Part IV Archaeological Description
1. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
We can now reverse the procedure; we can go downstream, and, once we have covered the domain of discursive formations and statements, once we have outlined their general theory, we can proceed to possible domains of application. We can examine what use is served by this analysis that I have rather solemnly called 'archaeology'. Indeed, we must: for, to be frank, as they are at the moment, things are rather disturbing. I set out with a relatively simple problem: the division of discourse into great unities that were not those of oeuvres, authors, books, or themes. And with the sole purpose of establishing them, I have set about constructing a whole series of notions (discursive formations, positivity, archive), I have defined a domain (statements, the enunciative field, discursive practices), I have tried to reveal the specificity of a method that is neither formalizing nor interpretative; in short, I have appealed to a whole apparatus, whose sheer weight and, no doubt, somewhat bizarre machinery are a source of embarrassment. For two or three reasons: there exist already enough methods for describing and analysing language (langage) for it not to be presumptuous to wish to add another. And, anyway, I was suspicious of such unities of discourse as the 'book' and the 'oeuvre' because I suspected them of not being as immediate and self-evident as they appeared: is it reasonable to replace them by unities that one has established with so much effort, after so much groping, and in accordance with principles so obscure that it has taken hundreds of pages to elucidate them? And are the things that all these instruments finally delimit, those 'dis-courses' whose identity they map out, the same as those figures (called 'psychiatry', or 'political economy', or 'Natural History') for which I empirically set out, and which have provided me with a pretext for developing this strange arsenal? It is n.ow of the utmost importance that I should measure the descriptive efficacy of the notions that I have tried to define. I must discover whether the machine works, and what it can produce. What, then, can this 'archaeology' offer that other descriptions are unable to provide? What are the rewards for such a heavy enterprise?
And now a suspicion occurs to me. I have behaved as if I were discovering a n.ew domain, as if, in order to chart it, I needed new measurements and guide-lines. But, in fact, was I not all the time in that very space that has long been known as 'the history of ideas'? Was it not to that space that I was implicitly referring, even when on two or three occasions I tried to keep my distance? And if I had not forced myself to turn away from it, would I not have found in it, already prepared, already analysed, all that I was looking for? Perhaps I am a historian of ideas after all. But an ashamed, or, if you prefer, a pre-sumptuous historian of ideas. One who set out to renew his discipline from top to bottom; who wanted., no doubt, to achieve a rigour that so many other, similar descriptions have recently acquired; but who, unable to modify in any real way that old form of analysis, to make it cross the threshold of scientificity (or finding that such a meta-morphosis is always impossible, or that h.e did not have the strength to effect that transformation himself), declares that h.e had been doing, and wanted to do, something quite different. All this new fog just to hide what remained in the same landscape, fixed to an old patch of ground cultivated to the point of exhaustion. I cannot be satisfied until I have cut myself off from 'the history of ideas', until I have shown in what way archaeological analysis differs from the descriptions of 'the history of ideas'.
It is not easy to characterize a discipline like the history of ideas: it is an uncertain object, with badly drawn frontiers, methods borrowed from here and there, and an approach lacking in. rigour and stability. And it seems to possess two roles. On the one hand, it recounts the by-ways and margins of history. Not the history of the sciences, but that of imperfect, ill-based knowledge, which could never in the whole of its long, persistent life attain the form of scientificity (the history of alchemy rather than chemistry, of animal spirits or phrenology rather than physiology, the history of atomistic themes rather than physics). The history of those shady philosophies that haunt literature, art, the sciences, law, ethics, and even man's daily life; the history of those age-old themes that are never crystallized in a rigorous and individual system, but which have formed the spontaneous philosophy of those who did not philosophize. The history not of literature but of that tangential rumour, that everyday, transient writing that never acquires the status of an oeuvre, or is immediately lost: the analysis of sub-literatures, almanacs, reviews and newpapers, temporary successes, anonymous authors. Thus defined - but one can see at once how difficult it is to fix precise limits for it - the history of ideas is concerned with all that insidious thought, that whole interplay of representations that flow anonymously between men; in the interstices of the great discursive monuments, it reveals the crumbling soil on which they are based. It is the discipline of fluctuating languages (langages), of shapeless works, of unrelated themes. The analysis of opinions rather than of knowledge, of errors rather than of truth, of types of mentality rather than of forms of thought.
But on the other hand the history of ideas sets out to cross the boundaries of existing disciplines, to deal with them from the outside, and to reinterpret them. Rather than a marginal domain, then, it constitutes a style of analysis, a putting into perspective. It takes account of the historical field of the sciences, of literature, of philosophy: but it describes the knowledge that has served as an empirical., unreflective basis for subsequent formalizations; it tries to rediscover the immediate experience that discourse transcribes; it follows the genesis, which, on the basis of received or acquired representations, gives birth to systems and ceuvres. It shows, on the other hand, how the great figures that are built up in this way gradually decompose: how the themes fall apart, pursue their isolated lives, fall into disuse, or are recomposed in a new way. The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole inter-play of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific know-ledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.
It is clear how these two roles of the history of ideas are articulated one upon the other. In its most general form, it can be said that it continually describes - and in all the directions in which it operates - the transition from non-philosophy to philosophy, from non-scientificity to science, from non-literature to the æuvre itself. It is the analysis of silent births, or distant correspondences, of permanences that persist beneath apparent changes, of slow formations that profit from innumerable blind complicities, of those total figures that gradually come together and suddenly condense into the fine point of the work. Genesis, continuity, totalization: these are the great themes of the history of ideas, and that by which it is attached to a certain, now traditional, form of historical analysis. In these conditions, it is normal that anyone who still practises history, its methods, its requirements and possibilities - this now rather shop-soiled idea - cannot conceive that a discipline like the history of ideas should be abandoned; or rather, considers that any other form of analysing discourses is a betrayal of history itself. But archaeological description is precisely such an abandonment of the history of ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures, an attempt to practise a quite different history of what men have said. That some people do not recognize in this enterprise the history of their childhood, that they mourn its passing, and continue to invoke, in an age that is no longer made for it, that great shade of former times, certainly proves their fidelity. But such conservative zeal confirms me in my purpose and gives me the confidence to do what I set out to do.
Between archaeological analysis and the history of ideas there are a great many points of divergence. I shall try shortly to establish four differences that seem to me to be of the utmost importance. They concern the attribution of innovation, the analysis of contradictions, comparative descriptions, and the mapping of transformations. I hope that by examining these different points we will be able to grasp the specific qualities of archaeological analysis, and that we may be able to measure its descriptive capacity. For the moment, however, I should like to lay down a few principles.
1.Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in dis-courses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be 'allegorical'.
2.Archaeology does not seek to rediscover th.e continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them. It does not await the moment when, on the basis of what they were not yet, they became what they are; nor the moment when, the solidity of their figure crumbling away, they will gradually lose their identity. On the contrary, its problem is to define discourses in their specificity; to show in what way the set of rules that they put into operation is irreducible to any other; to follow them the whole length of their exterior ridges, in order to underline them the better. It does not proceed, in slow pro-gression, from the confused field of opinion to the uniqueness of the system or the definitive stability of science; it is not a 'doxology'; but a differential analysis of the modalities of discourse.
3.Archaeology is not ordered in accordance with the sovereign figure of the oeuvres; it does not try to grasp the moment in which the oeuvre emerges on the anonymous horizon. It does not wish to rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and the social are inverted into one another. It is neither a psychology, nor a sociology, nor more generally an anthropology of creation.. The oeuvre is not for archaeology a relevant division, even if it is a matter of replacing it in its total context or in the network of causalities that support it. It defines types of rules for discursive practices that run through individual oeuvres, sometimes govern them entirely, and dominate them to such an extent that nothing eludes them; but which sometimes, too, govern only part of it. The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d'etre of an oeuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it.
4.Lastly, archaeology does not try to restore what has been thought, wished, aimed at, experienced, desired by men in the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse; it does not set out to recapture that elusive nucleus in which the author and the oeuvre exchange identities; in which thought still remains nearest to one-self, in the as yet unaltered form of the same, and in which language (langage) has n.ot yet been deployed in the spatial, successive dispersion. of discourse. In other words, it does not try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity. It does not claim to efface itself in the ambiguous modesty of a reading that would bring back, in all its purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin. It is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object.
2. THE ORIGINAL And THE REGULAR
In general, the history of ideas deals with the field of discourses as a domain with two values; any element located there may be characterized as old or new; traditional or original; conforming to an average type or deviant. One can distinguish. therefore between two categories of formulation: those that are highly valued and relatively rare, which appear for the first time, which have no similar antecedents, which may serve as models for others, and which to this extent deserve to be regarded as creations; and those, ordinary, everyday, solid, that are not responsible for themselves, and which. derive, sometimes going so far as to repeat it word for word, from what has already been said. To each of these two groups the history of ideas gives a status; and it does not subject them to the same analysis: in describing the first, it recounts the history of inventions, changes, transformations, it shows how truth freed itself from error, how consciousness awoke from its successive slumbers, how new forms rose up i.n turn to produce the landscape that we know today; it is the task of the historian to rediscover on the basis of these isolated points, these successive ruptures, the continuous line of an evolution. The second group, on the other hand, reveals history as inertia and weight, as a slow accumulation of the past, a silent sedimentation of things said; in this second group, statements must he treated by weight and in accordance with what they have in common; their unique occurrence may be neutralized; the importance of their author's identity, the time and place of their appearance are also diminished; on the other hand, it is their extent that must be measured; the extent of their repetition in time and place, the channels by which they are diffused, the groups in which they circulate; the general horizon that they outline for men's thought, the limits that they impose on it; and how, in characterizing a period, they make it possible to distinguish it from others; one then describes a series of overall figures. In the first case, the history of ideas describes a succession of events in thought; in the second, there are uninterrupted expanses of effects; in the first, one reconstitutes the emergence of truths of forms; in the second, one re-establishes forgotten solidities, and refers discourses to their relativity.
