formation?

As for the analysis of these strategies, I can hardly enter into great detail. The reason is simple enough: in the various discursive domains, which I have tried to sketch out - rather hesitantly no doubt, and, especially at the beginning, with inadequate method­ological control - the problem was to describe in each case the discursive formation in all its dimensions, and according to its own characteristics: it was necessary therefore to describe each time the rules for the formation of objects, modalities of statement, concepts, and theoretical choices. But it turned out that the difficult point of the analysis, and the one that demanded greatest attention, was not the same in each case. In Madness and Civilization, I was dealing with a discursive formation whose theoretical points of choice were fairly easy to locate, whose conceptual systems were relatively uncomplex and few in number, and whose enunciative rules were fairly homo­geneous and repetitive; on the other hand, the problem lay in the emergence of a whole group of highly complex, interwoven objects; it was necessary above all to describe the formation of these objects, in order to locate in its specificity the whole of psychiatric discourse. In Naissance de la clinique, the essential point of the research was the way in which, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the enunciative forms of medical discourse had been modified; the analysis was concerned therefore less with the formation of conceptual systems, or the formation of theoretical choices, than with the status, the institutional siting, the situation, and the modes of insertion used by the discoursing subject. Lastly, in The Order of Things, my attention was concentrated mainly on the net-works of concepts and their rules of formation (identical or different) as they could be located in General Grammar, Natural History, and the Analysis of Wealth. The place, and the implications, of the stra­tegic choices were indicated (whether, for example, in the case of Linnaeus and Buffon, or the Physiocrats and the Utilitarists); but I did little more than locate them, and my analysis scarcely touched on their formation. Let us say that a fuller analysis of theoretical choices must be left until a later study, in which I shall be able to give it my whole attention.

For the moment, the most that I can do is to indicate the directions in which the research will proceed. These might be summarized thus:

I Determine the possible points of diffraction of discourse. These points are characterized in the first instance as points of incompatibility: two objects, or two types of enunciation, or two concepts may appear, in the same discursive formation, without being able to enter - under pain of manifest contradiction or inconsequence - the same series of statements. They are then characterized as points of equivalence: the two incompatible elements are formed in the same way and on the basis of the same rules; the conditions of their appearance are identical; they are situated at the same level; and instead of constituting a mere defect of coherence, they form an alternative: even if, chronologically speak-ing, they do not appear at the same time, even if they do not have the same importance, and if they were not equally represented in the popu­lation of effective statements, they appear in the form of 'either . or'. Lastly, they are characterized as link points of systematization: on the basis of each of these equivalent, yet incompatible elements, a coherent series of objects, forms of statement, and concepts has been derived (with, in each series, possible new points of incompatibility). In other words, the dispersions studied at previous levels do not simply constitute gaps, non-identities, discontinuous series; they come to form discursive sub-groups - those very sub-groups that are usually regarded as being of major importance, as if they were the immediate unity and raw material out of which larger discursive groups ('theories', 'concep­tions', 'themes') are formed. For example, one does not consider, in an analysis of this kind, that the Analysis of Wealth, in the eighteenth century, was the result (by way of simultaneous composition or chronological succession) of several different conceptions of coinage, of the exchange of objects of need, of the formation of value and prices, or of ground rent; one does not consider that it is made up of the ideas of Cantillon, taking up from those of Petty, of Law's experi­ence reflected by various theoreticians in turn, and of the Physiocratic system opposing Utilitarist conceptions. One describes it rather as a unity of distribution that opens a field of possible options, and enables various mutually exclusive architectures to appear side by side or in turn.

2. But all the possible alternatives are not in fact realized: there are a good many partial groups, regional compatibilities, and coherent architectures that might have emerged, yet did not do so. In order to account for the choices that were made out of all those that could have been made (and those alone), one must describe the specific author­ities that guided one's choice. Well to the fore is the role played by the discourse being studied in relation to those that are contemporary with it or related to it. One must study therefore the economy of the discursive constellation to which it belongs. It may in fact play the role of a formal system of which other discourses are applications with various seman­tic fields; it may, on the other hand, he that of a concrete model that must be applied to other discourses at a higher level of abstraction (thus General Grammar, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appears as a particular model of the general theory of signs and repre­sentation). The discourse under study may also be in a relation of analogy, opposition, or complementarity with certain other discourses (there is, for example, a relation of analogy, in the Classical period, between the Analysis of Wealth and Natural History; the first is to the representation of need and desire what the second is to the representa­tion of perceptions and judgements; one may also note that Natural History and General Grammar are opposed to one another in the same way as a theory of natural characters and a theory of conventional signs; both, in turn, are opposed to the Analysis of Wealth just as the study of qualitative signs is opposed to that of the quantitative signs of measurement; each, in fact, develops one of the three complementary roles of the representative sign: designation, classification, exchange). Lastly, one may describe between several discourses relations of mutual delimitation, each giving the other the distinctive marks of its singular­ity by the differentiation of its domain of application (as in the case of psychiatry and organic medicine which were virtually not dis­tinguished from one another before the end of the eighteenth century, and which established from that moment a gap that has since character­ized them). This whole group of relations forms a principle of determination that permits or excludes, within a given discourse, a certain number of statements: these are conceptual systematizations, enunciative series, groups and organizations of objects that might have been possible (and of which nothing can justify the absence at the level of their own rules of formation), but which are excluded by a dis-cursive constellation at a higher level and in a broader space. A dis-cursive formation does not occupy therefore all the possible volume that is opened up to it of right by the systems of formation of its objects, its enunciations, and its concepts; it is essentially incomplete, owing to the system of formation of its strategic choices. Hence the fact that, taken up again, placed, and interpreted in a new constellation, a given discursive formation may reveal new possibilities (thus in the present distribution of scientific discourses, the Grammar of Port-Royal or the taxonomy of Linnaeus may free elements that, in relation to them, are both intrinsic and new); but we are not dealing with a silent content that has remained implicit, that has been said and yet not said, and which constitutes beneath manifest statements a sort of sub-discourse that is more fundamental, and which is now emerging at last into the light of day; what we are dealing with is a modification in the principle of exclusion and the principle of the possibility of choices; a modification that is due to an insertion in a new discursive constellation.

3. The determination of the theoretical choices that were actually made is also dependent upon another authority. This authority is char­acterized first by the function that the discourse under study must carry out in a field of non-discursive practices. Thus General Grammar played a role in pedagogic practice; in a much more obvious, and much more important way, the Analysis of Wealth played a role not only in the political and economic decisions of governments, but in the scarcely conceptualized, scarcely theoretized, daily practice of emergent capital-ism, and in the social and political struggles that characterized the Classical period. This authority also involves the rules and processes of appropriation of discourse: for in our societies (and no doubt in many others) the property of discourse - in the sense of the right to speak, ability to understand, licit and immediate access to the corpus of already formulated statements, and the capacity to invest this discourse in decisions, institutions, or practices - is in fact confined (sometimes with the addition of legal sanctions) to a particular group of individuals; in the bourgeois societies that we have known since the sixteenth century, economic discourse has never been a common dis-course (no more than medical or literary discourse, though in a differ­ent way). Lastly, this authority is characterized by the possible positions of desire in relation to discourse: discourse may in fact be the place for a phan­tasmatic representation, an element of symbolization, a form of the forbidden, an instrument of derived satisfaction (this possibility of being in relation with desire is not simply the fact of the poetic, fic­tional, or imaginary practice of discourse: the discourses on wealth, on language (langage), on nature, on madness, on life and death, and many others, perhaps, that are much more abstract, may occupy very specific positions in relation to desire). In any case, the analysis of this authority must show that neither the relation of discourse to desire, nor the processes of its appropriation, nor its role among non-discursive prac­tices is extrinsic to its unity, its characterization, and the laws of its formation. They are not disturbing elements which, superposing themselves upon its pure, neutral, atemporal, silent form, suppress its true voice and emit in its place a travestied discourse, but, on the contrary, its formative elements.

A discursive formation will be individualized if one can define the system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it; in other words, if one can show how they all derive (in spite of their sometimes extreme diversity, and in spite of their dispersion in time) from the same set of relations. For example, the Analysis of Wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is characterized by the system that could form both Colbert's mercantilism and Cantillon's 'neo-mercantilism'; Law's strategy and that of Paris-Duverney; the Physio­cratic option and the Utilitarist option. And one will have defined this system if one can describe how the points of diffraction of economic discourse derive from one another, regulate one another, and are involved with one another (how a point of choice about prices derives from a decision about the concept of value); how the choices made depend on the general constellation in which economic discourse fig­ures (the choice in favour of coinage-sign is linked to the place occupied by the Analysis of Wealth, beside the theory of language (langage), the analysis of representations, mathesis, and the science of order) ; how these choices are linked to the function carried out by economic dis-course in the practice of emergent capitalism, the process of appropri­ation of which it is the object on the part of the bourgeoisie, the role that it can play in the realization of interests and desires. Economic discourse, in the Classical period, is defined by a certain constant way of relating possibilities of systematization interior to a discourse, other discourses that are exterior to it, and a whole non-discursive field of practices, appropriation, interests, and desires.

It should be noted that the strategies thus described are not rooted, anterior to discourse, in the silent depths of a choice that is both preliminary and fundamental. All these groups of discourses that are to be described are not the expression of a world-view that has been coined in the form of words, nor the hypocritical translation of an interest masquerading under the pretext of a theory: the Natural His-tory of the Classical period is more than a confrontation, in the limbo that precedes manifest history, between a (Linnaean) view of a static, ordered, compartmented universe that is subjected from its very beginnings to the classificatory table, and the still confused perception of a nature that is the heir to time, with all the weight of its accidents, and open to the possibility of an evolution; similarly, the Analysis of Wealth is more than. the conflict of interest between a bourgeoisie that has become a land-owning class, expressing its economic or political demands through the Physiocrats, and a commercial bourgeoisie that demands protectionist or liberal measures through the Utilitarists. Nei­ther the Analysis of Wealth, nor Natural History, if one questions them at the level of their existence, their unity, their permanence, an.d their transformations, may be regarded as the sum of these various options. On the contrary, these options must be described as systematically different ways of treating objects of discourse (of delimiting them, regrouping or separating them, linking them together and making them derive from one another), of arranging forms of enunciation (of choosing them, placing them, constituting series, composing them into great rhetorical unities), of manipulating concepts (of giving them rules for their use, inserting them into regional coherences, and thus constituting conceptual architectures). These options are not seeds of discourse (in which discourses are determined in advance and prefigured in a quasi-microscopic form); they are regulated ways (and describable as such) of practising the possibilities of discourse.

But these strategies must not be analysed either as secondary elem­ents that are superposed on a discursive rationality that is, of right, independent of them.. There is not (or, at least, as far as the historical description whose possibility we are tracing here is concerned) a sort of ideal discourse that is both ultimate and timeless, and which choices, extrinsic in origin, have perverted, disturbed, suppressed, or thrust towards a possibly distant future; one must not suppose for example that it holds on nature or on the economy two superposed and intermingled discourses: one that proceeds slowly, accumulating its acquisitions and gradually achieving completion (a true discourse, but one that exists in its pure state only at the teleological confines of history); the other forever disintegrating, recommenced, in perpetual rupture with itself, composed of heterogeneous fragments (a discourse of opinion that history, in the course of time, throws back into the past). There is no natural taxonomy that has been exact, fixism excepted; there is no economy of exchange and use that has been true, without the preferences and illusions of a mercantile bourgeoisie. Classical taxonomy or the Analysis of Wealth, in the form in which they actually existed, and constituted historical figures, involve, in an articulated but indissociable system, objects, statements, concepts, and theoretical choices. And just as one must not relate the formation of objects either to words or to things, nor that of statements either to the pure form of knowledge or to the psychological subject, nor that of concepts either to the structure of ideality or to the succession of ideas, one must not relate the formation of theoretical choices either to a fundamental project or to the secondary play of opinions.

7. REMARKS AND CONSEQUENCES

We must now take up once more a number of remarks to be found in the preceding analyses, reply to some of the questions that they inevit­ably raise, and above all examine the objection that threatens to present itself, for the paradox of the enterprise is now apparent.

At the outset I questioned those pre-established unities according to which one has traditionally divided up the indefinite, repetitive, pro­lific domain of discourse. My intention. was not to deny all value to these unities or to try to forbid their use; it was to show that they required, in order to be defined exactly, a theoretical elaboration. How-ever - and it is here that all the preceding analyses appear so problem­atic - was it necessary to superpose upon these unities, which may in fact have been rather uncertain, another category of less visible, more abstract, and certainly far more problematical unities? But in cases when their historical limits and the specificity of their organization are fairly easy to perceive (witness General Grammar or Natural History), these discursive formations present far more difficult problems of loca­tion than the book, or the oeuvre. Why, then, proceed to such dubious regroupings at the very moment when one is challenging those that once seemed the most obvious? What new domain is one hoping to discover? What hitherto obscure or implicit relations? What transform­ations that have hitherto remained outside the reach of historians? In short, what descriptive efficacy can one accord to these new analyses? I shall try to answer all these questions later. But for the moment I must reply to a question that is primary in relation to these later analyses, and terminal in relation to the preceding ones: on the question of the discursive formations that I have tried to define, can one really speak of unities? Is the re-division that I am proposing capable of individual­izing wholes? And what is the nature of the unity thus discovered or constructed?

We set out with an observation: with the unity of a discourse like that of clinical medicine, or political economy, or Natural History, we are dealing with a dispersion of elements. This dispersion itself - with its gaps, its discontinuities, its entanglements, its incompatibilities, its replacements, and its substitutions - can be described in its uniqueness if one is able to determine the specific rules in accordance with which its objects, statements, concepts, and theoretical options have been formed: if there really is a unity, it does not lie in the visible, horizontal coherence of the elements formed; it resides, well anterior to their formation, in the system that makes possible and governs that forma-tion. But in what way can we speak of unities and systems? How can we affirm that we have properly individualized certain discursive groups or wholes? When in a highly random way we have uncovered, behind the apparently irreducible multiplicity of objects, statements, concepts, and choices, a mass of elements that were no less numerous or dis­persed, but which were heterogeneous with one another? When we have divided these elements into four distinct groups whose mode of articulation has scarcely been defined? And in what sense can one say that all these elements that have been uncovered behind the objects, statements, concepts, and strategies of discourses guarantee the existence of no less individualizable wholes such as oeuvres or books?

1. As we have seen - and there is probably no need to reiterate it - when one speaks of a system of formation, one does not only mean the juxtaposition, coexistence, or interaction of heterogeneous elements (institutions, techniques, social groups, perceptual organizations, relations between various discourses), but also the relation that is established between them - and in a well determined form - by dis-cursive practice. But what is to he done with those four systems or rather those four groups of relations? How can they all define a single system of formation?

In fact, the different levels thus defined are not independent of one another. I have shown that the strategic choices do not emerge directly from a world-view or from a predominance of interests peculiar to this or that speaking subject; but that their very possibility is determined by points of divergence in the group of concepts; I have also shown that concepts were not formed directly against the approximative, confused, and living background of ideas, but on the basis of forms of coexist­ence between statements; and, as we have seen, the modalities of enun­ciation were described on the basis of the position occupied by the subject in relation to the domain of objects of which he is speaking. In this way, there exists a vertical system of dependences: not all the positions of the subject, all the types of coexistence between state­ments, all the discursive strategies, are equally possible, but only those authorized by anterior levels; given, for example, the system of forma-tion that governed, in the eighteenth century, the objects of Natural History (as individualities possessing characters, and therefore classifi­able; as structural elements capable of variation; as visible, analysable surfaces; as a field of continuous, regular differences), certain modal­ities of enunciation are excluded (for example, the decipherment of signs), others are implied (for example, description according to a particular code); given, too, the different positions that the discoursing subject may occupy (as an observing subject with instrumental medi­ation, as a subject selecting out of the perceptual plurality only the elements of the structure, as a subject transcribing these elements into a coded vocabulary, etc.), there are a number of coexistences between the statements that are excluded (as, for example, the erudite reactiva­tion of the already-said, or the exegetic commentary of a sacralized text), others on the other hand that are possible or required (such as the integration of totally or partially analogous statements into a clas­sificatory table). The levels are not free from one another therefore, and are not deployed according to an unlimited autonomy: between the primary differentiation of objects and the formation of discursive strategies there exists a whole hierarchy of relations.

But relations are also established in a reverse direction. The lower levels are not independent of those above them. Theoretical choices exclude or imply, in the statements in which they are made, the forma-tion of certain concepts, that is, certain forms of coexistence between statements: thus in the texts of the Physiocrats, one will not find the same modes of integrating quantitative data and measurements as in the analyses of the Utilitarists. It is not that the Physiocratic option can modify the group of rules that govern the formation of economic concepts in the eighteenth century; but it can implement some of these rules and exclude others and consequently reveal certain concepts (like that, for example, of the net product) that appear nowhere else. It is not the theoretical choice that governs the formation of the concept; but the choice has produced the concept by the mediation of specific rules for the formation of concepts, and by the set of relations that it holds with this level.

2. These systems of formation must not be taken as blocks of immobility, static forms that are imposed on discourse from the out-side, and that define once and for all its characteristics and possibilities. They are not constraints whose origin is to be found in the thoughts of men, or in the play of their representations; but nor are they determin­ations which, formed at the level of institutions, or social or economic relations, transcribe themselves by force on the surface of discourses. These systems - I repeat - reside in discourse itself; or rather (since we are concerned not with its interiority and what it may contain, but with its specific existence and with its conditions) on its frontier, at that limit at which the specific rules that enable it to exist as such are defined. By system of formation, then, I mean a complex group of relations that function as a rule: it lays down what must be related, in a particular discursive practice, for such and such an enunciation to be made, for such and such a concept to be used, for such and such a strategy to be organized. To define a system of formation in its specific individuality is therefore to characterize a discourse or a group of statements by the regularity of a practice.

As a group of rules for a discursive practice, the system of formation is not a stranger to time. It does not concentrate everything that may appear through an age-old series of statements into an initial point that is, at the same time, beginning, origin, foundation, system of axioms, and on the basis of which the events of real history have merely to unfold in a quite necessary way. What it outlines is the system of rules that must be put into operation if such and such an object is to be transformed, such and such a new enumeration appear, such and such a concept he developed, whether metamorphosed or imported, and such and such a strategy he modified - without ever ceasing to belong to this same discourse; and what it also outlines is the system of rules that has to be put into operation if a change in other discourses (in other practices, in institutions, in social relations, and in economic processes) is to be transcribed within a given discourse, thus constitut­ing a new object, giving rise to a new strategy, giving place to new enunciations or new concepts. A discursive formation, then, does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes it for decades or centuries; it determines a regularity proper to temporal processes; it presents the principle of articulation between a series of discursive events and other series of events, transformations, mutations, and pro­cesses. It is not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondence between several temporal series.

This mobility of the system of formation appears in two ways. First at the level of the elements that are being related to one another: these in fact may undergo a number of intrinsic mutations that are integrated into discursive practice without the general form of its regularity being altered; thus, throughout the nineteenth century, criminal juris-prudence, demographic pressure, the demand for labour, the forms of public assistance, the status and juridical conditions of internment, were continually changing; yet the discursive practice of psychiatry continued to establish the same group of relations between these elem­ents; in this way, the system preserved the characteristics of its indi­viduality; through the same laws of formation, new objects appear (new types of individuals, new classes of behaviour are characterized as pathological), new modalities of enunciation are put into operation (quantitative notations and statistical calculations), new concepts are outlined (such as those of degeneracy, perversion, neurosis), and of course new theoretical structures can be built. But, inversely, the dis-cursive practices modify the domains that they relate to one another. It is no use establishing specific relations that can be analysed only at their own level - the effect of these relations is not confined to discourse alone: it is also felt in the elements that they articulate upon one another. The hospital field, for example, did not remain unaffected when clinical discourse was put into relation with the laboratory: the body of rules that governed its working, the status accorded the hos­pital doctor, the function of his observation, the level of analysis that can be carried out in it, were necessarily modified.

3. What are described as 'systems of formation' do not constitute the terminal stage of discourse, if by that term one means the texts (or words) as they appear, with their vocabulary, syntax, logical structure, or rhetorical organization. Analysis remains anterior to this manifest level, which is that of the completed construction: in defining the principle of distributing objects in a discourse, it does not take into account all their connexions, their delicate structure, or their internal sub-divisions; in seeking the law of the dispersion of concepts, it does not take into account all the processes of elaboration, or all the deduct­ive series in which they may figure; if analysis studies the modalities of enunciation, it questions neither the style nor the succession. of the sentences; in short, it leaves the final placing of the text in dotted out-line. But we must be clear on one point: if analysis stands back in relation to this final construction, it is not to turn away from the discourse and to appeal to the silent work of thought; nor is it to turn away from the systematic and to reveal the 'living' disorder of attempts, trials, errors, and new beginnings.

In this respect, the analysis of discursive formations is opposed to many customary descriptions. One is used, in fact, to consider that discourses and their systematic ordering are not only the ultimate state, the final result of a long and often sinuous development involving language (longue) and thought, empirical experience and categories, the lived and ideal necessities, the contingency of events and the play of formal constraints. Behind the visible facade of the system, one posits the rich uncertainty of disorder; and beneath the thin surface of discourse, the whole mass of a largely silent development (devenir): a 'presystematic' that is not of the order of the system; a 'prediscursive' that belongs to an essential silence. Discourse and system produce each other - and conjointly - only at the crest of this immense reserve. What are being analysed here are certainly not the terminal states of discourse; they are the preterminal regularities in relation to which the ultimate state, far from constituting the birth-place of a system, is defined by its variants. Behind the completed system, what is discovered by the analysis of formations is not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet uncaptured state; it is an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple relations. Moreover, these relations cannot be the very web of the text - they are not by nature foreign to discourse. They can certainly be qualified as 'prediscursive', but only if one admits that this prediscursive is still discursive, that is, that they do not specify a thought, or a consciousness, or a group of representations which, a posteriori, and in a way that is never quite necessary, are transcribed into a discourse, but that they characterize certain levels of discourse, that they define rules that are embodied as a particular practice by dis-course. One is not seeking, therefore, to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from the exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the pure recollection of the moment, from superficial multiplicity to profound unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse.