Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Part III The Statement and the Archive

1. DEFINING THE STATEMENT

I suppose that by now we have accepted the risk; that we are now willing, in order to articulate the great surface of discourse, to posit the existence of those somewhat strange, somewhat distant figures that I have called discursive formations; that we have put to one side, not in a definitive way, but for a time and out of methodological rigour, the traditional unities of the book and the ceuvre; that we have ceased to accept as a principle of unity the laws of constructing discourse (wi.th the formal organization that results), or the situation of the speaking subject (with the context and the psychological nucleus that character­ize it); that we no longer relate discourse to the primary ground of experience, nor to the a priori authority of knowledge; but that we seek the rules of its formation in discourse itself. I suppose that we have agreed to undertake these long inquiries into the system of emergence of objects, the system of the appearance and distribution of enunciative modes, the system of the placing and dispersion of concepts, the system of the deployment of strategic choices. I suppose that we are willing to construct such abstract, problematic unities, instead of welcoming those that presented themselves as being more or less perceptually familiar, if not as self-evident realities.

But what, in fact, have I been speaking about so far? What has been the object of my inquiry? And what did I intend to describe?

'Statements' - both in that discontinuity that frees them from all the forms in which one was so ready to allow them to be caught, and in the general, unlimited, apparently formless field of discourse. But I refrained from providing a preliminary definition of the statement. Nor did I try to construct one as I proceeded in order to justify the naivety of my starting-point. Moreover - and this no doubt is the reason for so much unconcern - I wonder whether I have not changed direction on the way; whether I have not replaced my first quest with another; whether, while analysing 'objects' or 'concepts', let alone 'strategies', I was in fact still speaking of statements; whether the four groups of rules by which I characterized a discursive formation really did define groups of statements. Lastly, instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word 'discourse', I believe that I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements; and have I not allowed this same word 'discourse', which should have served as a boundary around the term 'statement', to vary as I shifted my analysis or its point of application, as the statement itself faded. from view?

This, then, is the task that now confronts me: to take up the defin­ition of the statement at its very root. And to see whether that defin­ition really was present in my earlier descriptions; to see whether I really was dealing with the statement in my analysis of discursive formations.

On several occasions I have used the term 'statement', either to speak of a population of statements (as if I were dealing with individuals or isolated events), or in order to distinguish it from the groups that I called 'discourses' (as the part is distinguished from the whole). At first sight, the statement appears as an ultimate, undecomposable element that can be isolated and introduced into a set of relations with other similar elements. A point without a surface, but a point that can be located in planes of division and in specific forms of groupings. A seed that appears on the surface of a tissue of which it is the constituent element. The atom of discourse.

And the problem soon arises: if the statement really is the elem­entary unit of discourse, what does it consist of? What are its distinctive features? What boundaries must one accord to it? Is this unity identical with that to which logicians have given the term 'proposition', and that which grammarians call a 'sentence', or that which 'analysts' try to map by the term 'speech act'? What place does it occupy among all those unities that the investigation of language (langage) has already revealed? (Even though the theory of these unities is so often incomplete, on account of the difficulty of the problems that they present, and the difficulty in many cases of delimiting them with any degree of rigour.)

I do not think that the necessary and sufficient condition of a state-ment is the presence of a defined propositional structure, or that one can speak of a statement only when there is a proposition. In fact, one can have two perfectly distinct statements, referring to quite different discursive groupings, when one finds only one proposition, possessing only one value, obeying only one group of laws for its construction, and involving the same possibilities of use. 'No one heard' and 'It is true that no one heard' are indistinguishable from a logical point of view, and cannot be regarded as two different propositions. But in so many statements, these two formations are not equivalent or inter-changeable. They cannot occupy the same place on the plane of dis-course, nor can they belong to exactly the same group of statements. If one finds the formulation 'No one heard' in the first line of a novel, we know, until a new order emerges, that it is an observation made either by the author, or by a character (aloud or in the form of an interior monologue); if one finds the second formulation, 'It is true that no one heard', one can only be in a group of statements constituting an interior monologue, a silent discussion with. oneself, or a frag­ment of dialogue, a group of questions and answers. In each case, there is the same propositional structure, but there are distinct enunciative characteristics. There may, on the other hand, be complex and doubled propositional forms, or, on the contrary, fragmentary, incomplete propositions, when one is quite obviously dealing with a simple, com­plete, autonomous statement (even if it is part of group of other state­ments): the example 'The present king of France is bald' is well known (it can be analysed from a logical point of view only if on.e accepts, in the form of a single statement, two distinct propositions, each of which may be true or false on its own account), or again there is a proposition like 'I am lying', which can be true only in relation to an assertion on a lower level. The criteria by which one can define the identity of a proposition, distinguish several of them beneath the unity of a formulation, characterize its autonomy or its completion are not valid when one comes to describe the particular unity of a statement.

And what of the sentence? Should we not accept an equivalence between sentence and statement? Wherever there is a grammatically isolable sentence, one can recognize the existence of an independent statement; but, on the other hand, one cannot speak of statement when, beneath the sentence itself, one reaches the level of its constitu­ents. It would he pointless to object, against such an equivalence, that some statements may be composed, outside the canonical form of subject-copula-predicate, of a simple nominal syntagma ('That man!') or an adverb ('Absolutely'), or a personal pronoun ('You!'). For the grammarians themselves recognize such formulations as independent sentences, even if those formulations have been obtained through a series of transformations on the basis of the subject-predicate schema. Moreover: they recognize as 'acceptable' sentences groups of linguistic elements that have not been correctly constructed, providing they are interpretable; on the other hand, they accord the status of grammatical sentences to interpretable groups on condition however that they are correctly formed. With so broad - an.d, in a sense, so lax - a definition of the sentence, it is difficult to see how one is to recognize sentences that are not statements, or statements that are not sentences.

Yet the equivalence is far from being a total one; and it is relatively easy to cite statements that do not correspond to the linguistic structure of sentences. When one finds in a Latin grammar a series of words arranged in a column: amo, amas, amat, one is dealing not with a sen­tence, but with the statement of the different personal inflexions of the present indicative of the verb amare. One may find this example debat­able; one may say that it is a mere artifice of presentation, that this statement is an elliptical, abbreviated sentence, spatialized in a relatively unusual mode, that should he read as the sentence 'The present indica­tive of the verb amare is amo for the first person', etc. Other examples, in any case, are less ambiguous: a classificatory table of the botanical species is made up of statements, not sentences (Linnaeus's Genera Plantarum is a whole book of statements, in which one can recognize only a small number of sentences); a genealogical tree, an accounts book, the calculations of a trade balance are statements; where are the sentences? One can go further: an equation of the nth degree, or the algebraic formula of the law of refraction must be regarded as state­ments: and although they possess a highly rigorous grammaticality (since they are made up of symbols whose meaning is determined by rules of usage, and whose succession is governed by laws of construc­tion), this grammaticality cannot be judged by the same criteria that, in a natural language (Iangue), make it possible to define an acceptable, or interpretable sentence. Lastly, a graph, a growth curve, an age pyramid, a distribution could are all statements: any sentences that may accom­pany them are merely interpretation or commentary; they are in no way an equivalent: this is proved by the fact that, in a great many cases, only an. infinite number of sentences could equal all the elements that are explicitly formulated in this sort of statement. It would not appear to be possible, therefore, to define a statement by the grammatical characteristics of the sentence.

One last possibility remains: at first sight, the most likely of all. Can one not say that there is a statement wherever one can recognize and isolate an act of formulation - something like the speech act referred to by the English analysts? This term does not, of course, refer to the material act of speaking (aloud or to oneself) or of writing (by hand or typewriter); nor does it refer to the intention of the individual who is speaking (the fact that he wants to convince someone else, to be obeyed, to discover the solution to a problem, or to communicate information) ; nor does it refer to the possible result of what he has said (whether he has convinced someone or aroused his suspicion; whether he was listened to and whether his orders were carried out; whether his prayer was heard); what one is referring to is the operation that has been carried out by the formula itself, in its emergence: promise, order, decree, contract, agreement, observation. The speech act is not what took place just prior to the moment when the statement was made (in the author's thought or intentions); it is not what might have hap­pened, after the event itself, in. its wake, and the consequences that it gave rise to; it is what occurred by the very fact that a statement was made - and precisely this statement (and no other) in specific circum­stances. Presumably, therefore, one individualization of statements refers to the same criteria as the location of acts of formulation: each act is embodied in a statement each statement contains one of those acts. They exist through one another in an exact reciprocal relationship.

Yet such a correlation does not stand up to examination. For one thing, more than a statement is often required to effect a speech act: an oath, a prayer, a contract, a promise, or a demonstration usually require a certain number of distinct formulas or separate sentences: it would be difficult to challenge the right of each of these formulas and sentences to be regarded as a statement on the pretext that they are all imbued with one and the same speech act. In that case, it might be said that the act itself does not remain the same throughout the series of statements; that in a prayer there are as many limited, successive, and juxtaposed acts of prayer as demands formulated by distinct statements; and that in a promise there are as many engagements as sequences that can be individualized into separate statements. But one cannot be satisfied with this answer: first because the act of formulation would no longer serve to define the statement, but, on the contrary, the act of formula-tion would be defined by the statement - which raises problems, and requires criteria of individualization. Moreover, certain speech acts can be regarded as complete in their particular unity only if several state­ments have been made, each in its proper place. These acts are not constituted, therefore, by the series or sum of these statements, by their necessary juxtaposition; they cannot be regarded as being present whole and entire in the least of them, and as renewing themselves with each one. So one cannot establish a hi-univocal relation between the group of statements and that of speech acts either.

When one wishes to individualize statements, one cannot therefore accept unreservedly any of the models borrowed from grammar, logic, or 'analysis'. In all three cases, one realizes that the criteria proposed are too numerous and too heavy, that they limit the extent of the statement, and that although the statement sometimes takes on the forms described and adjusts itself to them exactly, it does not always do so: one finds statements lacking in legitimate propositional structure; one finds statements where one cannot recognize a sentence; one finds more statements that one can isolate speech acts. As if the statement were more tenuous, less charged with determinations, less strongly structured, more omnipresent, too, than all these figures; as if it had fewer features, and ones less difficult to group together; but as if, by that very fact, it rejected all possibility of describing anything. And this is all the more so, in that it is difficult to see at what level it should be situated, and by what method it should be approached: for all the analyses mentioned above, there is never more than a support, or acci­dental substance: in logical analysis, it is what is left when the prop­ositional structure has been extracted and defined; for grammatical analysis, it is the series of linguistic elements in which one may or may not recognize the form of a sentence; for the analysis of speech acts, it appears as the visible body in which they manifest themselves. In rela­tion to all these descriptive approaches, it plays the role of a residual element, of a mere fact, of irrelevant raw material.

Must we admit in the end that the statement cannot possess a char­acter of its own and that it cannot be adequately defined, in so far as it is, for all analyses of language (langage), the extrinsic material on the basis of which they determine their own object? Must we admit that any series of signs, figures, marks, or traces - whatever their organiza­tion or probability may be - is enough to constitute a statement; and that it is the role of grammar to say whether or not it is a sentence, the role of logic to decide whether or not it contains a propositional form, the role of Analysis to determine what speech act it may embody? In which case, we would have to admit that there is a statement whenever a number of signs are juxtaposed - or even, perhaps - when there is a single sign. The threshold of the statement is the threshold of the existence of signs. Yet even here, things are not so simple, and the meaning of a term like `the existence of signs' requires elucidation. What does one mean when one says that there are signs, and that it is enough for there to be signs for there to he a statement? What special status should be given to that verb to be?