It is true that, between these two authorities, the history of ideas is continuously determining relations; neither analysis is ever found in its pure state; it describes conflicts between the old and the new, the resistance of the acquired, the repression that it exercises over what has so far never been said, the coverings by which it masks it, the oblivion to which it sometimes succeeds in confining it; but it also describes the conditions, which, obscurely and at a distance, will facilitate the emergence of future discourses; it describes the repercussions of discoveries, the speed and extent of their diffusion, the slow processes of replacement or the sudden upheavals that overthrow familiar language (langage); it describes the integration of the new in the already structured field of the acquired, the progressive fall from the original into the traditional, or, again, the reappearances of the already-said, and the uncovering of the original. But this intersection does not prevent it from always maintaining a bipolar analysis of the old and the new. An analysis that reinvests in the empirical element of history, and in each of its stages, the problematic of the origin: in every æuvre, in every hook, in the smallest text, the problem is to rediscover the point of rupture, to establish, with the greatest possible precision, the division between the implicit density of the already-said, a perhaps involuntary fidelity to acquired opinion, the law of discursive fatalities, and the vivacity of creation, the leap into irreducible difference. Although this description of originalities may seem obvious enough, it poses two very different methodological problems; that of resemblance and that of procession. It presupposes, in effect, that one can establish a sort of single, great series in which every formulation would assume a date in accordance with homogeneous chronological guide-lines. But, to examine the question more closely, does Grimm, with his law of vowel-gradations, precede Bopp (who quoted him, used him, applied and modified what he said) in the same way and on the same temporal line; and did Cceurdoux and Anquetil-Duperron (in observing analogies between Greek and Sanskrit) anticipate the definition of the Indo-European languages, and precede the founders of comparative grammar? Was Saus-sure 'preceded' by Peirce and his semiotics, by Arnauld and Lancelot with the Classical analysis of the sign, and by the Stoics and the theory of the 'signifier', in the same series and in accordance with the same mode of anteriority? Precession is not an irreducible and primary donnee; it cannot play the role of an absolute measure that makes it possible to gauge all discourse and to distinguish the original from the repetitive. The mapping of antecedents is not enough, in itself, to determine a discursive order; on the contrary, it is subordinated to the discourse that one is analysing, at the level that one chooses, on the scale that one establishes. By deploying discourse throughout a calendar, and by giving a date to each of its elements, one does not obtain a definitive hierarchy of precessions and originalities; this hierarchy is never more than relative to the systems of discourse that it sets out to evaluate.
Similarly, the resemblance between two or several successive formulations also poses a whole series of problems. In what sense and in accordance with what criteria can one affirm: 'this has been said'; 'the same thing can already he found in this or that text', etc.? What is identity, partial or total, in the order of discourse? The fact that two enunciations are exactly identical, that they are made up of the same words used with the same meaning, does not, as we know, mean that they are absolutely identical. Even when one finds, in the work of Diderot and Lamarck, or of Benoit de Maillet and Darwin, the same formulation of the principle of evolution, one cannot consider that one is dealing in each case with the same discursive event, which has been subjected at different times to a series of repetitions. Identity is not a criterion even when it is exhaustive; even less so when it is partial, when words are not used each time in the same sense, or when the same nucleus of meaning is apprehended through different words: to what extent can one affirm that it is the same organicist theme that emerges in the so very different discourses and vocabularies of Buffon, Jussieu, and Cuvier? And, inversely, can one say that the word 'organization' has the same meaning in the work of Daubenton, Blumenbach, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire? Generally speaking, does one find the same type of resemblance between Cuvier and Darwin, and between Cuvier and Linnaeus (or Aristotle)? There is no immediately recognizable resemblance between the formulations: their analogy is an effect of the discursive field in which it is mapped.
It is not legitimate, then, to demand, point-blank, of the texts that one is studying their title to originality, and whether they really possess those degrees of nobility that are measured here by the absence of ancestors. The question can have meaning only in very precisely defined series, in groups whose limits and domain have been established, between guide-lines that delimit sufficiently homogeneous dis-cursive fields.' But to seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles 'in advance' a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port-Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.
Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to which the facts of succession must be referred if one is not to establish them in an unsystematic and naive way, that is in terms of merit. At the level in which they are, the originality/banality opposition is therefore not relevant: between an initial formulation and the sentence, which, years, centuries later, repeats it more or less exactly, it establishes no hierarchy of value; it makes no radical difference. It tries It was in this way that M. Canguilhem established the series of propositions which, from Willis to Prochaska, made possible the definition of the reflex.
only to establish the regularity of statements. In this sense, regularity is not in opposition to irregularity, which, in the margins of current opinion or the most frequent texts, characterizes the deviant statement (abnormal, prophetic, retarded, pathological, or the product of genius); it designates, for every verbal performance (extraordinary, or banal, unique in its own kind or endlessly repeated), the set of conditions in which the enunciative function operates, and which guarantees and defines its existence. In this sense, regularity does not characterize a certain central position between the ends of a statistical curve - it is not valid therefore as an index of frequency or probability; it specifies an effective field of appearance. Every statement bears a certain regularity and it cannot be dissociated from it. One must not therefore oppose the regularity of a statement with the irregularity of another (that may he less expected, more unique, richer in. innovation), but to other regularities that characterize other statements.
Archaeology is not in search of inventions; and it remains unmoved at the moment (a very moving one, I admit) when for the first time someone was sure of some truth; it does not try to restore the light of those joyful mornings. But neither is it concerned with the average phenomena of opinion, with the dull grey of what everyone at a particular period might repeat. What it seeks in the texts of Linnaeus or Buffon, Petty or Ricardo, Pinel or Bichat, is not to draw up a list of founding saints; it is to uncover the regularity of a discursive practice. A practice that is in operation, in the same way, in the work of their predecessors; a practice that takes account in their work not only of the most original affirmations (those that no one else dreamt of before them), but also of those that they borrowed, even copied, from their predecessors. A discovery is no less regular, from the enunciative point of view, than the text that repeats an.d diffuses it; regularity is no less operant, no less effective and active, in a banal as in a unique forma-tion. In. such a description one cannot admit a difference in nature between creative statements (which reveal something new, which emit hitherto unknown information, and which are 'active' in the same way) and imitative statements (which receive and repeat information, an.d remain, as it were, 'passive'). The field of statements is not a group of inert areas broken up by fecund moments; it is a domain that is active throughout.
This analysis of enunciative regularities opens up in several directions that one day perhaps will be explored with greater care.
1. A group of statements is characterized, then, by a certain form of regularity, without it being either necessary or possible to distinguish between what is new and what is not. But these regularities - we shall come hack to them later - are not given once and for all; the same regularity is not to be found at work in Tournefort and Darwin, Lancelot and Saussure, Petty and Keynes. There are, then, homogeneous fields of enunciative regularities (they characterize a discursive forma-tion), but these fields are different from one another. The movement from one field of enunciative regularities to another need not be accompanied by corresponding changes at all other levels of discourse. There are verbal performances that are identical from the point of view of grammar (vocabulary, syntax, and the language (langue) in general); that are also identical. from the point of view of logic (from the point of view of propositional structure, or of the deductive system in which it is placed) ; but which. are enunciatively different. Thus the formation of the quantitative relation between prices and monetary mass in circulation may be expressed in the same words - or synonymous words - and be obtained by the same reasoning; but it is not enunciatively identical in Gresham or Locke and the nineteenth-century marginalists; it does not belong in each case to the same system of formation of objects and concepts. We must distinguish, then, between linguistic ana-logy (or translatability), logical identity (or equivalence), and enunciative homogeneity. It is with these homogeneities and these alone that archaeology is concerned. It can see the appearance of a new discursive practice through verbal formulations that remain linguistically analogous or logically equivalent (by taking up again, sometimes word for word, the old theory of sentence-attribution and verb-copula the Port-Royal grammarians opened up an enunciative regularity whose specificity it is the duty of archaeology to describe). Inversely, it may ignore differences of vocabulary, it may pass over semantic fields or different deductive organizations, if it is capable of recognizing in each case, despite their heterogeneity, a certain enunciative regularity (from this point of view, the theory of the language (langage) of action, the search for the origin of languages (longues), the establishment of primitive roots, as they are found in the eighteenth century, are not 'new' in relation to Lancelot's 'logical' analyses)
One can see the emergence therefore of a number of disconnexions and articulations. One can no longer say that a discovery, the formula-tion of a general principle, or the definition of a project, inaugurates, in a massive way, a new phase in the history of discourse. One no longer has to seek that point of absolute origin or total revolution on the basis of which everything is organized, everything becomes possible and necessary, everything is effaced in order to begin again. One is deal-ing with. events of different types and levels, caught up in distinct historical webs; the establishment of an enunciative homogeneity in no way implies that, for decades or centuries to come, men will say and think the same thing; nor does it imply the definition, explicit or not, of a number of principles from which everything else would flow, as inevitable consequences. Enunciative homogeneities (and heterogeneities) intersect with linguistic continuities (and changes), with logical identities (and differences), without any of them proceeding at the same pace or necessarily affecting one another. But there must exist between them a number of relations and inter-dependences whose no doubt highly complex domain must be described.
2. Another direction of research: the interior hierarchies within enunciative regularities. We have seen that every statement belongs to a certain regularity - that consequently none can be regarded as pure creation, as the marvellous disorder of genius. But we have also seen that no statement can be regarded as inactive, and be valid as the scarcely real shadow or transfer of the initial statement. The whole enunciative field is both regular and alerted: it never sleeps; the least statement - the most discreet or the most banal - puts into operation a whole set of rules in accordance with which its object, its modality, the concepts that it employs, and the strategy of which it is a part, are formed. These rules are never given in a formulation, they 'traverse' formulations, and set up for them a space of coexistence; one cannot therefore rediscover the unique statement that would articulate them for themselves. However, certain groups of statements put these rules into operation in their most general and most widely applicable form;
using them as a starting-point, one can see how other objects, other concepts, other enunciative modalities, or other strategic choices may be formed on the basis of rules that are less general and whose domain of application is more specified. One can thus describe a tree of enunciative derivation: at its base are the statements that put into operation rules of formation in their most extended form; at its summit, and after a number of branchings, are the statements that put into operation the same regularity, but one more delicately articulated, more clearly delimited and localized in its extension.
Archaeology - and this is one of its principal themes - may thus constitute the tree of derivation of a discourse. That of Natural History, for example. It will place at the root, as governing statements, those that concern the definition of observable structures and the field of possible objects, those that prescribe the forms of description and the perceptual codes that it can use, those that reveal the most general possibilities of characterization, and thus open up a whole domain of concepts to be constructed, and, lastly, those that, while constituting a strategic choice, leave room for the greatest number of subsequent options. And it will find, at the ends of the branches, or at various places in the whole, a burgeoning of `discoveries' (like that of fossil series), conceptual transformations (like the new definition of the genus), the emergence of new notions (like that of mammals or organ-ism), technical improvements (principles for organizing collections, methods of classification and nomenclature). This derivation from governing statements must not be confused with a deduction that is made on the basis of axioms; nor must it be identified with the germination of a general idea, or a philosophical nucleus whose significance emerges gradually in experience or precise conceptualizations; lastly, it must not he taken as a psychological genesis based on a discovery whose consequences and possibilities gradually develop and unfold. It is different from all these courses, and it must be described in its autonomy. One can thus describe the archaeological derivations of Natural History without beginning with its undemonstrable axioms or its fundamental themes (the continuity of nature, for example), and without taking as one's starting-point and guiding-thread the first discoveries or the first approaches (those of Tournefort before those of Linnaeus, those of Jonston before those of Tournefort). The archaeo-
logical order is neither that of systematici ties, nor that of chronological successions.
But one can see that a whole domain of possible questions is open-ing up here. For these different orders cannot be specific and autonomous; there must be relations and dependences between them. For certain discursive formations, the archaeological order is perhaps not very different from the systematic order, as in other cases it may follow the thread of chronological successions. These parallelisms (contrary to the distortions met with elsewhere) are worthy of analysis. In any case, it is important not to confuse these different orders, not to seek in an 'initial' discovery or in the originality of a formulation the principle from which everything can be deduced and derived; not to seek in a general principle the law of enunciative regularities or individual inventions; not to demand of archaeological derivation that it reproduce the order of time or reveal a deductive schema.
Nothing would be more false than to see in the analysis of dis-cursive formations an attempt at totalitarian periodization, whereby from a certain moment and for a certain time, everyone would think in the same way, in spite of surface differences, say the same thing, through a polymorphous vocabulary, and produce a sort of great dis-course that one could travel over in any direction. On the contrary, archaeology describes a level of enunciative homogeneity that has its own temporal articulations, and which does not carry with it all the other forms of identity and difference that are to be found in language; and at this level, it establishes an order, hierarchies, a whole burgeon-ing that excludes a massive, amorphous synchrony, given totally once and for all. In those confused unities that we call 'periods', it reveals, with all their specificity, 'enunciative periods' that are articulated, but without being confused with them, upon the time of concepts, on theoretical phases, on stages of formalization and of linguistic development.
3. CONTRADICTIONS
The history of ideas usually credits the discourse that it analyses with coherence. If it happens to notice an irregularity in the use of words, several incompatible propositions, a set of meanings that do not adjust to one another, concepts that cannot be systematized together, then it regards it as its duty to find, at a deeper level, a principle of cohesion that organizes the discourse and restores to it its hidden unity. This law of coherence is a heuristic rule, a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of research: not to multiply contradictions uselessly; not to be taken in by small differences; not to give too much weight to changes, disavowals, returns to the past, and polemics; not to suppose that men's discourse is perpetually undermined from within by the contradiction of their desires, the influences that they have been subjected to, or the conditions in which they live; but to admit that if they speak, and if they speak among themselves, it is rather to overcome these contradictions, and to find the point from which they will be able to be mastered. But this same coherence is also the result of research: it defines the terminal unities that complete the analysis; it discovers the internal organization of a text, the form of development of an individual oeuvre, or the meeting-place of different discourses. In order to reconstitute it, it must first be presupposed, and one will only be sure of finding it if one has pursued it far enough and for long enough. It appears as an optimum: the greatest possible number of contradictions resolved by the simplest means.
But a great many means are used and, by that very fact, the coherences found may differ considerably. By analysing the truth of propositions and the relations that unite them, one can define a field of logical non-contradiction: one will then discover a systematicity; one will rise from the visible body of sentences to that pure, ideal architecture that the ambiguities of grammar and the overloading of words with meanings have probably concealed as much as expressed. But one can adopt the contrary course, and, by following the thread of analogies and symbols, rediscover a thematic that is more imaginary than discursive, more affective than rational, and less close to the concept than to desire; its force animates the most opposed figures, but only to melt them at once into a slowly transformable unity; what one then dis-covers is a plastic continuity, the movement of a meaning that is embodied in various representations, images, and metaphors. These coherences may be thematic or systematic, explicit or not: they can be sought at the level of representations that were conscious in the speak-ing subject, but which his discourse - for circumstantial reasons or because of an inadequacy in the very form of his language (langage) - failed to express; it can also be sought in structures that would have constrained the author the more he constructed them, and which would have imposed on him, without his realizing it, postulates, operational schemata, linguistic rules, a set of affirmations and fundamental beliefs, types of images, or a whole logic of the fantastic. Lastly, there are coherences that one establishes at the level of an individual - his biography, or the unique circumstances of his discourse - but one can also establish them in accordance with broader guide-lines, one can give them the collective, diachronic dimensions of a period, a genera] form of consciousness, a type of society, a set of traditions, an imaginary landscape common to a whole culture. In all these forms, a coherence discovered in this way always plays the same role: it shows that immediately visible contradictions are merely surface reflections; and that this play of dispersed light must be concentrated into a single focus. Contradiction is the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness, thought and the text, the ideality and the contingent body of expression. In any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can.
At the end of this work, only residual contradictions remain - accidents, defects, mistakes - or, on the contrary, as if the entire analysis had been carried out in secrecy and in spite of itself, the fundamental contradiction emerges: the bringing into play, at the very origin of the system, of incompatible postulates, intersections of irreconcilable influences, the first diffraction of desire, the economic and political conflict that opposes a society to itself, all this, instead of appearing as so many superficial elements that must be reduced, is finally revealed as an organizing principle, as the founding, secret law that accounts for all minor contradictions and gives them a firm foundation: in short, a model for all the other oppositions. Such a contradiction, far from being an appearance or accident of discourse, far from being that from which it must be freed if its truth is at last to be revealed, constitutes the very law of its existence: it is on the basis of such a contradiction that discourse emerges, and it is in order both to translate it and to overcome it that discourse begins to speak; it is in order to escape that contradiction, whereas contradiction is ceaselessly reborn through dis-course, that discourse endlessly pursues itself and endlessly begins again; it is because contradiction is always anterior to the discourse, and because it can never therefore entirely escape it, that discourse changes, undergoes transformation, and escapes of itself from its own continuity. Contradiction, then, functions throughout discourse, as the principle of its historicity.
The history of ideas recognizes, therefore, two levels of contradiction: that of appearances, which is resolved in the profound unity of discourse; and that of foundations, which gives rise to discourse itself. In relation to the first level of contradiction, discourse is the ideal figure that must be separated from their accidental presence, from their too visible body; in relation to the second, discourse is the empirical figure that contradictions may take up and whose apparent cohesion must be destroyed, in order to rediscover them at last in their irruption and violence. Discourse is the path from one contradiction to another: if it gives rise to those that can be seen, it is because it obeys that which it hides. To analyse discourse is to hide and reveal contradictions; it is to show the play that they set up within it; it is to manifest how it can express them, embody them, or give them a temporary appearance.
For archaeological analysis, contradictions are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered. They are objects to be described for themselves, without any attempt being made to discover from what point of view they can be dissipated, or at what level they can be radicalized and effects become causes. Let us take a simple example, one that has already been mentioned several times: in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus's fixist principle was contradicted, not so much by the discovery of the Peloria, which changed only its modes of application, but by a number of 'evolutionist' affirmations that are to be found in the works of Buffon, Diderot, Bordeu, Maillet, and many others. Archaeological analysis does not consist in showing that beneath this opposition, at a more essential level, everyone accepted a number of fundamental theses (the continuity and plenitude of nature, the correlation between recent forms and climate, the almost imperceptible transition from the non-living to the living); nor does it consist in showing that such an opposition reflects, in the particular domain of Natural History, a more general conflict that divides all eighteenth-century knowledge and thought (the conflict between the theme of an ordered creation, acquired once and for all, deployed without irreducible secret, and the theme of a prolific nature, endowed with enigmatic powers, gradually deploying itself through history, and overturning all spatial orders in obedience to the onward thrust of time). Archaeology tries to show how the two affirmations, fixist and 'evolutionist', share a common locus in a certain description of species and genera: this description takes as its object the visible structure of organs (that is, their form, size, number, and arrangement in space); and it can limit that object in two ways (to the organism as a whole, or to certain elements, determined either by importance or by taxonomic convenience); one then reveals, in the second case, a regular table, containing a number of definite squares, that in a way constitutes the programme of all possible creation (so that, whether present, still to come, or already disappeared, the ordering of the species and genera is definitively fixed) ; and in the first case, groups of kinship that remain indefinite and open, that are separated from one another, and that tolerate an indeterminate number of new forms, however close they may be to preexisting forms. By deriving in this way the contradiction between two theses from a certain domain of objects, from its delimitations and divisions, one does not discover a point of conciliation. But neither does one transfer it to a more fundamental level; one defines the locus in which it takes place; it reveals the place where the two branches of the alternative join; it localizes the divergence and the place where the two discourses are juxtaposed. The theory of structure is not a common postulate, a basis of general belief shared by Linnaeus and Buffon, a solid, fundamental affirmation that throws back to the level of a subsidiary debate the conflict of evolutionism and fixism; it is the principle of their incompatibility, the law that governs their derivation and their coexistence. By taking contradictions as objects to be described, archaeological analysis does not try to discover in their place a common form or theme, it tries to determine the extent and form of the gap that separates them. In relation to a history of ideas that attempts to melt contradictions in the semi-nocturnal unity of an overall figure, or which attempts to transmute them into a general, abstract, uniform principle of interpretation or explanation, archaeology describes the different spaces of dissension.
It ceases, therefore, to treat contradictions as a general function operating, in the same way, at all levels of discourse, and which analysis should either suppress entirely or lead back to a primary, constitutive form: for the great game of contradiction - present under innumerable guises, then suppressed, and finally restored in the major conflict in which it culminates - it substitutes the analysis of different types of contradiction, different levels in accordance with which it can be mapped, different functions that it can exercise.
Different types first of all. Some contradictions are localized only at the level of propositions and assertions, without in any way affecting the body of enunciative rules that makes them possible: thus in the eighteenth century the thesis of the animal character of fossils was opposed by the more traditional thesis of their mineral nature; the consequences that can be drawn from these two theses are certainly very numerous and far-reaching; but it can be shown that they originated in the same discursive formation, at the same point, and in accordance with the same conditions of operation of the enunciative function; they are contradictions that are archaeologically derived, and which constitute a terminal state. Others, on the contrary, go beyond the bounds of a discursive formation, and they oppose theses that do not belong to the same conditions of enunciation: thus Linnaeus's fixism is contradicted by Darwin's evolutionism, but only to the extent that one neutralizes the difference between Natural History, to which the first belongs, and biology, to which the second belongs. They are extrinsic contradictions that reflect the opposition between distinct dis-cursive formations. For archaeological description (ignoring, for the moment, any possible procedural differences), this opposition constitutes the terminus a quo, whereas derived contradictions constitute the terminus ad quem of analysis. Between these two extremes, archaeological description describes what might be called intrinsic contradictions: those that are deployed in the discursive formation itself, and which, originating at one point in the system of formations, reveal sub-systems: hence, to keep to the example of eighteenth-century Natural History, the contradiction between `methodical' analyses and 'systematic' analyses. The opposition here is not a terminal one: they are not two contradictory propositions about the same object, they are not two incompatible uses of the same concept, but two ways of forming statements, both characterized by certain objects, certain positions of subjectivity, certain concepts, and certain strategic choices. Yet these systems are not primary ones: for it can be shown to what extent they both derive from a single positivity, that of Natural History. It is these intrinsic oppositions that are relevant to archaeological analysis.
Then different levels. An intrinsic archaeological contradiction is not a fact, purely and simply, that it is enough to state as a principle or explain as an effect. It is a complex phenomenon that is distributed over different levels of the discursive formation. Thus, for systematic Natural History and methodical Natural History, which were in con-stant opposition for a good part of the eighteenth century, one can recognize: an inadequation of the objects (in the one case one describes the general appearance of the plant; in the other certain predetermined variables; in the one case, one describes the totality of the plant, or at least its most important parts, in the other one describes a number of elements chosen arbitrarily for their taxonomic convenience; some-times one takes account of the plant's different states of growth and maturity, at others one confines one's attention to a single moment, a stage of optimum visibility); a divergence of enunciative modalities (in the case of the systematic analysis of plants, one applies a rigorous perceptual and linguistic code, and in accordance with a constant scale; for methodical description, the codes are relatively free, and the scales of mapping may oscillate); an incompatibility of concepts (in the 'systems', the concept of generic character is an arbitrary, though mislead-ing mark to designate the genera; in the methods this same concept must include the real definition of the genus); lastly, an exclusion of theoretical options (systematic taxonomy makes 'fixism' possible, even if it is rectified by the idea of a continuous creation in time, gradually unfolding the elements of the tables, or by the idea of natural catastrophes having disturbed by our present gaze the linear order of natural proximities, but excludes the possibility of a transformation that the method accepts without absolutely implying it).
Functions. These forms of opposition do not all play the same role in discursive practice: they are not, in a homogeneous way, obstacles to overcome or a principle of growth. In any case, it is not enough to seek in them the cause either of the deceleration or the acceleration of history; time is not introduced into the truth and ideality of discourse on the basis of the empty, general form of opposition. These oppositions are always particular functional stages. Some of them bring about an additional development of the enunciative field: they open up sequences of argumentation, experiment, verification, and various inferences; they make possible the determination of new objects, they arouse new enunciative modalities, they define new concepts or modify the field of application of those that already exist: but without anything being modified in the system of positivity of the discourse (this was the case in the discussions of the eighteenth-century naturalists on the frontier between the mineral and the vegetal, or on the boundaries of life or nature and the origin of fossils); such additive processes may remain decisively open or closed by a demonstration that refutes them or a discovery that puts them out of operation. Others induce a reorganization of the discursive field: they pose the question of the possible translation of one group of statements into another, of the point of coherence that might articulate one on another, of their integration in a more general space (thus the system/method opposition among eighteenth-century naturalists induces a series of attempts to recreate both of them in a single form of description, to give to the method the rigour and. regularity of the system, to coincide the arbitrariness of the system with the concrete analyses of the method); they are not new objects, new concepts, new enunciative modalities that are added in a linear fashion to the old; but objects of another (more general or more particular) level, concepts that have another structure and another field of application, enunciations of another type, without, however, altering the rules of formation. Other oppositions play a critical role: they put into operation the existence of the `acceptability' of the discursive practice; they define the point of its effective impossibility and of its historical reflexion (thus the description., in Natural History itself, of organic similarities and functions that operate, through anatomical variables, in definite conditions of existence, no longer permits, as an autonomous discursive formation at least, a Natural. History that is a taxonomic science of beings on the basis of their visible ch.aracters).
A discursive formation is not, therefore, an ideal, continuous, smooth text that runs beneath the multiplicity of contradictions, and resolves them in the calm unity of coherent thought; nor is it the surface in which, in a thousand different aspects, a contradiction is reflected that is always in retreat, but everywhere dominant. It is rather a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described. Archaeological analysis, then, erects the primacy of a contradiction that has its model in the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a single proposition. But the reason for this is not to even out oppositions in th.e general forms of thought and to pacify them by force, by a recourse to a constructing a priori. On the contrary, its purpose is to map, in a particular discursive practice, the point at which they are constituted, to define the form that they assume, the relations that they have with each other, and the domain that they govern. In short, its purpose is to maintain discourse in all its many irregularities; and consequently to suppress the theme of a contradiction uniformly lost and rediscovered, resolved and forever rising again, in the undifferentiated element of the Logos.
4. THE COMPARATIVE FACTS
Archaeological analysis individualizes and describes discursive formations. That is, it must compare them, oppose them to one another in the simultaneity in which they are presented., distinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time-scale, relate them, on the basis of their specificity, to the non-discursive practices that surround them and serve as a general element for them. In this, too, they are very different from epistemological or `architectonic' descriptions, which analyse the internal structure of a theory; archaeological study is always in the plural; it operates in a great number of registers; it crosses interstices and gaps; it has its domain where unities are juxtaposed, separated, fix their crests, confront one another, and accentuate the whitespaces between one another. When it is concerned with a particular type of discourse (that of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization or that of medicine in Naissance de la clinique), it is in order to establish, by comparison, its chronological limits; it is also in order to describe, at the same time as them and in correlation with them, an institutional field, a set of events, practices, and political decisions, a sequence of economic processes that also involve demographic fluctuations, techniques of public assistance, manpower needs, different levels of unemployment, etc. But it may also, by a sort of lateral rapprochement (as in The Order of Things), put into operation several distinct positivities, whose concomitant states are compared during a particular period, and which are confronted with other types of discourse that have taken place at a given period.
But all these analyses are very different from those usually practised.
1. In archaeological analysis comparison is always limited and regional. Far from wishing to reveal general forms, archaeology tries to outline particular configurations. When one compares General Gram-mar, the Analysis of Wealth, and Natural History in the Classical period, it is not in order to regroup three manifestations - particularly charged with expressive value, and hitherto strangely neglected - of a mentality that was general in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it is not in order to reconstitute, on the basis of a reduced model and a particular domain, the forms of rationality that operated in the whole of Classical science; it is not even to illuminate the less well-known profile of what we thought was a familiar cultural face. Our aim was not to show that men in the eighteenth century were generally speaking more interested in order than in history, in classification than development, in signs than the mechanisms of causality. Our aim was to reveal a well-determined set of discursive formations that have a number of describable relations between them. These relations do not spill over into adjacent domains and they cannot be brought gradually closer to the totality of contemporary discourses, even less to what is usually called 'the Classical spirit'; they are closely confined to the triad being stud-ied, and are valid only in the domain specified. This interdiscursive group is itself, in its group form, related to other types of discourse (with the analysis of representation, the general theory of signs, and 'ideology' on the one hand; and with mathematics, algebraic analysis, and the attempt to establish a mathesis on the other). They are those internal and external relations that characterize Natural History, the Analysis of Wealth, and General Grammar, as a specific group, and make it possible to recognize in them an interdiscursive configuration.
There are those who would say: 'Why did you not speak of cosmology, physiology, or Biblical exegesis? Could not pre-Lavoisier chemistry, or Euler's mathematics, or Vico's history have invalidated all the analyses to be found in The Order of Things? Are there not, in the inventive richness of the eighteenth century, many other ideas that do not fit into the rigid framework of archaeology?' To such people, with their quite legitimate impatience, to all the counter-examples which, as I am very well aware, they could supply, I will reply: of course, I not only admit that my analysis is limited, I want it so; I have made it so. What for me would he a counter-example would be precisely the possibility of saying: all these relations that you have described in three particular formations, all these networks in which the theories of attribution, articulation, designation, and derivation are articulated upon one another, all that taxonomy that rests on a discontinuous characterization and a continuity of order are found uniformly, and in the same way, in geometry, rational mechanics, the physiology of humours and germs, Biblical criticism, and emergent crystallography. This would, in fact, prove that I did not describe, as I claimed to have done, a region of interpositivity; I would have characterized the spirit or science of a period - the very thing to which my whole enterprise is opposed. The relations that I have described are valid in order to define a particular configuration: they are not signs to describe the face of a culture in its totality. It is the friends of the Weltanschauung who will be disappointed; I insist that the description that I have undertaken is quite different from theirs. What, for them, is a lacuna, an omission, an error is, for me, a deliberate, methodical exclusion.
But one might also say: you have compared General. Grammar with Natural History and the Analysis of Wealth. But why not with. History as it was practised at the time, with Biblical criticism, with rhetoric, with the theory of the fine arts? Wouldn't you then have discovered a quite different field of interpositivity? What privilege, then, has the one that you have described? - Privilege, none; it is only one of the describable groups; if, in fact, one took General Grammar, and tried to define its relations with the historical disciplines and textual criticism, one would certainly see the emergence of a quite different system of relations; and a description would reveal an interdiscursive network that was not identical with the first, but which would overlap at certain points. Similarly, the taxonomy of the naturalists might be compared not with grammar and economics, but with physiology and pathology: there, too, new interpositivities would emerge (one only has to compare the taxonomy/grammar/economics relations analysed in The Order of Things with the taxonomy/pathology relations studied in Naissance de In clinique). The number of such networks is not, therefore, defined in advance; only the test of analysis can show whether they exist, and which of them exist (that is, which can be described). Moreover, every discursive formation does not belong (necessarily, at least) to only one of these systems, but enters simultaneously into several fields of relations, in which it does not occupy the same place, or exercise the same function (the taxonomy/pathology relations are not isomorphic with the taxonomy/grammar relations; the grammar/Analysis of Wealth relations are not isomorphic with the grammar/exegesis relations).
The horizon of archaeology, therefore, is not a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture; it is a tangle of interpositivities whose limits and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a single operation. Archaeology is a comparative analysis that is not intended to reduce the diversity of discourses, and to outline the unity that must totalize them, but is intended to divide up their diversity into different figures. Archaeological comparison does not have a unifying, but a diversifying, effect.
2. In confronting General Grammar, Natural History, and the Analysis of Wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one might wonder what ideas were shared at that time by linguists, naturalists, and economists; one might wonder what implicit postulates they shared despite the diversity of their theories, what general, perhaps unstated principles they obeyed; one might wonder what influence the analysis of language exercised on taxonomy, or what role the idea of an ordered nature played in the theory of wealth; one might also study the respective diffusion of these different types of discourse, the prestige accorded to each, the value attributed to it on account of its age (or, on the contrary, on account of its newness) or of its greater rigour, the channels of communication by which information was exchanged; lastly, one might, as in quite traditional analyses, wonder to what extent Rousseau had transferred to the analysis of languages and their origin his knowledge and experience as a botanist; what common categories Turgot applied to the analysis of coinage and to the theory of language and etymology; how the idea of a universal, artificial, and perfect language had been taken up again and used by such classifiers as Linnaeus and Adanson. Of course, these questions would be legitimate
(some of them, at least). But none of them would be relevant to the level of archaeology.
What archaeology wishes to uncover is primarily - in the specificity and distance maintained in various discursive formations - the play of analogies and differences as they appear at the level of rules of formation. This implies five distinct tasks:
a)To show how quite different discursive elements may be formed on the basis of similar rules (the concepts of General Grammar, like those of verb, subject, complement, root, are formed on the basis of the same arrangements of the enunciative field - theories of attribution, articulation, designation, and derivation - as the very different, radically heterogeneous concepts of Natural History and Economy); to show, between different formations, the archaeological isomorphisms.
b)To show to what extent these rules do or do not apply in the same way, are or are not linked in the same order, are or are not arranged in accordance with the same model in different types of discourse (General Grammar follows, and in that same order, the theory of attribution, the theory of articulation, the theory of designation, and the theory of derivation; Natural History and the Analysis of Wealth regroup the first two and the last two, but they link each of them in the reverse order); to define the archaeological model of each formation.
c)To show how entirely different concepts (like those of value and specific character, or price and generic character) occupy a similar position in the ramification of their system of positivity - that they are therefore endowed with an archaeological isotopia - although their domain of application, their degree of formalization, and above all their historical genesis make them quite alien to one another.
d)To show, on the other hand, how a single notion (possibly designated by a single word) may cover two archaeologically distinct elements (the notions of origin and evolution have neither the same role, the same place, nor the same formation in the system of positivity of General Grammar and Natural History); to indicate the archaeological shifts.
(e) Lastly, to show how, from one positivity to another, relations of subordination or complementarity may he established (thus in relation to the Analysis of Wealth and the analysis of species, the description of language plays a dominant role in the Classical period, in so far as it is the theory of institutional signs that duplicate, mark, and represent the representation itself): to establish the archaeological correlations.
None of these descriptions is based on the attribution of influences, exchanges, transmitted information, or communications. Not that I wish to deny their existence, or deny that they could ever be the object of a description. But rather that I have tried to step back from them, to shift the level of attack of the analysis, to reveal what made them possible; to map the points at which the projection of one concept upon another could take place, to fix the isomorphism that made a transference of methods or techniques possible, to show the proximities, sysmmetries, or analogies that have made generalizations possible; in short, to describe the field of vectors and of differential receptivity (of permeability and impermeability) that has been a condition of historical possibility for the interplay of exchanges. A configuration of interpositivity is not a group of neighbouring disciplines; it is not only an observable phenomenon of resemblance; it is not only the overall relation of several discourses to this or that other discourse; it is the law of their communications. Because Rousseau and others reflected in turn on the ordering of the species and the origin of the languages, this does not mean that relations were made and exchanges occurred between taxonomy and grammar; or because Turgot, after Law and Petty, wished to treat coinage as a sign, that economy and the theory of language were brought close together and that their history still bears the trace of these attempts. It means rather - if, at least, one is attempting to make an archaeological description - that the respective arrangements of these three positivities were such that, at the level of uuvres, authors, individual existences, projects, and attempts, one can find such exchanges.
3. Archaeology also reveals relations between discursive formations and non-discursive domains (institutions, political events, economic practices and processes). These rapprochements are not intended to uncover great cultural continuities, nor to isolate mechanisms of causality. Before a set of enunciative facts, archaeology does not ask what could have motivated them (the search for contexts of formulation); nor does it seek to rediscover what is expressed in them (the task of hermeneutics); it tries to determine how the rules of formation that govern it - and which characterize the positivity to which it belongs - may be linked to non-discursive systems: it seeks to define specific forms of articulation.
Let us take the example of clinical medicine, whose establishment at the end of the eighteenth century is contemporary with a number of political events, economic phenomena, and institutional changes. Between these facts and the organization of hospital medicine, it is easy enough to suspect the existence of certain links, at least if one operates largely on intuition. But how can such links be analysed? A symbolic analysis would see in the organizing of clinical medicine, and in the historical processes that were concomitant with it, two simultaneous expressions, which reflect and symbolize one another, which serve each other as a mirror, and whose meanings are caught up in an end-less play of reflexion: two expressions that express nothing but the form that they share. Thus medical ideas of organic solidarity, functional cohesion, tissular communication - and. the abandonment of the classificatory principle of diseases in favour of an analysis of the bodily interactions - might correspond (in order to reflect them, but also to he reflected in them) to a political practice that is discovering, beneath still feudal stratifications, relations of a functional type, economic connexions, a society whose dependences and reciprocities were to pro-vide, in the form of society, the analogon of life. A causal analysis, on the other hand, would try to discover to what extent political changes, or ecomonic processes, could determine the consciousness of scientists - the horizon and direction of their interest, their system of values, their way of perceiving things, the style of their rationality; thus, at a period in which industrial capitalism was beginning to recalculate its manpower requirements, disease took a on social dimension: the maintenance of health, cure, public assistance for the poor and sick, the search for pathological causes and sites, became a collective responsibility that must be assumed by the state. Hence the value placed upon the body as a work tool, the care to rationalize medicine on the basis of the other sciences, the efforts to maintain the level of health of a population, the attention paid to therapy, after-care, and the recording of long-term phenomena.
Archaeology situates its analysis at another level: the phenomena of expression, reflexions, and symbolization are for it merely the effects of an overall reading in search of formal analogies or translations of meaning; as for causal relations, they may be assigned to the level of the context or of the situation and their effect on the speaking subject; both, in any case, can be mapped once one has defined the positivities in which they appear and the rules in accordance with which these positivities have been formed. The field of relations that characterizes a discursive formation is the locus in which symbolizations and effects may he perceived, situated, and determined. If archaeology brings medical discourse closer to a number of practices, it is in order to discover far less 'immediate' relations than expression, but far more direct relations than those of a causality communicated through the consciousness of the speaking subjects. It wishes to show not how political practice has determined the meaning and form of medical discourse, but how and in what form it takes part in its conditions of emergence, insertion, and functioning. This relation may he assigned to several levels. First to that of the division and delimitation of the medical object: not, of course, that it was political practice that from the early nineteenth century imposed on medicine such new objects as tissular lesions or the anatomo-physiological correlations; but it opened up new fields for the mapping of medical objects (these fields are constituted by the mass of the population administratively compartmented and supervised, gauged according to certain norms of life and health, and analysed according to documentary and statistical forms of registration; they are also constituted by the great conscript armies of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, with their specific form of medical control; they are also constituted by the institutions of hospital assistance that were defined at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, in relation to the economic needs of the time, and to the reciprocal position of the social classes). One can also see the appearance of this relation of political practice to medical discourse in the status accorded to the doctor, who becomes not only the privileged, but also virtually the exclusive, enunciator of this discourse, in the form of institutional relation that the doctor may have with the hospitalized patient or with his private practice, in the modalities of teaching and diffusion that are prescribed or authorized for this knowledge. Lastly, one can grasp this relation in the function that is attributed to medical discourse, or in the role that is required of it, when it is a question of judging individuals, making administrative decisions, laying down the norms of a society, translating - in order to 'resolve' or to conceal them - conflicts of another order, giving models of a natural type to analyses of society and to the practices that concern it. It is not a question, then, of showing how the political practice of a given society constituted or modified the medical concepts and theoretical structure of pathology; but how medical discourse as a practice concerned with a particular field of objects, finding itself in the hands of a certain number of statutorily designated individuals, and having certain functions to exercise in society, is articulated on practices that are external to it, and which are not themselves of a discursive order.
If in this analysis archaeology suspends the theme of expression and reflexion, if it refuses to see in discourse the surface of the symbolic projection of events or processes that are situated elsewhere, it is not in order to rediscover a causal sequence that might be described point by point, and which would make it possible to relate a discovery and an event, or a concept and a social structure. But on the other hand if it suspends such a causal analysis, if it wishes to avoid the necessary connexion through the speaking subject, it is not in order to guarantee the sovereign, sole independence of discourse; it is in order to discover the domain of existence and functioning of a discursive practice. In other words, the archaeological description of discourses is deployed in the dimension of a general history; it seeks to discover that whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated; it tries to show how the autonomy of discourse and its specificity nevertheless do not give it the status of pure ideality and total historical independence; what it wishes to uncover is the particular level in which history can give place to definite types of discourse, which have their own type of historicity, and which are related to a whole set of various historicities.
5. CHANGE And TRANSFORMATIONS
Let us now turn to the archaeological description of change. Whatever theoretical criticisms one can make of the traditional history of ideas, it does at least take as its essential theme the phenomena of temporal succession and sequence, analyses them in accordance with schemata of evolution, and thus describes the historical deployment of dis-courses. Archaeology, however, seems to treat history only to freeze it. On the one hand, by describing discursive formations, it ignores the temporal relations that may he manifested in them; it seeks general rules that will he uniformly valid, in the same way, and at every point in time: does it not, therefore, impose the constricting figure of a synchrony on a development that may he slow and imperceptible? In this 'world of ideas', which is in itself so untrustworthy, in which apparently the most stable figures disappear so quickly, but in which so many irregularities occur that are later accorded definitive status, in which the future always anticipates itself, whereas the past is constantly shifting, is not archaeology valid as a sort of motionless thought? And, on the other hand, when it does have recourse to chronology, it is only, it seems, in order to fix, at the limits of the positivities, two pinpoints: the moment at which they are born and the moment at which they disappear, as if duration was used only to fix this crude calendar, and was omitted throughout the analysis itself; as if time existed only in the vacant moment of rupture, in that white, paradoxically atemporal crack in which one sudden formulation replaces another. Whether as a synchrony of positivities, or as an instantaneity of substitutions, time is avoided, and with it the possibility of a historical description disappears. Discourse is snatched from the law of development and established in a discontinuous atemporality. It is immobilized in fragments: precarious splinters of eternity. But there is nothing one can do about it: several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either movement, time, or history.
But the problem must be examined in greater detail.
Let us take first the apparent synchrony of discursive formations. One thing is true: it is no use establishing the rules in every statement, and they cannot therefore he put into operation with every statement, they do not change each time; they can he found at work in statements or groups of statements in widely separated periods. We have seen, for example, that for nearly a century - from Tournefort to Jussieu - the various objects of Natural History obeyed the same rules of formation; we have seen that the theory of attribution is the same and plays the same role in the work of Lancelot, Condillac, and Destutt de Tracy. Moreover, we have seen that the order of statements based on archaeological derivation did not necessarily reproduce the order of successions: one can find in Beauzee statements that are archeologically anterior to those to be found in. the Grammaire of Port-Royal. In such an analysis, therefore, there is a suspension of temporal successions - or, to be more precise, of the calendar of formulations. But this suspension is intended precisely to reveal the relations that characterize the temporality of discursive formations and articulate them in series whose intersection in no way precludes analysis.
(a) Archaeology defines the rules of formation of a group of statements. In this way it shows how a succession of events may, in the same order in which it is presented, become an object of discourse, be recorded, described, explained, elaborated into concepts, and provide the opportunity for a theoretical choice. Archaeology analyses the degree and form of permeability of a discourse: it provides the principle of its articulation over a chain of successive events; it defines the operators by which the events are transcribed into statements. It does not challenge, for example, the relation between the Analysis of Wealth and the great monetary fluctuations of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; it tries to show what, in these crises, could be given as an object of discourse, how those crises could be conceptualized in such an object, how the interests that were in conflict throughout these processes could deploy their strategy in them. Or again, it does not claim that the cholera epidemic of 1832 was not an event that concerned medicine: it shows how clinical discourse put into operation such a body of rules that a whole domain of medical objects could then be reorganized, that a whole group of methods of recording and nota-tion could be used, that the concept of inflammation could be abandoned and the old theoretical problem of fevers could be resolved definitively. Archaeology does not deny the possibility of new statements in correlation with 'external' events. Its task is to show on what condition a correlation can exist between them, and what precisely it consists of (what are its limits, its form, its code, its law of possibility). It does not try to avoid that mobility of discourses that makes them move to the rhythm of events; it tries to free the level at which it is set in motion - what might he called the level of 'evential' engage-ment. (An engagement that is specific for every discursive formation, and which does not have the same rules, the same operators, or the same sensibility in, for example, the Analysis of Wealth and in Political Economy, in the old medicine of the 'constitutions' and in modern epidemiology.)
(h) Moreover, all the rules of formation assigned by archaeology to a positivity do not have the same generality: some are more specific and derive from others. This subordination may be merely hierarchical but it may also involve a temporal vector. Thus in General Grammar, the theory of the verb-attribution and that of the noun-articulation are linked to one another: and the second derives from the first, but without it being possible to determine an order of succession between them (other than the deductive or rhetorical order that has been chosen for the expose). On the other hand, the analysis of the complement or the search for roots could appear (or reappear) only when the analysis of the attributive sentence or the notion of the noun as an analytic sign of representation had been developed. Another example: in the Classical period, the principle of the continuity of beings is implied in the classification of species according to structural characters; and in this sense they are simultaneous; on the other hand, it is only when this classification is undertaken that the lacunae and gaps may be interpreted in the categories of a history of nature, of the earth, and of the species. In other words, the archaeological ramification of the rules of formation is not a uniformly simultaneous network: there exist relations, branches, derivations that are temporally neutral; there exist others that imply a particular temporal direction. Archaeology, then, takes as its model neither a purely logical schema of simultaneities; nor a linear succession of events; but it tries to show the intersection between necessarily successive relations and others that are not so. It does not believe, therefore, that a system of positivity is a synchronic figure that one can perceive only by suspending the whole of the diachronic process. Far from being indifferent to succession, archaeology maps the temporal vectors of derivation.
Archaeology does not set out to treat as simultaneous what is given as successive; it does not try to freeze time and to substitute for its flux of events correlations that outline a motionless figure. What it suspends is the theme that succession is an absolute: a primary, indissociable sequence to which discourse is subjected by the law of its finitude; it is also the theme that there is in discourse only one form and only one level of succession. For these themes, it substitutes analyses that reveal both the various forms of succession that are superposed in discourse (and by forms I do not simply mean the rhythms or causes, but the series themselves), and the way in which the successions thus specified are articulated. Instead of following the thread of an original calendar, in relation to which one would establish the chronology of successive or simultaneous events, that of short or lasting processes, that of momentary or permanent phenomena, one tries to show how it is possible for there to be succession, and at what different levels distinct successions are to be found. To constitute an archaeological history of discourse, then, one must free oneself of two models that have for so long imposed their image: the linear model of speech (and partly at least of writing), in which all events succeed one another, without any effect of coincidence and superposition; and the model of the stream of consciousness whose presence always eludes itself in its openness to the future and its retention of the past. Paradoxical as it may be, dis-cursive formations do not have the same model of historicity as the flow of consciousness or the linearity of language. Discourse, at least as analysed by archaeology, that is, at the level of its positivity, is not a consciousness that embodies its project in the external form of language (langage); it is not a language (longue), plus a subject to speak it. It is a practice that has its own forms of sequence and succession.
Archaeology is much more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistributions. The practice of political economy was, traditionally, to seek everything that led up to Ricardo, everything that could foreshadow his analyses, methods, and principal notions, every-thing that tended to make his discoveries more probable; the practice of the history of comparative grammar was to rediscover - beyond Bopp and Rask - earlier research into the filiation and kinship of languages; it was to determine how much Anquetil-Duperron contributed towards the constitution of an Indo-European domain; it was to uncover the first comparison (made in 1769) of Sanskrit and Latin conjugations; it may even lead one back to Harris or Ramus. Archaeology proceeds in the opposite direction: it seeks rather to untie all those knots that historians have patiently tied; it increases differences, blurs the lines of communication, and tries to make it more difficult to pass from one thing to another; it does not try to show that the Physiocratic analysis of production foreshadowed that of Ricardo; it does not regard it as relevant to its own analyses to say that Cceurdoux foreshadowed Bopp.
What does this insistence on discontinuities correspond to? In fact, it is paradoxical only in relation to the practice of the historians of ideas. It is rather the history of ideas - with its concern for continuities, transitions, anticipations, and foreshadowings - that plays with paradox. From Daubenton to Cuvier, from Anquetil to Bopp, from Graslin, Turgot, or Forbonnais to Ricardo - even such a chronologically small gap - the differences are innumerable: some are localized, others are more general; some concern methods, others concepts; sometimes they concern the domain of objects, at others the whole linguistic instrument. More striking still is the example of medicine: in a quarter of a century, from 1790 to 1815, medical discourse changed more profoundly than since the seventeenth century, probably than since the Middle Ages, and perhaps even since Greek medicine: a change that revealed new objects (organic lesions, deep sites, tissular alterations, ways and forms of inter-organic diffusion, anatomoclinical signs and correlations), techniques of observation, of detection of the pathological site, recording; a new perceptual grid, and on almost entirely new descriptive vocabulary; new sets of concepts and nosographical distributions (century-old, sometimes age-old categories such as fever or constitution disappeared, and diseases that are perhaps as old as the world - like tuberculosis - were at last isolated and named). Those who say that archaeology invents differences in an arbitrary way can never have opened La Nosographic philosophique and the Traite des membranes. Archaeology is simply trying to take such differences seriously: to throw some light on the matter, to determine how they are divided up, how they are entangled with one another, how they govern or are governed by one another, to which distinct categories they belong; in short, to describe these differences, not to establish a system of differences between them. If there is a paradox in archaeology, it is not that it increases differences, but that it refuses to reduce them - thus inverting the usual values. For the history of ideas, the appearance of difference indicates an error, or a trap; instead of examining it, the clever historian must try to reduce it: to find beneath it a smaller difference, and beneath that an even smaller one, and so on until he reaches the ideal limit, the non-difference of perfect continuity. Archaeology, on the other hand, takes as the object of its description what is usually regarded as an obstacle: its aim is not to overcome differences, but to analyse them, to say what exactly they consist of, to differentiate them. How does this differen-tiation operate?
1. Instead of considering that discourse is made up of a series of homogeneous events (individual formulations), archaeology dis-tinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse: the level of the statements themselves in their unique emergence; the level of the appearance of objects, types of enunciation, concepts, strategic choices (or transformations that affect those that already exist); the level of the derivation of new rules of forma-tion on the basis of rules that are already in operation – but always in the element of a single positivity; lastly, a fourth level, at which the substitution of one discursive formation for another takes place (or the mere appearance and disappearance of a positivity). These events, which are by far the most rare, are, for archaeology, the most important: only archaeology, in any case, can reveal them. But they are not the exclusive object of its description; it would be a mistake to think that they have an absolute control over all the others, and that they lead to similar, simultaneous ruptures at the different levels distinguished above. All the events that occur within the density of discourse are not immediately below one another. Of course, the appearance of a discursive formation is often correlative with a vast renewal of objects, forms of enunciation, concepts, and strategies (a principle that is not universal however: General Grammar was established in the seventeenth century without much apparent alteration in grammatical tradition); but it is not possible to determine the particular concept or object that suddenly manifests its presence. One should not describe such an event, therefore, in accordance with categories that may be suitable for the emergence of a formulation, or the appearance of a new word. It is useless to ask of such an event questions like: `Who is its author? Who is speaking? In what circumstances and in what context? With what intentions, what project in mind?' The appearance of a new positivity is not indicated by a new sentence – unexpected, surprising, logically unpredictable, stylistically deviant – that is inserted into a text, and announces either the opening of a new chapter, or the entry of a new speaker. It is an event of a quite different type.
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2. In order to analyse such events, it is not enough simply to indicate changes, and to relate them immediately to the theological, aesthetic model of creation (with its transcendence, with all its originalities and inventions), or to the psychological model of the act of consciousness (with its previous obscurity, its anticipations, its favourable circumstances, its powers of restoration), or to the biological model of evolution. We must define precisely what these changes consist of: that is, substitute for an undifferentiated reference to change - which is both a general container for all events and the abstract principle of their succession - the analysis of transformations. The disappearance of one positivity and the emergence of another implies several types of trans-formation. By going from the more particular to the more general, one can and must describe: how the different elements of a system of formation were transformed (what, for example, were the variations in the rate of unemployment and labour needs, what were the political decisions concerning the guilds and the universities, what were the new needs and new possibilities of public assistance at the end of the eighteenth century - all these were elements in the system of forma-tion of clinical medicine); how the characteristic relations of a system of formation were transformed (how, in the middle of the seventeenth century, for example, the relation between the perceptual field, the linguistic code, the use of instruments, and information that was put into operation by the discourse on living beings was modified, thus making possible the definition of the objects proper to Natural His-tory); how the relations between different rules of formation were transformed (how, for example, biology modified the order and the dependence that Natural History had established between the theory of characterization and the analysis of temporal derivations); lastly, how the relations between various positivities were transformed (how the relations between philology, biology, and economics transform the relations between General Grammar, Natural History, and the Analysis of Wealth; how the interdiscursive configuration outlined by the privileged relations of these three disciplines is decomposed; how their respective relations with mathematics and philosophy are modified; how a place emerges for other discursive formations and, in particular, for that interpositivity that was later to assume the name of the human sciences). Rather than refer to the living force of change (as if it were its own principle), rather than seek its causes (as if it were no more than a mere effect), archaeology tries to establish the system of trans-formations that constitute 'change'; it tries to develop this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analysable status of transformation. It is understandable that some minds are so attached to all those old metaphors by which, for a century and a half, history (movement, flux, evolution) has been imagined, that they see archaeology simply as the negation of history and the crude affirmation of discontinuity; the truth is that they cannot accept that change should be cleansed of all these adventitious models, that it should be deprived of both its primacy as a universal law and its status as a general effect, and that it should be replaced by the analysis of various transformations.
3. To say that one discursive formation is substituted for another is not to say that a whole world of absolutely new objects, enunciations, concepts, and theoretical choices emerges fully armed and fully organized in a text that will place that world once and for all; it is to say that a general transformation of relations has occurred, but that it does not necessarily alter all the elements; it is to say that statements are governed by new rules of formation, it is not to say that all objects or concepts, all enunciations or all theoretical choices disappear. On the contrary, one can, on the basis of these new rules, describe and analyse phenomena of continuity, return, and repetition: we must not forget that a rule of formation is neither the determination of an object, nor the characterization of a type of enunciation, nor the form or content of a concept, but the principle of their multiplicity and dispersion. One of these elements - or several of them - may remain identical (preserve the same division, the same characteristics, the same structures), yet belong to different systems of dispersion, and be governed by distinct laws of formation. One can find in such phenomena therefore: elements that remain throughout several distinct positivities, their form and content remaining the same, but their formations being heterogeneous (such as monetary circulation as an object first in the Analysis of Wealth, and then in political economy; the concept of character first in Natural History, then in biology); elements that are constituted, modified, organized in one discursive formation, and which, stabilized at last, figure in another (such as the concept of reflex, which, as G. Canguilhem has shown, was formed in Classical science from Willis to Prochaska, then entered modern physiology); elements that appear later, as an ultimate derivation in a discursive formation, and which occupy an important place in a later formation (such as the notion of organism, which appeared at the end of the eighteenth century in Natural History, and as the result of a whole taxonomic enterprise of characterization, and which became the major concept of biology at the time of Cuvier; or the notion of lesional site, which Morgagni discovered, and which became one of the principal concepts of clinical medicine); elements that reappear after a period of desuetude, oblivion, or even invalidation (such as the return to a Linnaean type of fixism in a biologist like Cuvier; or the reactivation in the eighteenth century of the old notion of an original language). The problem for archaeology is not to deny such phenomena, nor to try to diminish their importance; but, on the contrary, to try to describe and measure them: how can such permanences or repetitions, such long sequences or such curves projected through time exist? Archaeology does not hold the content for the primary and ultimate dormee that must account for all the rest; on the contrary, it considers that the same, the repetitive, and the uninterrupted are no less problematic than the ruptures; for archaeology, the identical and the continuous are not what must be found at the end of the analysis; they figure in the element of a dis-cursive practice; they too are governed by the rules of formation of positivities; far from manifesting that fundamental, reassuring inertia which we like to use as a criterion of change, they are themselves actively, regularly formed. And to those who might be tempted to criticize archaeology for concerning itself primarily with the analysis of the discontinuous, to all those agoraphobics of history and time, to all those who confuse rupture and irrationality, I will reply: It is you who devalue the continuous by the use that you make of it. You treat it as the support-element to which everything else must be related; you treat it as the primary law, the essential weight of any discursive practice; you would like to analyse every modification in the field of this inertia, as one analyses every movement in the gravitational field. But in according this status to continuity, you are merely neutralizing it, driv-ing it out to the outer limit of time, towards an original passivity. Archaeology proposes to invert this arrangement, or rather (for our aim is not to accord to the discontinuous the role formerly accorded to the continuous) to play one off against the other; to show how the continuous is formed in accordance with the same conditions and the same rules as dispersion; and how it enters - neither more nor less than differences, inventions, innovations or deviations - the field of dis-cursive practice.'
4. The appearance and disappearance of positivities, the play of substitutions to which they give rise, do not constitute a homogeneous process that takes place everywhere in the same way. We must not imagine that rupture is a sort of great drift that carries with it all discursive formations at once: rupture is not an undifferentiated inter-val - even a momentary one - between two manifest phases; it is not a kind of lapsus without duration that separates two periods, and which deploys two heterogeneous stages on either side of a split; it is always a discontinuity specified by a number of distinct transformations, between two particular positivities. The analysis of archaeological breaks sets out, therefore, to establish, between so many different changes, analogies and differences, hierarchies, complementarities, coincidences, and shifts: in short, to describe the dispersion of the discontinuities themselves.
The idea of a single break suddenly, at a given moment, dividing all discursive formations, interrupting them in a single moment and reconstituting them in accordance with the same rules - such an idea cannot be sustained. The contemporaneity of several transformations does not mean their exact chronological coincidence: each transformation may have its own particular index of temporal `viscosity'. Natural History, General Grammar, and the Analysis of Wealth were constituted in similar ways, and all three in the course of the seventeenth century; but the system of formation of the Analysis of Wealth was linked with a great many conditions and non-discursive practices (the circulation of goods, monetary manipulations and their effects, the system of protect-ing trade and manufactures, fluctuations in the quantity of metal coined): hence the slowness of a process that lasted for over a century (from Grammont to Cantillon), whereas the transformations that had taken place in General Grammar and Natural History had extended over scarcely more than twenty-five years. Inversely, contemporary, similar, and linked transformations do not belong to a single model that is reproduced several times on the surface of discourses, and imposes on all a strictly identical form of rupture: when one describes the archaeological break that led to philology, biology, and economics, one is showing how these three positivities were linked (by the disappearance of the analysis of the sign, and of the theory of representation), what symmetrical effects it could produce (the idea of a totality and of an organic adaptation among living beings; the idea of morphological coherence, and of a regulated evolution in languages; the idea of a form of production that has its internal laws and its limits of development); but it also shows what were the specific differences of these transformations (how in particular historicity is introduced in a particular way in these three positivities, how their relation to history cannot therefore be the same, even though they all have a particular relation with it).
Lastly, there are important shifts between different archaeological ruptures - and sometimes even between discursive formations that are very close and linked by a great many relations. Let us take the disciplines of languages and historical analysis: the great transformation that gave rise at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a historical, comparative grammar preceded by a good half-century the mutation in historical discourse: as a result, the system of interpositivity in which philology was involved was profoundly affected in the second half of the nineteenth century, without the positivity of philology ever being put into question. Hence phenomena of 'fragmented shift', of which we can cite at least another famous example: concepts like those of surplus value or falling rate of profit, as found in Marx, may be described on the basis of the system of positivity that is already in operation in the work of Ricardo; but these concepts (which are new, but whose rules of formation are not) appear - in Marx himself - as belonging at the same time to a quite different discursive practice: they are formed in that discursive practice in accordance with specific laws, they occupy in it a different position, they do not figure in the same sequences: this new positivity is not a transformation of Ricardo's analyses; it is not a new political economy; it is a discourse that occurred around the derivation of certain economic concepts, but which, in turn, defines the conditions in which the discourse of economists takes place, and may therefore be valid as a theory and a critique of political economy.
Archaeology disarticulates the synchrony of breaks, just as it destroyed the abstract unity of change and event. The period is neither its basic unity, nor its horizon, nor its object: if it speaks of these things it is always in terms of particular discursive practices, and as a result of its analyses. The Classical age, which has often been mentioned in archaeological analyses, is not a temporal figure that imposes its unity and empty form on all discourses; it is the name that is given to a tangle of continuities and discontinuities, modifications within positivities, dis-cursive formations that appear and disappear. Similarly, rupture is not for archaeology the prop of its analyses, the limit that it indicates from afar, without being able either to determine it or to give it specificity; rupture is the name given to transformations that bear on the general rules of one or several discursive formations. Thus the French Revolution - since up to now all archaeological analyses have been centred on it - does not play the role of an event exterior to discourse, whose divisive effect one is under some kind of obligation to discover in all dis-courses; it functions as a complex, articulated, describable group of transformations that left a number of positivities intact, fixed for a number of others rules that are still with us, and also established positivities that have recently disappeared or are still disappearing before our eyes.
6. SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE
A silent delimitation has been imposed on all the preceding analyses, without the principle governing it, or even its outline, being made clear. All the examples referred to belonged without exception to a very small domain. In no way could I be said to have 'covered', let alone analysed, the immense domain of discourse: why did I systematically ignore 'literary', 'philosophical', or 'political' texts? Do not discursive formations and systems of positivities have a place in them too? And if I was restricting my attention to the sciences, why did I say nothing of mathematics, physics, or chemistry? Why did I concentrate on so many dubious, still imprecise disciplines that are perhaps doomed for ever to remain below the threshold of scientificity? In short, what is the relation between archaeology and the analysis of the sciences?
(a) POSITIVITIES, DISCIPLINES, SCIENCES First question: does not archaeology, under the rather bizarre terms of 'discursive formation' and 'positivity', describe what are quite simply pseudo-sciences (like psychopathology), sciences at the prehistoric stage (like Natural History), or sciences entirely penetrated with ideology (like political economy)? Is it not the privileged analysis of what will always remain quasi-scientific? If one calls 'disciplines' groups of statements that borrow their organization from scientific models, which tend to coherence and demonstrativity, which are accepted, institutionalized, transmitted, and sometimes taught as sciences, could one not say that archaeology describes disciplines that are not really sciences, while epistemology describes sciences that have been formed on the basis of (or in spite of) existing disciplines?
To these questions I can reply in the negative. Archaeology does not describe disciplines. At most, such disciplines may, in their manifest deployment, serve as starting-points for the description of positivities; but they do not fix its limits: they do not impose definitive divisions upon it; at the end of the analysis they do not re-emerge in the same state in which they entered it; one cannot establish a bi-univocal relation between established disciplines and discursive formations.
Let us take an example of this distortion. The linch-pin of Madness and Civilization was the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of a psychiatric discipline. This discipline had neither the same content, nor the same internal organization, nor the same place in medicine, nor the same practical function, nor the same methods as the traditional chapter on `diseases of the head' or `nervous diseases' to be found in eighteenth-century medical treatises. But on examining this new discipline, we discovered two things: what made it possible at the time it appeared, what brought about this great change in the economy of concepts, analyses, and demonstrations, was a whole set of relations between hospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures of social exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms of industrial labour and bourgeois morality, in short a whole group of relations that characterized for this discursive practice the formation of its statements; but this practice is not only manifested in a discipline possess-ing a scientific status and scientific pretensions; it is also found in operation in legal texts, in literature, in philosophy, in political decisions, and in the statements made and the opinions expressed in daily life. The discursive formation whose existence was mapped by the psychiatric discipline was not coextensive with it, far from it: it went well beyond the boundaries of psychiatry. Moreover, by going back in time and trying to discover what, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could have preceded the establishment of psychiatry, we realized that there was no such prior discipline: what had been said on the subject of mania, delirium, melancholia, and nervous diseases by the doctors of the Classical period in no way constituted. an autonomous discipline, but at most a commentary on the analysis of fevers, of alterations in the humours, or of affections of the brain. However, despite the absence of any established discipline, a discursive practice, with its own regularity and consistency, was in operation. This dis-cursive practice was certainly present in medicine, but it was also to be found in administrative regulations, in literary or philosophical texts, in casuistics, in the theories or projects of obligatory labour or assistance to the poor. In the Classical period, therefore, there were a discursive formation and a positivity perfectly accessible to description, to which corresponded no definite discipline that could be compared with psychiatry.
But although it is true that positivities are not merely the doublets of established disciplines, are they not the prototypes of future sciences? By discursive formation, does one not mean the retrospective projection of sciences on their own past, the shadow that they cast on what preceded them and which thus appears to have foreshadowed them? What we have described, for example, as the Analysis of Wealth or General Grammar, thus according them what was perhaps a highly artificial autonomy, was it not, quite simply, political economy in an inchoate state, or a stage prior to the establishment of a truly rigorous science of language? Is it archaeology trying, by means of a retrograde movement whose legitimacy it would no doubt be difficult to establish, to regroup in an independent discursive practice all the heterogeneous and dispersed elements whose complicity will prove to he necessary to the establishment of a science?
Again, the answer must be in the negative. What was analysed under the name of Natural History does not embrace, in a single figure, everything that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might validly constitute a prototype of the science of life, and figure in its legitimate genealogy. The positivity thus revealed accounts for a num-ber of statements concerning the resemblances and differences between beings, their visible structure, their specific and generic characters, their possible classification, the discontinuities that separate them, and the transitions that connect them; but it ignores a number of other analyses that date nevertheless from the same period, and which also outline the ancestral figures of biology: the analysis of reflex movement (which was to have so much importance in the constitution of an anatomo-physiology of the nervous system), the theory of germs (which seems to anticipate the problems of evolution and genetics), the explanation of animal or vegetal growth (which was to be one of the major questions of the physiology of organisms in general). More-over: far from anticipating a future biology, Natural History - a taxonomic discourse, linked to the theory of signs and to the project of a science of order - excluded, by its solidity and autonomy, the constitution of a unitary science of life. Similarly, the discursive formation described as General Grammar does not take into account - far from it - everything that could have been said about language in the Classical period, and of which the inheritance or repudiation, development or critique, was to be found later in philology: it ignored the methods of Biblical exegesis, and that philosophy of language as formulated by Vico or Herder. Discursive formations are not, therefore, future sciences at the stage at which, still unconscious of themselves, they are quietly being constituted: they are not, in fact, in a state of teleological subordination in relation to the orthogenesis of the sciences.
Should it be said, therefore, that there can he no science where there is a positivity, and that positivities are always exclusive of the sciences? Should it be supposed that instead of being in a chronological relation to the sciences, they are in fact alternatives? That they are, in a way, the positive figure of a certain epistemological defect. But here, too, one could find a counter-example. Clinical medicine is certainly not a science. Not only because it does not comply with the formal criteria, or attain the level of rigour expected of physics, chemistry, or even of physiology; but also because it involves a scarcely organized mass of empirical. observations, uncontrolled experiments and results, therapeutic prescriptions, and institutional regulations. And yet this non-science is not exclusive of science: in the course of the nineteenth century, it established definite relations between such perfectly constituted sciences as physiology, chemistry, or microbiology; moreover, it gave rise to such discourses as that of morbid anatomy, which it would be presumptuous no doubt to call a false science.
Discursive formations can be identified, therefore, neither as sciences, nor as scarcely scientific disciplines, nor as distant prefigurations of the sciences to come, nor as forms that exclude any scientificity from the outset. What, therefore, is the relation between the positivities and the sciences?
(b) KNOWLEDGE (SAVOIR)
Positivities do not characterize forms of knowledge - whether they are a priori, necessary conditions or forms of rationality that have, in turn, been put into operation by history. But neither do they define the state of knowledge at a given moment in time: they do not draw up a list of what, from that moment, had been demonstrated to be true and had assumed the status of definitively acquired knowledge, and a list of what, on the other hand, had been accepted without either proof or adequate demonstration, or of what had been accepted as a common belief or a belief demanded by the power of the imagination. To analyse positivities is to show in accordance with which rules a discursive practice may form groups of objects, enunciations, concepts, or theoretical choices. The elements thus formed do not constitute a science, with a defined structure of ideality; their system of relations is certainly less strict; but neither are they items of knowledge piled up one on top of another, derived from heterogeneous experiments, traditions, or discoveries, and linked only by the identity of the subject that possesses them. They are that on the basis of which coherent (or incoherent) propositions are built up, more or less exact descriptions developed, verifications carried out, theories deployed. They