For it is obvious that statements do not exist in the same sense in which a language (longue) exists, and, with that language, a collection of signs defined by their contrasting characteristics and their rules of use; a language in fact is never given in itself, in its totality; it could only he so in a secondary way, in the oblique form of a description that would take it as its object; the signs that make up its elements are forms that are imposed upon statements and control them from within. If there were no statements, the language (longue) would not exist; but no statement is indispensable for a language to exist (and one can always posit, in place of any statement, another statement that would in no way modify the language). The language exists only as a system for constructing possible statements; but in another respect, it exists only as a (more or less exhaustive) description obtained from a collection of real statements. Language (longue) and statement are not at the same level of existence; and one cannot say that there are statement in the same way as one says that there are languages (longues). But is it enough, then, that the signs of a language constitute a statement, if they were produced (articulated, drawn, made, traced) in one way or another, if they appeared in a moment of time and in a point in space, if the voice that spoke them or the gesture that formed them gave them the dimen­sions of a material existence? Can the letters of the alphabet written by me haphazardly on to a sheet of paper, as an example of what is not a statement, can the lead characters used for printing books - and one cannot deny their materiality, which has space and volume - can these signs, spread out, visible, manipulable, be reasonably regarded as statements?

When looked at more closely, however, these two examples (the lead characters and the signs that I wrote down on the sheet of paper) are seen to be not quite superposable. This pile of printer's characters, which I can hold in my hand, or the letters marked on the keyboard of a typewriter are not statements: at most they are tools with which one can write statements. On the other hand, what are the letters that I write down haphazardly on to a sheet of paper, just as they come to mind, and to show that they cannot, in their disordered state, constitute a statement? What figure do they form? Are they not a table of letters chosen in a contingent way, the statement of an alphabetical series governed by other laws than those of chance? Similarly, the table of random numbers that statisticians sometimes use is a series of numer­ical symbols that are not linked together by any syntactical structure; and yet that series is a statement: that of a group of figures obtained by procedures that eliminate everything that might increase the prob-ability of the succeeding issues. Let us look at the example again: the keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters. So we are presented with a number of negative consequences: a regular linguistic construction is not required in order to form a statement (this state-ment may be made up of a series possessing a minimal probability) ; but neither is it enough to have any material effectuation of linguistic elements, any emergence of signs in time and space, for a statement to appear and to begin to exist. The statement exists therefore neither in the same way as a language (longue) (although it is made up of signs that are definable in their individuality only within a natural or artificial linguistic system), nor in the same way as the object presented to perception (although it is always endowed with a certain materiality, and can always he situated in accordance with spatio-temporal coordinates).

This is not the place to answer the general question of the statement, but the problem can be clarified: the statement is not the same kind of unit as the sentence, the proposition, or the speech act; it cannot be referred therefore to the same criteria; but neither is it the same kind of unit as a material object, with its limits and independence. In its way of being unique (neither entirely linguistic, nor exclusively material), it is indispensable if we want to say whether or not there is a sentence, proposition, or speech act; and whether the sentence is correct (or acceptable, or interpretable), whether the proposition is legitimate and well constructed, whether the speech act fulfils its requirements, and was in fact carried out. We must not seek in the statement a unit that is either long or short, strongly and weakly structured, but one that is caught up, like the others, in a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus. It is not so much one element among others, a division that can he located at a certain level of analysis, as a function that operates vertically in relation to these various units, and which enables one to say of a series of signs whether or not they are present in it. The statement is not therefore a structure (that is, a group of relations between variable elements, thus authorizing a possibly infinite number of concrete models); it is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intu­ition, whether or not they 'make sense', according to what rule they follow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation (oral or written). One should not be surprised, then, if one has failed to find structural criteria of unity for the statement; this is because it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space.

It is this function that we must now describe as such, that is, in its actual practice, its conditions, the rules that govern it, and the field in which it operates.

2. THE ENUNCIATIVE FUNCTION

It is useless therefore to look for the statement among unitary groups of signs. The statement is neither a syntagma, nor a rule of construc­tion, nor a canonic form of succession and permutation; it is that which enables such groups of signs to exist, and enables these rules or forms to become manifest. But although it enables them to exist, it does so in a special way - a way that must not be confused with the existence of signs as elements of a language (longue), or with the material existence of those marks that occupy a fragment of space or last for a variable length of time. It is this special mode of existence, characteristic of every series of signs, providing it is stated, that we must now examine.

(a) So let us take once again the example of those signs made or drawn in a defined materiality, and grouped in a particular way, which may or may not be arbitrary, but which, in any case, is not grammat­ical: the keyboard of a typewriter, or a handful of printer's characters. All that is required is that the signs be given, that I copy them on to a sheet of paper (in the same order in which they appear, but without producing a word) for a statement to emerge: the statement of the letters of the alphabet in an order that makes the typing of them easier, and the statement of a random group of letters. What has happened, then, that a statement should have been made? What can the second group possess that is not possessed by the first? Reduplication, the fact that it is a copy? Certainly not, since the keyboards of typewriters all copy a certain model and are not, by that very fact, statements. The intervention of a subject? This answer is inadequate for two reasons: it is not enough that the reiteration of a series be due to the initiative of an individual for it to be transformed, by that very fact, into a state-ment; and, in any case, the problem does not lie in the cause or origin of the reduplication, but in the special relation between the two identi­cal series. The second series is not a statement because and only because a hi-univocal relation can be established between each of its elements in the first series (this relation characterizes either the fact of duplication if it is simply a copy, or the exactitude of the statement if one has in fact crossed the threshold of enunciation; but it does not allow us to define this threshold and the very fact of the statement). A series of signs will become a statement on condition that it possesses `something else' (which may be strangely similar to it, and almost identical as in the example chosen), a specific relation that concerns itself - and not its cause, or its elements.

It may be objected that there is nothing enigmatic about this rela­tion; that, on the contrary, it is a very familiar one, which is constantly being analysed: that, in fact, it concerns the relation of the signifier (significant) to the signified (signifie), of the name to what it designates; the relation of the sentence to its meaning; the relation of the prop­osition to its referent (referent). But I believe that one can show that the relation of the statement to what it states is not superposable on any of these relations.

The statement, even if reduced to a nominal syntagma ('The boat!'), even if it is reduced to a proper noun ('Peter!'), does not have the same relation with what it states as the name with what it designates or signifies. The name or noun is a linguistic element that may occupy different places in grammatical groups: its meaning is defined by its rules of use (whether these concern individuals who may be validly designated by it, or syntactical structures in which it may correctly participate); a noun is defined by its possibility of recurrence. A state-ment exists outside any possibility of reappearing; and the relation that it possesses with what it states is not identical with a group of rules of use. It is a very special relation: and if in these conditions an identical formulation reappears, with the same words, substantially the same names - in fact, exactly the same sentence - it is not necessarily the same statement.

Nor should the relation between a statement and what it states be confused with the relation between a proposition and its referent. We know that logicians say that a proposition like The golden mountain is in California' cannot be verified because it has no referent: its negation is therefore neither more nor less true than its affirmation. Should we say similarly that a statement refers to nothing if the proposition, to which it lends existence, has no referent? Rather the reverse. We should say not that the absence of a referent brings with it the absence of a correlate for the statement, but that it is the correlate of the statement - that to which it refers, not only what is said, but also what it speaks of, its 'theme' - which makes it possible to say whether or not the prop­osition has a referent: it alone decides this in a definitive way. Let us suppose in fact that the formulation 'The golden mountain is in Cali­fornia' is found not in a geography book, nor in a travel book, but in a novel, or in some fictional context or other, one could still accord it a value of truth or error (according to whether the imaginary world to which it refers does or does not authorize such a geological and geo-graphical fantasy). We must know to what the statement refers, what is its space of correlations, if we are to say whether a proposition has or has not a referent. 'The present king of France is bald' lacks a referent only if one supposes that the statement refers to the world of con-temporary historical information. The relation of the proposition to the referent cannot serve as a model or as a law for the relation of the statement to what it states. The latter relation not only does not belong to the same level as the former, but it is anterior to it.

Nor is it superposable to the relation that may exist between a sen­tence and its meaning. The gap between these two forms of relation appears clearly in the case of two famous sentences that are meaning-less, in spite of their perfectly correct grammatical structure (as in the example: 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously'). In fact, to say that a sentence like this is meaningless presupposes that one has already excluded a number of possibilities - that it describes a dream, that it is part of a poetic text, that it is a coded message, that it is spoken by a drug addict - and that one assumes it to be a certain type of statements that must refer, in a very definite way, to some visible reality. The relation of a sentence with its meaning resides within a specific, well-stabilized enunciative relation. Moreover, even if these sentences are taken at an enunciative level at which they are meaningless, they are not, as statements, deprived of correlations: there are those that enable one to say, for example, that ideas are never either coloured or colour-less, and therefore that the sentence is meaningless (and these correl­ations concern a level of reality in which ideas are invisible, and in which colours can he seen, etc.); there are also those correlations that validate the sentence in question as a mention of a type of correct syntactical organization that was also meaningless (and these correl­ations concern the level of the language (langue), with its laws and properties). A sentence cannot be non-significant; it refers to something, by virtue of the fact that it is a statement.

How, then, can we define this relation that characterizes the state-ment as statement - a relation that seems to be implicitly presupposed by the sentence or the proposition, and which is anterior to it? How can we disentangle it from those relations of meaning or those values of truth, with which it is usually confused? Any statement, as simple a statement as one can imagine, does not have as its correlate an individual or a particular object that is designated by this or that word in the sentence: in the case of a statement like `The golden mountain is in California', the correlate is not the formation, real or imaginary, possible or absurd, that is designated by the nominal syntagma that serves as the subject. But nor is the correlate of the statement a state of things or a relation capable of verifying the proposition (in the example chosen, this would be the spatial inclusion of a particular mountain in a par­ticular region). On the other hand, what might he defined as the correlate of the statement is a group of domains in which such objects may appear and to which such relations may be assigned: it would, for example, be a domain of material objects possessing a certain number of observable physical properties, relations of perceptible size - or, on the contrary, it would he domain of fictitious objects, endowed with arbitrary properties (even if they have a certain constancy and a certain coherence), without any authority of experimental or perceptive veri­fication; it would be a domain of spatial and geographical localizations, with coordinates, distances, relations of proximity and of inclusion - or, on the contrary, a domain of symbolic appurtenances and secret kinships; it would be a domain of objects that exist at the same moment and on the same time-scale as the statement is formulated, or it would be a domain of objects that belongs to a quite different pres­ent - that indicated and constituted by the statement itself, and not that to which the statement also belongs. A statement is not confronted (face to face, as it were) by a correlate - or the absence of a correlate - as a proposition has (or has not) a referent, or as a proper noun designates someone (or no one). It is linked rather to a 'referential' that is made up not of 'things', 'facts', 'realities', or 'beings', but of laws of possibil­ity, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it. The referential of the statement forms the place, the condition, the field of emergence, the authority to differentiate between individuals or objects, states of things and relations that are brought into play by the statement itself; it defines the possibilities of appearance and delimitation of that which gives meaning to the sentence, a value as truth to the proposition. It is this group that characterizes the enunciative level of the formulation, in contrast to its grammatical and logical levels: through the relation with these various domains of possibility the statement makes of a syntagma, or a series of symbols, a sentence to which one may or may not ascribe a meaning, a proposition that may or may not be accorded a value as truth.

One can see in any case that the description of this enunciative level can be performed neither by a formal analysis, nor by a semantic investigation, nor by verification, but by the analysis of the relations between the statement and the spaces of differentiation, in which the statement itself reveals the differences.

(b) A statement also differs from any series of linguistic elements by virtue of the fact that it possesses a particular relation with a subject. We must now define the nature of this relation, and, above all, distinguish it from other relations with which it might be confused.

We must not, in fact, reduce the subject of the statement to the first-person grammatical elements that are present within the sentence. First because the subject of th.e sentence is not within the linguistic syntagma; secondly because a statement that does not involve a first person nevertheless has a subject; lastly and above all, all statements that have a fixed grammatical form (whether in the first or second person) do not have the same type of relation with the subject of the statement. It is easy to see that this relation is not the same in a state-ment of the type 'Night is falling', and 'Every effect has a cause'; while in the case of a statement of the type 'Longtemps, je me Buis couche de bonne heure' ('For a long time I used to go to bed early'), the relation to the enunciating subject is not the same if one hears it spoken in the course of a conversation, and if one reads it at the beginning of Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu.

Is not this subject exterior to the sentence quite simply the indi­vidual who spoke or wrote those words? As we know, there can be no signs without someone, or at least something, to emit them. For a series of signs to exist, there must - in accordance with the system of causality - be an 'author' or a transmitting authority. But this `author' is not identical with the subject of the statement; and the relation of production that he has with the formulation is not superposable to the relation that unites the enunciating subject and what he states. Let us ignore the over-simple case of a group of signs that have been materi­ally fashioned or traced: their production implies an author even though there is neither a statement nor a subject of a statement. One might also mention, by way of showing the dissociation between the transmitter of signs and the subject of a statement, the case of a text read by a third person, or that of an actor speaking his part. But these are extreme cases. Generally speaking, it would seem, at first sight at least, that the subject of the statement is precisely he who has produced the various elements, with the intention of conveying meaning. Yet things are not so simple. In a novel, we know that the author of the formulation is that real individual whose name appears on the title page of the book (we are still faced with the problem of the dialogue, and sentences purporting to express the thoughts of a character; we are still faced with the problem of texts published under a pseudonym: and we know all the difficulties that these duplications raise for practi­tioners of interpretative analysis when they wish to relate these formu­lations, en bloc, to the author of the text, to what he wanted to say, to what he thought, in short, to that great silent, hidden, uniform discourse on which they build that whole pyramid of different levels); but, even apart from those authorities of formulation that are not iden­tical with the individual/author, the statements of the novel do not have the same subject when they provide, as if from the outside, the historical and spatial setting of th.e story, when they describe things as they would be seen by an anonymous, invisible, neutral individual who moves magically among the characters of the novel, or when they provide, as if by an immediate, internal decipherment, the verbal version of what is silently experienced by a character. Although the author is the same in each case, although he attributes them to no one other than himself, although he does not invent a supplementary link between what he is himself and the text that one is reading, these statements do not presuppose the same characteristics for the enunciat­ing subject; they do not imply the same relation between this subject and what is being stated.

It might be said that the often quoted example of the fictional text has no conclusive validity; or rather that it questions the very essence of literature, and not the status the subject of statements in general. According to this view, it is in the nature of literature that the author should appear to be absent, conceal himself within it, delegate his authority, or divide himself up; and one should not draw a general conclusion from this dissociation that the subject of the statement is distinct in everything - in nature, status, function, and identity - from the author of the formulation. Yet this gap is not confined to literature alone. It is absolutely general in so far as the subject of the statement is a particular function, but is not necessarily the same from one state-ment to another; in so far as it is an empty function, that can be filled by virtually any individual when he formulates the statement; and in so far as one and the same individual may occupy in turn, in the same series of statements, different positions, and assume the role of different subjects. Take the example of a mathematical treatise. In the sentence in the preface in which one explains why this treatise was written, in what circumstances, in response to what unsolved prob­lems, or with what pedagogical aim in view, using what methods, after what attempts and failures, the position of the enunciative subject can be occupied only by the author, or authors, of the formulation: the conditions of individualization of the subject are in fact very strict, very numerous, and authorize in this case only one possible subject. On the other hand, if in the main body of the treatise, one meets a proposition like 'Two quantities equal to a third quantity are equal to each other', the subject of the statement is the absolutely neutral position, indiffer­ent to time, space, and circumstances, identical in any linguistic sys­tem, and in any code of writing or symbolization, that any individual may occupy when affirming such a proposition. Moreover, sentences like 'We have already shown that . .' necessarily involve statements of precise contextual conditions that were not implied by the preceding formulation: the position is then fixed within a domain constituted by a finite group of statements; it is localized in a series of enunciative events that must already have occurred; it is established in a demonstra­tive time whose earlier stages are never lost, and which do not need therefore to be begun again and repeated identically to be made pres­ent once more (a mention is enough to reactivate them in their ori­ginal validity); it is determined by the prior existence of a number of effective operations that need not have been performed by one and the same individual (he who is speaking now), but which rightfully belong to the enunciating subject, which are at his disposal, and of which he may avail himself when necessary. The subject of such a statement will be defined by these requisites and possibilities taken together; and he will not be described as an individual who has really carried out certain operations, who lives in an unbroken, never forgot-ten time, who has interiorized, in the horizon of his consciousness, a whole group of true propositions, and who retains, in the living pres­ent of his thought, their potential reappearance (this is merely, in the case of individuals, the psychological, 'lived' aspect of their position as enunciating subjects).

Similarly, one might describe the specific position of the enunciat­ing subject in sentences like 'I call straight any series of points that or 'Let there be a finite series of any elements'; in each case the position of the subject is linked to the existence of an operation that is both determined and present; in each case, the subject of the statement is also the subject of the operation (he who establishes the definition of a straight line is also he who states it; he who posits the existence of a finite series is also, and at the same time, he who states it); and in each case, the subject links, by means of this operation and the statement in which it is embodied, his statement as his own law). There is a differ­ence however: in the first case, what is stated is a convention of language (langage) - of that language that the enunciating subject must use, and within. which he is defined: the enunciating subject and what is stated are therefore at the same level (whereas for a formal analysis a statement like this one implies the difference of level proper to meta-language); in the second case, on the other hand, the enunciating subject brings into existence outside himself an object that belongs to a previously defined domain, whose laws of possibility have already been articulated, and whose characteristics precede the enunciation that posits it. We saw above that the position of the enunciating subject is not always identical in the affirmation of a true proposition; we now see that it is also not identical when an operation is carried out within the statement itself.

So the subject of the statement should not he regarded as identical with the author of the formulation - either in substance, or in function. He is not in fact the cause, origin, or starting-point of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence; nor is it that mean­ingful intention which, silently anticipating words, orders them like the visible body of its intuition; it is not the constant, motionless, unchanging focus of a series of operations that are manifested, in turn, on the surface of discourse through the statements. It is a particular, vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals; but, instead of being defined once and for all, and maintaining itself as such throughout a text, a book, or an oeuvre, this place varies - or rather i.t is variable enough to he able either to persevere, unchanging, through several sentences, or to alter with each one. It is a dimension that characterizes a whole formulation qua statement. It is one of the charac­teristics proper to the enunciative function and enables one to describe it. If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be called `state-ment', it is not therefore because, one day, someone happened to speak them or put them into some concrete form of writing; it is because the position of the subject can be assigned. To describe a formulation qua statement does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to) ; but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.

(c) The third characteristic of the enunciative function: it cannot operate without the existence of an associated domain. This makes the statement something other, something more, than a mere collection of signs, which, in order to exist, need only a material base - a writing surface, sound, malleable material, the hollowed incision of a trace. But this also, and above all, distinguishes it from the sentence and the proposition.

Take a group of words or symbols. In order to decide whether they constitute a grammatical unit like the sentence or a logical unit like the proposition, it is necessary, and enough, to determine the rules accord-ing to which it was constructed. 'Peter arrived yesterday' forms a sen­tence, but 'Yesterday arrived Peter' does not; A + B = C + D constitutes a proposition, but ABC + = D does not. Only an examination of the elements and of their distribution, in reference to the system - natural or artificial - of the language (longue) enables us to distinguish between what is and what is not a proposition, between what is a sentence and what is merely an accumulation of words. Moreover, this examination is enough to determine to what type of grammatical structure the sentence in question belongs (affirmative sentence, in the past tense, containing a nominal subject, etc.), or to what type of proposition the series of signs in question belongs (an equivalence between two add­itions). One can even conceive of a sentence or a proposition that is 'self-determining', that requires no other sentence or proposition to serve as a context, no other associated sentences or propositions: that such a sentence or proposition would, in such conditions, be useless and unusable, does not mean that one would not be able to recognize it, even in its singularity.

One could no doubt make a number of objections to this. One might say, for example, that a proposition can be established and individual­ized as such only if one knows the system of axioms that it obeys; do not those definitions, those rules, those conventions of writing form an associated field inseparable from the proposition (similarly, the rules of grammar, implicitly at work in the competence of the subject, are necessary if one is to recognize a sentence, and a sentence of a certain type)? It should be noted however that this group - actual or potential - does not belong to the same level as the proposition or the sentence: but that it has a bearing on their possible elements, succession, and distribution. The group is not associated with them: it is presupposed by them. One might also object that many (non-tautological.) proposi­tions cannot be verified on the basis of their rules of construction alone, and that recourse to the referent is needed if one is to decide whether they are true or false: but true or false, a proposition. remains a proposition, and it is not recourse to the referent that decides whether or not it is a proposition. The same goes for sentences; in many cases, they can yield their meaning only in relation to the context (whether they contain `deictic' elements that refer to a concrete situation; or make use of first - or second-person pronouns that designate the speaking subject and hi.s interlocutors; or make use of pronominal elements or connecting particles that refer to earlier or later sentences); but the fact that its meaning cannot be completed does not prevent the sentence from being grammatically complete and autonomous. Cer­tainly, one is not very sure what a group of words like 'I'll tell you that tomorrow' means; in any case, one can neither date this 'tomorrow', nor name the interlocutors, nor guess what is to be said. Nevertheless, it is a perfectly delimited sentence, obeying the rules of construction of the language (longue) in which it is written. Lastly, one might object that, without a context, it is sometimes difficult to define the structure of a sentence ('I shall never know if h.e is dead' may be construed: 'I shall never know whether or n.ot he is dead' or 'I shall never be informed of his death when this even occurs'). But this ambiguity is perfectly definable, simultaneous possibilities can be posited that belong to the structure proper of the sentence. Generally speaking, one can say that a sentence or a proposition - even when isolated, even divorced from the natural context that could throw light on to its meaning, even. freed or cut off from all the elements to which, implicitly or not, it refers - always remains a sentence or a proposition and can. always be recognized as such.

On the other hand, the enunciative function - and this shows that it is not simply a construction of previously existing elements - cannot operate on a sentence or proposition in isolation. It is not enough to say a sentence, i.t is not even enough to say it in a particular relation to a field of objects or in a particular relation to a subject, for a statement to exist: it must be related to a whole adjacent field. Or rather, since this is not some additional relation. that is superimposed on the others, one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation. A statement always has borders peopled by other statements. These borders are not what is usually meant by 'context' - real or verbal - that is, all the situational or linguistic elements, taken together, that motivate a formulation and determine its meaning. They are distinct from such a 'context' precisely in so far as they make it possible: the contextual relation between one sentence and those before an.d after it is not the same in the case of a novel and in that of a treatise in physics; the contextual relation between a formulation and the objective environment is not the same in a conversation and in the account of an experiment. It is against the background of a more general relation between the formulations, against the background of a whole verbal network, that the effect of context may he determined. Nor are these borders identical with the various texts and sentences that the subject may be conscious of when he speaks; again they are more extensive than such a psychological setting; and to a certain extent they determine that setting, for accord-ing to the position, status, and role of one formulation among others - according to whether it belongs to the field of literature or as an isolated remark, whether it is part of a narrative or the account of a demonstration - the way in which other statements are present in the mind of the subject will not he the same: neither the same level, nor the same form of linguistic experience, of verbal memory, of reference to what has already been said, is operating in each case. The psychological halo of a formulation is controlled from afar by the arrangement of the enunciative field.

The associated field that turns a sentence or a series of signs into a statement, and which provides them with a particular context, a spe­cific representative content, forms a complex web. It is made up first of all by the series of other formulations within which the statement appears and forms one element (the network of spoken formulations that make up a conversation, the architecture of a demonstration, hound on the one side by its premises and on the other by its conclu­sion, the series of affirmations that make up a narrative). The associated field is also made up of all the formulations to which the statement refers (implicitly or not), either by repeating them, modifying them, or adapting them, or by opposing them, or by commenting on them;

there can be no statement that in one way or another does not reactual­ize others (ritual elements in a narrative; previously accepted proposi­tions in a demonstration; conventional sentences in a conversation). The associated field is also made up of all the formulations whose subsequent possibility is determined by the statement, and which may follow the statement as its consequence, its natural successor, or its conversational retort (an order does not open up the same enunciative possibilities as the propositions of an axiomatic or the beginning of a narrative). Lastly, the associated field is made up of all the formulations whose status the statement in question shares, among which it takes its place without regard to linear order, with which it will fade away, or with which, on the contrary, it will be valued, preserved, sacralized, and offered, as a possible object, to a future discourse (a statement is not dissociable from the status that it may receive as `literature', or as an unimportant remark that is barely worthy of being forgotten, or as a scientific truth valid for all time, or as prophetic words, etc.). Generally speaking, one can say that a sequence of linguistic elements is a state-ment only if it is immersed in an enunciative field, in which it then appears as a unique element.

The statement is not the direct projection on to the plane of language (langage) of a particular situation or a group of representations. It is not simply the manipulation by a speaking subject of a number of elements and linguistic rules. At the very outset, from the very root, the state-ment is divided up into an enunciative field in which it has a place and a status, which arranges for its possible relations with the past, and which opens up for it a possible future. Every statement is specified in this way: there is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement; but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriv­ing support from them and distinguishing itself from them: it is always part of a network of statements, in which it has a role, however minimal it may be, to play. Whereas grammatical con­struction needs only elements and rules in order to operate; whereas one might just conceive of a language (longue) - an artificial one, of course - whose only purpose is the construction of a single sentence; whereas the alphabet, the rules of construction and trans-formation of a formal system being given, one can perfectly well define the first proposition of this language (langage), the same can-not be said of the statement. There is no statement that does not presuppose others; there is no statement that is not surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects of series and succession, a distribution of functions and roles. If one can speak of a statement, it is because a sentence (a proposition) figures at a definite point, with a specific position, in an enunciative network that extends beyond it.

Against this background of enunciative coexistence, there stand out, at an autonomous and describable level, the grammatical relations between sentences, the logical relations between propositions, the metalinguistic relations between an object language and one that defines the rules, the rhetorical relations between groups (or elements) of sentences. It is permissible, of course, to analyse all these relations without taking as one's theme the enunciative field itself, that is, the domain of coexistence in which the enunciative function operates. But they can exist and are analysable only to the extent that these sentences have been 'enunciated'; in other words, to the extent that they are deployed in an enunciative field that allows them to follow one another, order one another, coexist with one another, and play roles in relation to one another. Far from being the principle of individualiza­tion of groups of 'signifiers' (the meaningful `atom', the minimum on the basis of which there is meaning), the statement is that which situates these meaningful units in a space in which they breed and multiply.

(d) Lastly, for a sequence of linguistic elements to be regarded and analysed as a statement, it must fulfil a fourth condition: it must have a material existence. Could one speak of a statement if a voice had not articulated it, if a surface did not bear its signs, if it had not become embodied in a sense-perceptible element, and if it had not left some trace - if only for an instant - in someone's memory or in some space? Could one speak of a statement as an ideal, silent figure? The statement is always given through some material medium, even if that medium is concealed, even if it is doomed to vanish as soon as it appears. And the statement not only needs this materiality; its materiality is not given to it, in addition, once all its determinations have been fixed: it is partly made up of this materiality. Even if a sentence is composed of the same words, bears exactly the same meaning, and preserves the same syn-tactical and semantic identity, it does not constitute the same statement if it is spoken by someone in the course of a conversation, or printed in a novel; if it was written one day centuries ago, and if it now reappears in an oral formulation. The coordinates and the material status of the statement are part of its intrinsic characteristics. That is an obvious fact. Or almost. For as soon as one examines it a little more closely, things begin to blur and the problems increase.

Of course, it is tempting to say that if a statement is characterized, partly at least, by its material status, and if its identity is susceptible to a modification of that status, the same can be said of sentences and propositions: the materiality of signs is not, in fact, entirely indifferent to grammar or even to logic. We know what theoretical problems are presented to logic by the material constancy of the symbols used (how to define the identity of a symbol through the various substances in which it may be embodied and the variations of form that it can tolerate? How to recognize it and make certain that it is the same, if it must be defined as 'a concrete physical form?'); we know too what problems are presented to logic by the very notion of a series of sym-bols (what do 'precede' and 'follow' mean? Come 'before' and 'after'? In what space is such an order situated?). Much better known still are the relations of materiality and the language (longue) - the role of writ-ing and the alphabet, the fact that neither the same syntax, nor the same vocabulary operate in a written text and in a conversation, in a news-paper and in a book, in a letter and on a poster; moreover, there are series of words that form perfectly individualized and acceptable sen­tences if they feature as newspaper headlines, and which, nevertheless, in the course of a conversation, could never stand as meaningful sen­tences. Yet the materiality plays a much more important role in the statement: it is not simply a principle of variation, a modification of the criteria of recognition, or a determination of linguistic sub-groups. It is constitutive of the statement itself: a statement must have a substance, a support, a place, and a date. And when these requisites change, it too changes identity. At this point, a host of questions arises: Does the same sentence repeated very loudly and very softly form one or more statements? When one learns a text by heart, does each recitation con­stitute a statement, or should one regard it as a repetition of the same statement? A sentence is faithfully translated into a foreign language: two distinct statements or one? And in a collective recitation - a prayer or a lesson - how many statements are produced? How can one establish the identity of the statement through all these various forms, repetitions, and transcriptions?

The problem is no doubt obscured by the fact that there is often a confusion of different levels. To begin with, we must set aside the multiplicity of enunciations. We will say that an enunciation takes place whenever a group of signs is emitted. Each of these articulations has its spatiotemporal individuality. Two people may say the same thing at the same time, but since there are two people there will he two distinct enunciations. The same person may repeat the same sentence several times; this will produce the same number of enunciations distinct in time. The enunciation is an unrepeatable event; it has a situated and dated uniqueness that is irreducible. Yet this uniqueness allows of a number of constants - grammatical, semantic, logical - by which one can, by neutralizing the moment of enunciation and the coordinates that individualize it, recognize the general form of a sentence, a mean-ing, a proposition. The time and place of the enunciation, and the material support that it uses, then become, very largely at least, indif­ferent: and what stands out is a form that is endlessly repeatable, and which may give rise to the most dispersed enunciations. But the state-ment itself cannot be reduced to this pure event of enunciation, for, despite its materiality, it cannot be repeated: it would not be difficult to say that the same sentence spoken by two people in slightly different circumstances constitute only one statement. And yet the statement cannot he reduced to a grammatical or logical form because, to a greater degree than that form, and in a different way, it is susceptible to differences of material, substance, time, and place. What, then, is that materiality proper to the statement, and which permits certain special types of repetition? How is it that one can speak of the same statement when there are several distinct enunciations of it, yet must speak of several statements when one can recognize identical forms, structures, rules of construction, and intentions? What, then, is this rule of repeatable materiality that characterizes the statement?

This may not he a perceptible, qualitative materiality, expressed in the form of colour, sound, or solidity, and divided up by the same spatiotemporal observation as the perceptual space. Let us take a very simple example: a text reproduced several times, the successive edi­tions of a book, or, better still, the different copies of the same printing, do not give rise to the same number of distinct statements: in all the editions of Les Fleurs du mal (variants and rejected versions apart) , we find the same set of statements; yet neither the characters, nor the ink, nor the paper, nor even the placing of the text and the positions of the signs, are the same: the whole texture of the materiality has changed. But in this case these 'small' differences are not important enough to alter the identity of the statement and to bring about another: they are all neutralized in the general element - material, of course, but also institutional and economic - of the 'book': a book, however many copies or editions are made of it, however many different substances it may use, is a locus of exact equivalence for the statements - for them it is an authority that permits repetition without any change of identity. We see from this first example that the materiality of the statement is not defined by the space occupied or the date of its formulation; but rather by its status as a thing or object. A status that is never definitive, but modifiable, relative, and always susceptible of being questioned: we know for example that, for literary historians, the edition of a book published with the agreement of the author does not have the same status as posthumous editions, that the statements in it have a unique value, that they are not one of the manifestations of one and the same whole, that they are that by relation to which there is and must be repetition. Similarly, between the text of a Constitution, or a will, or a religious revelation, and all the manuscripts or printed copies that reproduce them exactly, with the same writing, in the same characters, and on similar substances, one cannot say that there is an equivalence: on the one hand there are the statements themselves, and on the other their reproduction. The statement cannot be identified with a fragment of matter; but its identity varies with a complex set of material institutions.

For a statement may be the same, whether written on a sheet of paper or published in a book; it may be the same spoken, printed on a poster, or reproduced on a tape-recorder; on the other hand, when a novelist speaks a sentence in daily life, then reproduces the same sen­tence in the manuscript that he is writing, attributing it to one of his characters, or even allowing it to be spoken by that anonymous voice that passes for that of the author, one cannot say that it is the same statement in each case. The rule of materiality that statements necessar­ily obey is therefore of the order of the institution rather than of the spatio-temporal localization; it defines possibilities of reinscription and transcription (hut also thresholds and limits), rather than limited and perishable individualities.

The identity of a statement is subjected to a second group of condi­tions and limits: those that are imposed by all the other statements among which it figures, by the domain in which it can be used or applied, by the role and functions that it can perform. The affirmation that the earth is round or that species evolve does not constitute the same statement before and after Copernicus, before and after Darwin; it is not, for such simple formulations, that the meaning of the words has changed; what changed was the relation of these affirmations to other propositions, their conditions of use and reinvestment, the field of experience, of possible verifications, of problems to be resolved, to which they can be referred. The sentence 'dreams fulfil desires' may have been repeated throughout the centuries; it is not the same state-ment in Plato and in Freud. The schemata of use, the rules of applica­tion, the constellations in which. they can play a part, their strategic potentialities constitute for statements a field of stabilization that makes it possible, despite all the differences of enunciation, to repeat them in their identity; but this same field may also, beneath the most manifest semantic, grammatical, or formal identities, define a threshold beyond which there can be no further equivalence, and the appear­ance of a new statement must be recognized. But it is possible, no doubt, to go further: there are cases in which one may consider that there is only one statement, even though the words, the syntax, and the language (langue) itself are not identical. Such cases are a speech and its simultaneous translation; a scientific text in English and its French version; a notice printed in three columns in three different languages: there are not, in such cases, the same number of state­ments as there are languages used, but a single group of statements in different linguistic forms. Better still: a given piece of information may be retransmitted with other words, with a simplified syntax, or in an agreed code; if the information content and the uses to which it could be put are the same, one can say that it is the same statement in each case.

Here too, we are concerned not with a criterion of individualization for the statement, but rather with its principle of variation: it is some-times more diverse than the structure of the sentence (and its identity is then finer, more fragile, more easily modifiable than that of a seman­tic or grammatical whole), sometimes more constant than that struc­ture (and its identity is then broader, more stable, more susceptible to variations). Moreover, not only can this identity of the statement not be situated once and for all in relation to that of the sentence, but it is itself relative and oscillates according to the use that is made of the statement and the way in which it is handled. When one uses a statement in such a way as to reveal its grammatical structure, its rhetorical configuration, or the connotations that it may carry, it is obvious that one cannot regard it as being identical in its original language (longue) and in a translation. On the other hand, if it is intended as part of a procedure of experimental verification, then text and translation constitute a single enunciative whole. Or again, at a certain scale of macro-history, one may consider that an affirmation like 'species evolve' forms the same statement in Darwin and in Simpson; at a finer level, and considering more limited fields of use ('neo-Darwinism' as opposed to the Darwin­ian system itself), we are presented with two different statements. The constancy of the statement, the preservation of its identity through the unique events of the enunciations, its duplications through the identity of the forms, constitute the function of the field of use in which it is placed.

The statement, then, must not be treated as an event that occurred in a particular time and place, and that the most one can do is recall it - and celebrate it from afar off - in an act of memory. But neither is it an ideal form that can be actualized in any body, at any time, in any circumstances, and in any material conditions. Too repeatable to be entirely identifiable with the spatio-temporal coordinates of its birth (it is more than the place and date of its appearance), too bound up with what surrounds it and supports it to be as free as a pure form (it is more than a law of construction governing a group of elements), it is endowed with a certain modifiable heaviness, a weight relative to the field in which it is placed, a constancy that allows of various uses, a temporal permanence that does not have the inertia of a mere trace or mark, and which does not sleep on its own past. Whereas an enunci­ation may be begun again or re-evoked, and a (linguistic or logical) form may be reactualized, the statement may be repeated - but always in strict conditions.

This repeatable materiality that characterizes the enunciative function reveals the statement as a specific and paradoxical object, but also as one of those objects that men produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose, and possibly destroy. Instead of being something said once and for all - and lost in the past like the result of a battle, a geological catastrophe, or the death of a king - the statement, as it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various fields of use, is subjected to trans­ferences or modifications, is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced. Thus the statement circu­lates, is used, disappears, allows or prevents the realization of a desire, serves or resists various interests, participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry.

3. THE DESCRIPTION OF STATEMENTS

I now find that the analysis has shifted its ground to a quite consider-able extent; it was my intention to return to the definition of the statement, which, at the outset, I had left in suspense. It was as if I had regarded the statement as a unit that could be established without difficulty, and that all I had to do was describe its possibilities and laws of combination. I now realize that I could not define the statement as a unit of a linguistic type (superior to the phenomenon of the word, inferior to the text); but that I was dealing with an enunciative function that involved various units (these may sometimes be sentences, some-times propositions; but they are sometimes made up of fragments of sentences, series or tables of signs, a set of propositions or equivalent formulations); and, instead of giving a 'meaning' to these units, this function relates them to a field of objects; instead of providing them with a subject, it opens up for them a number of possible subjective positions; instead of fixing their limits, it places them in a domain of coordination and coexistence; instead of determining their identity, it places them in a space in which they are used and repeated. In short, what has been discovered is not the atomic statement - with its apparent meaning, its origin, its limits, and its individuality - but the operational field of the enunciative function and the conditions accord-ing to which it reveals various units (which may be, but need not be, of a grammatical or logical order). But I now feel that I must answer two questions: what do I now understand by the task, which I originally set myself, of describing statements? How can this theory of the statement be adjusted to the analysis of discursive formations that I outlined previously?

I. First task: fix the vocabulary. If we agree to call verbal performance, or, better, linguistic performance, any group of signs produced on the basis of a natural (or artificial) language (langue), we could call formulation the individual (or possibly collective) act that reveals, on any material and according to a particular form, that group of signs: the formulation is an event that can always be located by its spatio-temporal coordinates, which can always be related to an author, and which may constitute in itself a specific act (a 'performative' act, as the British analysts call it); we can call sentence or proposition the units that grammar or logic may recognize in a group of signs: these units may always be characterized by the elements that figure in them, and by the rules of construction that unite them; in relation to the sentence and the proposition, the questions of origin, time and place, and context are merely subsidiary; the decisive question is that of their correctness (if only under the form of 'acceptability'). We will call statement the modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation with a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject, to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality. We can now understand the reason for the equivocal meaning of the term discourse, which I have used and abused in many different senses: in the most general, and vaguest way, it denoted a group of verbal performances; and by discourse, then, I meant that which was produced (perhaps all that was produced) by the groups of signs. But I also meant a group of acts of formulation, a series of sentences or propositions. Lastly - and it is this meaning that was finally used (together with the first, which served in a provisional capacity) - discourse is constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements, that is, i.n so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence. And if I succeed in showing, as I shall try to do shortly, that the law of such a series is precisely what I have so far called a discursive formation, if I succeed in showing that this discursive formation really is the principle of dispersion and redistribu­tion, not of formulations, not of sentences, not of propositions, but of statements (in the sense in which I have used this word), the term discourse can he defined as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation; thus I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse.

I am well aware that most of these definitions do not conform with current usage: linguists usually give the word discourse a quite different meaning; logicians and analysts use the term statement in a different way. But my intention here is not to transfer to some hitherto benighted domain. a set of concepts, a form of analysis, and a theory that have been formed elsewhere; and I do not intend to use a model by applying it, with its own efficacy, to new contents. Not, of course, that I wish to question the value of such a model; not that I wish, even before trying it, to limit its application, or to lay down the threshold that it must not cross. But I would like to reveal a descriptive possibility, outline the domain of which. it is capable, define its limits and its autonomy. This descriptive possibility is articulated upon others; i.t does not derive from them.

In particular, then, the analysis of statements does not claim to he a total, exhaustive description of 'language' (langage), or of 'what was said'. In the whole density implied by verbal performances, it is situ­ated at a particular level that must be distinguished from the others, characterized in relation to them, and abstract. In particular, it does not replace a logical analysis of propositions, a grammatical analysis of sentences, a psychological or contextual analysis of formulations: it is another way of attacking verbal performances, of dissociating their complexity, of isolating the terms that are entangled in its web, and of locating the various regularities that they obey. By confronting the statement with the sentence or the proposition, I am not trying to rediscover a lost totality, or to resuscitate, as many would nostalgically like to do, the plenitude of living speech, the richness of the Word, the profound unity of the Logos. The analysis of statements corresponds to a specific level of description.

2. The statement, then, is not an elementary unity that can be added to the unities described by grammar or logic. It cannot be isolated like a sentence, a proposition, or an act of formulation. To describe a state-ment is not a matter of isolating and characterizing a horizontal seg-ment; but of defining the conditions in which the function that gave a series of signs (a series that is not necessarily grammatical or logically structured) an existence, and a specific existence, can operate. An exist­ence that reveals such a series as more than a mere trace, but rather a relation to a domain of objects; as more than the result of an action or an individual operation, but rather a set of possible positions for a subject; as more than an organic, autonomous whole, closed in upon itself and capable of forming meaning of its own accord, but rather an element in a field of coexistence; as more than a passing event or an inert object, but rather a repeatable materiality. The description of statements is concerned, in a sort of vertical dimension, with the con­ditions of existence of different groups of signifiers (signifiants). Hence a paradox: the description of statements does not attempt to evade verbal performances in order to discover behind them or below their appar­ent surface a hidden element, a secret meaning that lies buried within them, or which emerges through them without saying so; and yet the statement is not immediately visible; it is not given in such a manifest way as a grammatical or logical structure (even if such a structure is not entirely clear, or is very difficult to elucidate). The statement is neither visible nor hidden.

Not hidden, by definition, since it characterizes the modalities of existence proper to a group of effectively produced signs. The analysis of statements can never confine its attention to the things said, to the sentences that were actually spoken or written, to the 'signifying' elements that were traced or pronounced - and, more particularly, to that very uniqueness that gives them existence, offers them to the view of the reader, to a possible reactivation, to innumerable uses or possible transformations, among other things, but not like other things. It can-not concern only realized verbal performances since it analyses them at the level of their existence: it is a description of things said, precisely as they were said. The analysis of statements, then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: it does not question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were 'really' saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element that they contain, the proliferation of thoughts, images, or fantasies that inhabit them; but, on the con­trary, it questions them as to their mode of existence, what it means to them to have come into existence, to have left traces, and perhaps to remain there, awaiting the moment when they might be of use once more; what it means to them to have appeared when and where they did - they and no others. From this point of view, there is no such thing as a latent statement: for what one is concerned with is the fact of language (langage).

A difficult thesis to sustain. We know - and this has probably been the case ever since men began to speak - that one thing is often said in place of another; that one sentence may have two meanings at once; that an obvious meaning, understood without difficulty by everyone, may conceal a second esoteric or prophetic meaning that a more subtle deciphering, or perhaps only the erosion of time, will finally reveal; that beneath a visible formulation, there may reign another that con­trols it, disturbs it, and imposes on it an articulation of its own; in short, that in one way or another, things said say more than themselves. But, in fact, these apparent duplications, this unsaid that is nevertheless said, do not affect the statement, at least as it has been defined here. Polysemia - which justifies hermeneutics and the discovery of another meaning - concerns the sentence, and the semantic fields that it employs: the same group of words may give rise to several meanings, and to several possible constructions; there may be, therefore, inter-woven or alternating, different meanings operating on the same enun­ciative base. Similarly, the suppression of one verbal performance by another, their substitution or interference, are phenomena that belong to the level of the formulation (even if they have incidences on the linguistic or logical structures); but the statement itself is not con­cerned with this duplication or this suppression: since it is the modal­ity of existence of the verbal performance as it has taken place. The statement cannot be regarded as the cumulative result or the crystalliza­tion of several fluctuating, scarcely articulated, and mutually opposed statements. The statement is not haunted by the secret presence of the unsaid, of hidden meanings, of suppressions; on the contrary, the way in which these hidden elements function, and in which they can be restored, depends on the enunciative modality itself: we know that the 'unsaid', the 'suppressed', is not the same - either in its structure or in its effect - in the case of a mathematical statement, a statement in economics, an autobiography, or the account of a dream.

However, to all these various modalities of the unsaid that may be located against the background of the enunciative field, should no doubt be added a lack, which, instead of being inside seems to be correlative with this field and to play a role in the determination of its very existence. There may in fact be - and probably always are - in the conditions of emergence of statements, exclusions, limits, or gaps that divide up their referential, validate only one series of modalities, enclose groups of co-existence, and prevent certain forms of use. But one should not confuse, either in its status or in its effect, the lack that is characteristic of an enunciative regularity and the meanings concealed in what is formulated in it.

3. Although the statement cannot be hidden, it is not visible either; it is not presented to the perception as the manifest bearer of its limits and characteristics. It requires a certain change of viewpoint and attitude to be recognized and examined in itself. Perhaps it is like the over-familiar that constantly eludes one; those familiar transparencies, which, although they conceal nothing in their density, are nevertheless not entirely clear. The enunciative level emerges in. its very proximity.

There are several reasons for this. The first has already been given: the statement is not just another unity - above or below - sentences and propositions; it is always invested in unities of this kind, or even in sequences of signs that do not obey their laws (and which may be lists, chance series, tables); it characterizes not what is given in them, but the very fact that they are given, and the way in which they are given. It has this quasi-invisibility of the 'there is', which is effaced in the very thing of which one can say: 'there is this or that thing'.

Another reason: the 'signifying' structure of language (langage)

always refers back to something else; objects are designated by it; meaning is intended by it; the subject is referred back to it by a number of signs even if he is not himself present in them. Language always seems to be inhabited by the other, the elsewhere, the distant; it is hollowed by absence. Is it not the locus in which something other than itself appears, does not its own existence seem to be dissipated in this function? But if one wishes to describe the enunciative level, one must consider that existence itself; question language, not in the direction to which it refers, but in the dimension that gives it; ignore its power to designate, to name, to show, to reveal, to be the place of meaning or truth, and, instead, turn one's attention to the moment - which is at once solidified, caught up in the play of the 'signifier' and the 'signi­fied' - that determines its unique and limited existence. In the examin­ation of language, one must suspend, not only the point of view of the 'signified' (we are used to this by now), but also that of the 'signifier', and so reveal the fact that, here and there, in relation to possible domains of objects and subjects, in relation to other possible formulations and re-uses, there is language.

The last reason for this quasi-invisibility of the statement: it is implied, but never made explicit, in all other analyses of language. If language is to he taken as an object, decomposed into distinct levels, described and analysed, an 'enunciative datum' must exist that will always be determined and not infinite: the analysis of a language (longue) always operates on a corpus of words and texts; the uncovering and interpretation of implicit meanings always rests on a limited group of sentences; the logical analysis of a system implies a given group of propositions in the rewriting, in a formal language (langage). The enun­ciative level is neutralized each time: either it is defined only as a representative sample that enables one to free endlessly applicable structures; or it disappears into a pure appearance behind which the truth of words is revealed; or it acts as a neutral substance that serves as a support for formal relations. The fact that, each time, it is indispens­able if an analysis is to take place deprives it of all relevance for the analysis itself. If one adds to this that all these descriptions can be made only when they themselves form finite groups of statements, it will be clear why they are surrounded on all sides by the enunciative field, why they cannot free themselves from it, and why they cannot take it directly as its theme. In considering statements in themselves, we will not seek, beyond all these analyses and at a deeper level, some secret or some root of language (langage) that they have omitted. We shall try to render visible, and analysable, that immediate transparency that constitutes the element of their possibility.

Neither hidden, nor visible, the enunciative level is at the limit of language (langage): it is not, in itself, a group of characteristics that are presented, even in an unsystematic way, to immediate experience; but neither is it the enigmatic, silent remainder that it does not translate. It defines the modality of its appearance: its periphery rather than its internal organization, its surface rather than its content. But the fact that one can describe this enunciative surface proves that the 'given', the datum, of language is not the mere rending of a fundamental silence; that the words, sentences, meanings, affirmations, series of propositions do not hack directly on to a primeval night of silence; but that the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning, the brusque gesture of the index finger of designation, always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function; that between lan­guage as one reads and hears it, and also as one speaks it, and the absence of any formulation, there is not a profusion of things half said, sentences left unfinished, thoughts half expressed, an endless mono­logue of which only a few fragments emerge; but, before all - or in any case before it (for it depends on them) - the conditions according to which the enunciative function operates. This also proves that it is vain to seek, beyond structural, formal, or interpretative analyses of lan­guage, a domain that is at last freed from all positivity, in which the freedom of the subject, the labour of the human being, or the opening up of a transcendental destiny could be fulfilled. One should not object to linguistic methods or logical analyses: 'When you have said so much about the rules of its construction, what do you do with language itself, in the plenitude of its living body? What do you do with this freedom, or with this meaning that is prior to all signification, without which individuals could not understand one another in the never-ending work of language? Are you not aware that as soon as one has crossed the finite systems that make possible the infinity of discourse, but which are incapable of founding it and of accounting for it, what one finds is the mark of a transcendence, or the work of the human being?

Do you know that you have described only a few of the characteristics of a language (langage) whose emergence and mode of being are entirely irreducible to your analyses?' Such objections must be set aside: for if it is true that there is a dimension there that belongs neither to logic nor to linguistics, it is not, for all that, a restored transcend­ence, nor a way that has been reopened in the direction of an inaccess­ible origin, nor a creation by the human being of his own meanings. Language, in its appearance and mode of being, is the statement; as such, it belongs to a description that is neither transcendental nor anthropological. The enunciative analysis does not lay down for lin­guistic or logical analyses the limit beyond which they must renounce their power and recognize their powerlessness; it does not mark the line that encloses their domain; it is deployed in another direction, which intersects them. The possibility of an enunciative analysis, if it is established, must make it possible to raise the transcendental obstacle that a certain form of philosophical discourse opposes to all analyses of language, in the name of the being of that language and of the ground from which it should derive its origin.

I must now turn to the second group of questions: how can the description of statements, thus defined, be adjusted to the analysis of discursive formations, the principles of which I outlined above? And inversely: to what extent can one say that the analysis of discursive formations really is a description of statements, in the sense in which I have used this word? It is important to answer these questions; for it is at this point that the enterprise to which I have devoted myself for so many years, which I have developed in a somewhat blind way, but of which I am now trying - even if I readjust it, even if I rectify a number of errors or imprudences - to recapture the general outline, must close its circle. As has already become clear, I am not trying to say here what I once tried to say in this or that concrete analysis, or to describe the project that I had in mind, the obstacles that I encountered, the attempts that I was forced to abandon, the more or less satisfactory results that I managed to obtain; I am not describing an effective trajec­tory in order to indicate what should have been and what will be from now on: I am trying to elucidate in itself – in order to measure it and to determine its requirements – a possibility of description that I have used without being aware of its constraints and resources; rather than trying to discover what I said, and what I might have said, I shall try to reveal, in its own regularity – a regularity that I have not yet succeeded in mastering – what made it possible to say what I did. But one can also see that I am not developing here a theory, in the strict sense of the term: the deduction, on the basis of a number of axioms, of an abstract model applicable to an indefinite number of empirical descriptions. If such an edifice were ever possible, the time for it has certainly not yet arrived. I am not inferring the analysis of discursive formations from a definition of statements that would serve as a basis; nor am I inferring the nature of statements from what discursive formations are, as one was able to abstract them from this or that description; but I am trying to show how a domain can be organized, without flaw, without con­tradiction, without internal arbitrariness, in which statements, their principle of grouping, the great historical unities that they may form, and the methods that make it possible to describe them are all brought into question. I am not proceeding by linear deduction, but rather by concentric circles, moving sometimes towards the outer and some-times towards the inner ones: beginning with the problem of dis-continuity in discourse and of the uniqueness of the statement (the central theme), I have tried to analyse, on the periphery, certain forms of enigmatic groupings; but the principles of unification with which I was then presented, and which are neither grammatical, nor logical, nor psychological, and which consequently cannot refer either to sentences, propositions, or representations, forced me to return to the centre, to that problem of the statement; to try to elucidate what is meant by the term statement. And I will consider, not that I have constructed a rigorous theoretical model, but that I have freed a coher­ent domain of description, that I have, if not established the model, at least opened up and arranged the possibility of one, if I have been able to 'loop the loop', and show that the analysis of discursive formations really is centred on a description of the statement in its specificity. In short, if I have been able to show that they really are the proper dimen­sions of the statement that are at work in the mapping of discursive formations. Rather than founding a theory – and perhaps before being able to do so (I do not deny that I regret not yet having succeeded in doing so) - my present concern is to establish a possibility.

In examining the statement what we have discovered is a function that has a bearing on groups of signs, which is identified neither with grammatical 'acceptability' nor with logical correctness, and which requires if it is to operate: a referential (which. is not exactly a fact, a state of things, or even an object, but a principle of differentiation); a subject (not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the formula-tion, but a position that may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals) ; an associated field (which is not the real context of the formulation, the situation in which it was articulated, but a domain of coexistence for other statements); a materiality (which is not only the substance or support of the articulation, but a status, rules of transcrip­tion, possibilities of use and re-use). Now, what has been described as discursive formations are, strictly speaking, groups of statements. That is, groups of verbal performances that are not linked to one another at the sentence level by grammatical (syntactical or semantic) links; which are not linked to one another at the proposition level by logical links (links of formal coherence or conceptual connexion); and which are not linked either at the formulation level by psychological links (either the identity of the forms of consciousness, the constancy of the mental­ities, or the repetition of a project); but which are linked at the statement level. That which implies that one can define the general set of rules that govern their objects, the form of dispersion that regularly divides up what they say, the system of their referentials; that which implies that one defines the general set of rules that govern the different modes of enunciation, the possible distribution of the subjective positions, and the system that defines and prescribes them; that which implies that one defines the set of rules common to all their associated domains, the forms of succession, of simultaneity, of the repetition of which they are capable, and the system that links all these fields of co-existence together; lastly, that which implies that one can define the general set of rules that govern the status of these statements, the way in which they are institutionalized, received, used, re-used., combined together, the mode according to which they become objects of appropriation, instruments for desire or interest, elements for a strat­egy. To describe statements, to describe the enunciative function of which they are the bearers, to analyse the conditions in which this function operates, to cover the different domains that this function presupposes and the way in which those domains are articulated, is to undertake to uncover what might be called the discursive formation. Or again, which amounts to the same thing, but in the opposite direc­tion; the discursive formation is the general enunciative system that governs a group of verbal performances - a system that is not alone in governing it, since it also obeys, and in accordance with its other dimensions, logical, linguistic, and psychological systems. What has been called 'discursive formation' divides up the general plane of things said at the specific level of statements. The four directions in which it is analysed (formation of objects, formation of the subjective positions, formation of concepts, formation of strategic choices) cor­respond to the four domains in which the enunciative function oper­ates. And if the discursive formations are free in relation to the great rhetorical unities of the text or the book, if they are not governed by the rigour of a deductive architecture, if they are not identified with the oeuvre of an author, it is because they bring into play the enunciative level, together with the regularities that characterize it, and not the grammatical level of sentences, or the logical level of propositions, or the psychological level of formulation.

On this basis, we can now advance a number of propositions that lie at the heart of these analyses:

1 It can be said that the mapping of discursive formations, inde­pendently of other principles of possible unification, reveals the specific level of the statement; but it can also be said that the descrip­tion of statements and of the way in which the enunciative level is organized leads to the individualization of the discursive formations. The two approaches are equally justifiable and reversible. The analysis of the statement and that of the formation are established correlatively. When the time finally comes to found a theory, it will have to define a deductive order.

2. A statement belongs to a discursive formation as a sentence belongs to a text, and a proposition to a deductive whole. But whereas the regularity of a sentence is defined by the laws of a language (longue),

and that of a proposition by the laws of logic, the regularity of state­ments is defined by the discursive formation itself. The fact of its belonging to a discursive formation and the laws that govern it are one and the same thing; this is not paradoxical since the discursive forma-tion is characterized not by principles of construction but by a disper­sion of fact, since for statements it is not a condition of possibility but a law of coexistence, and since statements are not interchangeable elem­ents but groups characterized by their modality of existence.

3.So we can now give a full meaning to the definition of 'dis-course' that we suggested above. We shall call discourse a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation; it does not form a rhetorical or formal unity, endlessly repeatable, whose appearance or use in history might be indicated (and, if necessary, explained) ; it is made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask one-self how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time; it is, from beginning to end, historical - a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transform­ations, the specific modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the midst of the complicities of time.

4.Lastly, what we have called 'discursive practice' can now be defined more precisely. It must not he confused. with the expressive operation by which can individual formulates an idea, a desire, an image; nor with the rational activity that may operate in a system of inference; nor with the 'competence' of a speaking subject when he constructs grammatical sentences; it is a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function.

It remains for me now to invert the analysis and, after referring dis-cursive formations to the statements that they describe, to seek in another direction, this time towards the exterior, the legitimate use of these notions: what can be discovered through them, how they can take their place among other methods of description, to what extent they can modify and redistribute the domain of the history of ideas. But before operating this inversion, and in order to operate it more surely, I shall remain a little longer in the dimension that I have been exploring, and try to define what the analysis of the enunciative field and of the formations that divide it up require and exclude.

4. RARITY, EXTERIORITY, ACCUMULATION

The enunci.ative analysis takes into consideration an element of rarity.

Generally speaking, the analysis of discourse operates between the twin poles of totality and plethora. One shows how the different texts with which one is dealing refer to one another, organize themselves into a single figure, converge with institutions and practices, and carry meanings that may be common to a whole period. Each element con-sidered is taken as the expression of the totality to which it belongs and whose limits it exceeds. And in this way one substitutes for the diver­sity of the things said a sort of great, uniform text, which has never before been articulated, and which reveals for the first time what men 'really meant' not only in their words and texts, their discourses and their writings, but also in the institutions, practices, techniques, and objects that they produced. In relation to this implicit, sovereign, communal 'meaning', statements appear in superabundant prolifer­ation, since it is to that meaning alone that they all refer and to it alone that they owe their truth: a plethora of signifying elements in relation to this single 'signified' (signifie). But this primary and ultimate mean-ing springs up through the manifest formulations, it hides beneath what appears, and secretly duplicates it, because each discourse contains the power to say something other than what it actually says, and thus to embrace a plurality of meanings: a plethora of the 'signi­fied' in relation to a single 'signifier'. From this point of view, discourse is both plenitude and endless wealth.

The analysis of statements and discursive formations opens up a quite contrary direction: it wishes to determine the principle according to which only the 'signifying' groups that were enunciated could appear. It sets out to establish a law of rarity. This task involves several aspects:

-It is based on the principle that everything is never said; in relation to what might have been stated in a natural language (longue), in relation to the unlimited combination of linguistic elements, state­ments (however numerous they may be) are always in deficit; on the basis of the grammar and of the wealth of vocabulary available at a given period, there are, in total, relatively few things that are said. We must look therefore for the principle of rarification or at least of non-filling of the field of possible formulations as it is opened up by the language (longue). Discursive formation appears both as a principle of division in the entangled mass of discourses and as a principle of vacuity in the field of language (langage).

-We are studying statements at the limit that separates them from what is not said, in the occurrence that allows them to emerge to the exclusion of all others. Our task is not to give voice to the silence that surrounds them, nor to rediscover all that, in them and beside them, had remained silent or had been reduced to silence. Nor is it to study the obstacles that have prevented a particular discovery, held hack a particular formulation, repressed a particular form of enunciation, a particular unconscious meaning, or a particular rationality in the course of development; but to define a limited system of presences. The discursive formation is not therefore a developing totality, with its own dynamism or inertia, carrying with it, in an unformulated discourse, what it does not say, what it has not yet said, or what contradicts it at that moment; it is not a rich, difficult germination, it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions.

-However, we are not linking these 'exclusions' to a repression; we do not presuppose that beneath manifest statements something remains hidden and subjacent. We are analysing statements, not as being in the place of other statements that have fallen below the line of possible emergence, but as being always in their own place. They are put back into a space that is entirely deployed and involves no reduplication. There is no sub-text. And therefore no plethora. The enunciative domain is identical with its own surface. Each statement occupies in it a place that belongs to it alone. The description of a statement does not consist therefore in rediscovering the unsaid whose place it occupies; nor how one can reduce it to a silent, common text; but on the contrary in discovering what special place it occupies, what ramifications of the system of formations make it possible to map its localization, how it is isolated in the general dispersion of statements.

-This rarity of statements, the incomplete, fragmented form of the enunciative field, the fact that few things, in all, can be said, explain that statements are not, like the air we breathe, an infinite transparency; but things that are transmitted and preserved, that have value, and which one tries to appropriate; that are repeated, reproduced, and transformed; to which pre-established networks are adapted, and to which a status is given in the institution; things that are duplicated not only by copy or translation, but by exegesis, commentary, and the internal proliferation of meaning. Because statements are rare, they are collected in unifying totalities, and the meanings to be found in them are multiplied.

Unlike all those interpretations whose very existence is possible only through the actual rarity of statements, but which nevertheless ignore that rarity, and, on the contrary, take as their theme the compact rich­ness of what is said, the analysis of discursive formations turns back towards that rarity itself; it takes that rarity as its explicit object; it tries to determine its unique system; and, at the same time, it takes account of the fact that there could have been interpretation. To interpret is a way of reacting to enunciative poverty, and to compensate for it by a multiplication of meaning; a way of speaking on the basis of that poverty, and yet despite it. But to analyse a discursive formation is to seek the law of that poverty, it is to weigh it up, and to determine its specific form. In one sense, therefore, it is to weigh the 'value' of statements. A value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by the presence of a secret content; but which characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility of trans-formation, not only in the economy of discourse, but, more generally, in the administration of scarce resources. In this sense, discourse ceases to be what it is for the exegetic attitude: an inexhaustible treasure from which one can always draw new, and always unpredictable riches; a providence that has always spoken in advance, and which enables one to hear, when one knows how to listen, retrospective oracles: it appears as an asset - finite, limited, desirable, useful - that has its own rules of appearance, but also its own conditions of appropriation and oper­ation; an asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only in its 'practical applications'), poses the question of power; an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle.

Another characteristic feature: the analysis of statements treats them in the systematic form of exteriority. Usually, the historical description of things said is shot through with the opposition of interior and exterior; and wholly directed by a desire to move from the exterior - which may be no more than contingency or mere material necessity, a visible body or uncertain translation - towards the essential nucleus of interiority. To undertake the history of what has been said is to re-do, in the opposite direction, the work of expression: to go back from statements preserved through time and dispersed in space, towards that interior secret that preceded them, left its mark in them, and (in every sense of the term) is betrayed by them. Thus the nucleus of the initiat­ing subjectivity is freed. A subjectivity that always lags behind manifest history; and which finds, beneath events, another, more serious, more secret, more fundamental history, closer to the origin, more firmly linked to its ultimate horizon (and consequently more in control of all its determinations). This other history, which runs beneath history, constantly anticipating it and endlessly recollecting the past, can be described - in a sociological or psychological way - as the evolution of mentalities; it can be given a philosophical status in the recollection of the Logos or the teleology of reason; lastly, it can be purified in the problematic of a trace, which, prior to all speech, is the opening of inscription, the gap of deferred time, it is always the historico­transcendental theme that is reinvested.

A theme whose enunciative analysis tries to free itself. In order to restore statements to their pure dispersion. In order to analyse them in an exteriority that may be paradoxical since it refers to no adverse form of interiority. In order to consider them in their discontinuity, without having to relate them, by one of those shifts that disconnect them and render them inessential, to a more fundamental opening or difference. In order to seize their very irruption, at the place and at the moment at which it occurred. In order to rediscover their occurrence as an event. Perhaps we should speak of 'neutrality' rather than exteriority; but even this word implies rather too easily a suspension of belief, an effacement or a 'placing in parentheses' of all position of existence, whereas it is a question of rediscovering that outside in which, in their relative rarity, in their incomplete proximity, in their deployed space, enunciative events are distributed.

-This task presupposes that the field of statements is not described as a 'translation' of operations or processes that take place elsewhere (in men's thought, in their consciousness or unconscious, in the sphere of transcendental constitutions); but that it is accepted, in its empirical modesty, as the locus of particular events, regularities, relationships, modifications and systematic transformations; in short, that it is treated not as the result or trace of something else, but as a practical domain that is autonomous (although dependent) , and which can be described at its own level (although it must be articulated on something other than itself).

-It also presupposes that this enunciative domain refers neither to an individual subject, nor to some kind of collective consciousness, nor to a transcendental subjectivity; but that it is described as an anonym­ous field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking subjects. Statements should no longer be situated in relation to a sover-eign subjectivity, but recognize in the different forms of the speaking subjectivity effects proper to the enunciative field.

As a result, it presupposes that, in its transformations, in its successive series, in its derivations, the field of statements does not obey the temporality of the consciousness as its necessary model. One must not hope - at least at this level and in this form of description - to be able to write a history of things said that is legitimately, in its form, in its regularity and in its nature, the history of an individual or anonymous consciousness, of a project, of a system of intentions, of a set of aims. The time of discourse is not the translation, in a visible chronology, of the obscure time of thought.

The analysis of statements operates therefore without reference to a cogito. It does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his sovereign freedom, or who, without realizing it, subjects himself to constraints of which he is only dimly aware. In fact, it is situated at the level of the 'it is said' - and we must not understand by this a sort of communal opinion, a collective representation that is imposed on every individual; we must not understand by it a great, anonymous voice that must, of necessity, speak through the discourses of everyone; but we must understand by it the totality of things said, the relations, the regularities, and the transformations that may be observed in them, the domain of which certain figures, certain inter-sections indicate the unique place of a speaking subject and may be given the name of author. `Anyone who speaks', but what he says is not said from anywhere. It is necessarily caught up in the play of an exteriority.

The third feature of enunciative analysis: it is addressed to specific forms of accumulation that can be identified neither with an interior­ization in the form of memory nor with an undiscriminating totalization of documents. Usually, when one analyses already existing discourses, one regards them as having sprung from an essential iner­tia: they have survived vived through chance, or through the care with which men have treated them, and the illusions that they have enter­tained as to their value and the immortal dignity of their words; but now they are nothing more than written symbols piling up in dusty libraries, slumbering in a sleep towards which they have never ceased to glide since the day they were pronounced, since they were forgotten and their visible effect lost in time. At most they may be lucky enough to be picked up and examined in some chance reading; at most they can discover that they bear the marks that refer back to the moment of their enunciation; at most, once these marks have been deciphered they can, by a sort of memory that moves across time, free meanings, thoughts, desires, buried fantasies. These four terms: reading - trace - decipherment - memory (however much importance one may accord to one or another of them, and whatever the metaphorical extent that one may accord it, and which enables it to embrace the other three) define the system that usually makes it possible to snatch past discourse from its inertia and, for a moment, to rediscover something of its lost vitality.

Now, the function of enunciative analysis is not to awaken texts from their present sleep, and, by reciting the marks still legible on their surface, to rediscover the flash of their birth; on the contrary, its func­tion is to follow them through their sleep, or rather to take up the related themes of sleep, oblivion, and lost origin, and to discover what mode of existence may characterize statements, independently of their enunciation, in the density of time in which they are preserved, in which they are reactivated, and used, in which they are also - but this was not their original destiny - forgotten, and possibly even destroyed.

-This analysis presupposes that statements are considered in the remanence (remanence) that is proper to them, and which is not that of an ever-realizable reference back to the past event of the formulation. To say that statements are residual (remanent) is not to say that they remain in the field of memory, or that it is possible to rediscover what they meant; but it means that they are preserved by virtue of a number of supports and material techniques (of which the book is, of course, only one example), in accordance with certain types of institutions (of which the library is one), and with certain statutory modalities (which are not the same in the case of a religious text, a law, or a scientific truth). This also means that they are invested in techniques that put them into operation, in practices that derive from them, in the social relations that they form, or, through those relations, modify. Lastly, it means that things do not have quite the same mode of existence, the same system of relations with their environment, the same schemata of use, the same possibilities of transformation once they have been said. This survival in time is far from being the accidental or fortunate prolongation of an existence originally intended only for the moment; on the contrary, this remanence is of the nature of the statement; oblivion and destruction are in a sense only the zero degree of this remanence. And against the background that it constitutes, the oper­ations of memory can be deployed.

-This analysis also presupposes that statements are treated in the form of additivity that is specific to them. In fact, the types of grouping between successive statements are not always the same, and they never proceed by a simple piling-up or juxtaposition of successive elements. Mathematical statements are not added to one another in the same way as religious texts or laws (they each have their own way of merging together, annulling one another, excluding one another, complement-ing one another, forming groups that are in varying degrees indissoci­able and endowed with unique properties). Moreover, these forms of additivity are not given once and for all, and for a particular category of statements: medical case-history today forms a corpus of knowledge that does not obey the same laws of composition as medical case-history in the eighteenth century; modern mathematics does not accumulate its statements according to the same model as Euclidean geometry.

-Lastly, enunciative analysis presupposes that one takes phenom­ena of recurrence into account. Every statement involves a field of antecedent elements in relation to which it is situated, but which it is able to reorganize and redistribute according to new relations. It consti­tutes its own past, defines, in what precedes it, its own filiation, redefines what makes it possible or necessary, excludes what cannot be compatible with it. And it poses this enunciative past as an acquired truth, as an event that has occurred, as a form that can be modified, as material to be transformed, or as an object that can be spoken about, etc. In relation to all these possibilities of recurrence, memory and oblivion, the rediscovery of meaning or its repression, far from being fundamental, are merely unique figures.

The description of statements and discursive formations must there-fore free itself from the widespread and persistent image of return. It does not claim to go back, beyond a time that is no more than a falling off, a latency, an oblivion, a covering up or a wandering, towards that moment of foundation when speech was not yet caught up in any form of materiality, when it had no chances of survival, and when it was confined to the non-determined dimension of the opening. It does not try to constitute for the already said the paradoxical instant of the second birth; it does not invoke a dawn about to return. On the con­trary, it deals with statements in the density of the accumulation in which they are caught up and which nevertheless they never cease to modify, to disturb, to over-throw, and sometimes to destroy.

To describe a group of statements not as the closed, plethoric totality of a meaning, but as an incomplete, fragmented figure; to describe a group of statements not with reference to the interiority of an inten­tion, a thought, or a subject, but in accordance with the dispersion of an exteriority; to describe a group of statements, in order to rediscover not the moment or the trace of their origin, but the specific forms of an accumulation, is certainly not to uncover an interpretation, to discover a foundation, or to free constituent acts; nor is it to decide on a ration­ality, or to embrace a teleology. It is to establish what I am quite willing to call a positivity. To analyse a discursive formation therefore is to deal with a group of verbal performances at the level of the statements and of the form of positivity that characterizes them; or, more briefly, it is to define the type of positivity of a discourse. If, by substituting the analysis of rarity for the search for totalities, the description of relations of exteriority for the theme of the transcendental foundation, the analysis of accumulations for the quest of the origin, one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be one. Similarly, I am not in the least unhappy about the fact that several times (though still in a rather blind way) I have used the term positivity to designate from afar the tangled mass that I was trying to unravel.

5. THE HISTORICAL A PRIORI AND THE ARCHIVE

The positivity of a discourse - like that of Natural History, political economy, or clinical medicine - characterizes its unity throughout time, and well beyond individual oeuvres, books, and texts. This unity certainly does not enable us to say of Linnaeus or Buffon, Quesnay or Turgot, Broussais or Bichat, who told the truth, who reasoned with rigour, who most conformed to his own postulates; nor does it enable us to say which of these oeuvres was closest to a primary, or ultimate, destination, which would formulate most radically the general project of a science. But what it does reveal is the extent to which Buffon and Linnaeus (or Turgot and Quesnay, Broussais and Bichat) were talking about 'the same thing', by placing themselves at 'the same level' or at 'the same distance', by deploying 'the same conceptual field', by opposing one another on 'the same field of battle'; and it reveals, on the other hand, why one cannot say that Darwin is talking about the same thing as Diderot, that Laennec continues the work of Van Swieten, or that Jevons answers the Physiocrats. It defines a limited space of communication. A relatively small space, since it is far from possessing the breadth of a science with all its historical development, from its most distant origin to its present stage; but a more extensive space than the play of influences that have operated from one author to another, or than the domain of explicit polemics. Different oeuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation - and so many authors who know or do not know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea - all these various figures and individuals do not communicate solely by the logical succession of propositions that they advance, nor by the recur­rence of themes, nor by the obstinacy of a meaning transmitted, forgot-ten, and rediscovered; they communicate by the form of positivity of their discourse, or more exactly, this form of positivity (and the condi­tions of operation of the enunciative function) defines a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed. Thus positivity plays the role of what might be called a historical a priori.

Juxtaposed, these two words produce a rather startling effect; what I mean by the term is an a priori that is not a condition of validity for judgements, but a condition of reality for statements. It is not a ques­tion of rediscovering what might legitimize an assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specific form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear. An a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually said. The reason for using this rather barbarous term is that this a priori must take account of statements in their dispersion, in all the flaws opened up by their non-coherence, in their overlapping and mutual replacement, in their simultaneity, which is not unifiable, and in their succession, which is not deductible; in short, it has to take account of the fact that discourse has not only a meaning or a truth, but a history, and a specific history that does not refer it back to the laws of an alien development. It must show, for example, that the history of grammar is not the projection into the field of language and its problems of a history that is generally that of reason or of a particular mentality, a history in any case that it shares with medicine, mechanical sciences, or theology; but that it involves a type of history - a form of dispersion in time, a mode of succession, of stability, and of reactivation, a speed of deployment or rotation - that belongs to it alone, even if it is not entirely unrelated to other types of history. Moreover, this a priori does not elude historicity: it does not constitute, above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal structure; it is defined as the group of rules that characterize a discursive practice: but these rules are not imposed from the outside on the elements that they relate together; they are caught up in the very things that they connect; and if they are not modified with the least of them, they modify them, and are transformed with them into certain decisive thresholds. The a priori of positivities is not only the system of a temporal dispersion; it is itself a transformable group.

Opposed to formal a prioris whose jurisdiction extends without con­tingence, there is a purely empirical figure; but on the other hand, since it makes it possible to grasp discourses in the law of their actual development, it must be able to take account of the fact that such a discourse, at a given moment, may accept or put into operation, or, on the contrary, exclude, forget, or ignore this or that formal structure. It cannot take account (by some kind of psychological or cultural gen­esis) of the formal a prioris; but it enables us to understand how the formal a prioris may have in history points of contact, places of insertion, irruption, or emergence, domains or occasions of operation, and to understand how this history may be not an absolutely extrinsic contin­gence, not a necessity of form deploying its own dialectic, but a spe­cific regularity. Nothing, therefore, would be more pleasant, or more inexact, than to conceive of this historical a priori as a formal a priori that is also endowed with a history: a great, unmoving, empty figure that irrupted one day on the surface of time, that exercised over men's thought a tyranny that none could escape, and which then suddenly disappeared in a totally unexpected, totally unprecedented eclipse: a transcendental syncopation, a play of intermittent forms. The formal a priori and the historical a priori neither belong to the same level nor share the same nature: if they intersect, it is because they occupy two different dimensions.

The domain of statements thus articulated in accordance with histor­ical a prioris, thus characterized by different types of positivity, and divided up by distinct discursive formations, no longer has that appearance of a monotonous, endless plain that I attributed to it at the outset when I spoke of `the surface of discourse'; it also ceases to appear as the inert, smooth, neutral element in which there arise, each according to its own movement, or driven by some obscure dynamic, themes, ideas, concepts, knowledge. We are now dealing with a com­plex volume, in which heterogeneous regions are differentiated or deployed, in accordance with specific rules and practices that cannot be superposed. Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the density of dis-cursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive.

By this term I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation. On the contrary, it is rather the reason why so many things, said by so many men, for so long, have not emerged in accordance with the same laws of thought, or the same set of circumstances, why they are not simply the signalization, at the level of verbal performances, of what could be deployed in the order of the mind or in the order of things; but they appeared by virtue of a whole set of relations that are peculiar to the discursive level; why, instead of being adventitious figures, grafted, as it were, in a rather haphazard way, on to silent processes, they are born in accordance with specific regularities; in short, why, if there are things said - and those only - one should seek the immediate reason for them in the things that were said not in them, nor in the men that said them, but in the system of discursivity, in the emmciative possibilities and impossibilites that it lays down. The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which deter-mines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accord­ance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale. The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability. Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning. Far from being that which unifies every-thing that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.

Between the language (langue) that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. It does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place; nor is it the welcoming oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational field of its freedom; between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.

It is obvious that the archive of a society, a culture, or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively; or even, no doubt, the archive of a whole period. On the other hand, it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say - and to itself, the object of our discourse - its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance. The archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable. It emerges in fragments, regions, and levels, more fully, no doubt, and with greater sharpness, the greater the time that separ­ates us from it: at most, were it not for the rarity of the documents, the greater chronological distance would be necessary to analyse it. And yet could this description of the archive be justified, could it elucidate that which makes it possible, map out the place where it speaks, control its rights and duties, test and develop its concepts - at least at this stage of the search, when it can define its possibilities only in the moment of their realization - if it persisted in describing only the most distant horizons? Should it not approach as close as possible to the positivity that governs it and the archive system that makes it possible today to speak of the archive in general? Should it not illuminate, if only in an oblique way, that enunciative field of which it is itself a part? The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us. The description of the archive deploys its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice; it begins with the outside of our own language (langage); its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices. In this sense, it is valid for our diagnosis. Not because it would enable us to draw up a table of our distinctive features, and to sketch out in advance the face that we will have in the future. But it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history; it breaks the thread of transcendental tele­ologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned man's being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other, and the outside. In this sense, the diagnosis does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, i.s this dispersion that we are and. make.

The never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the arch­ive forms the general horizon to which the description of discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of the enunciative field belong. The right of words - which i.s not that of the philologists - authorizes, therefore, the use of the term archaeology to describe all these searches. This term does not imply the search for a beginning; it does not relate analysis to geological excavation. It designates the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs. Archaeology describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive.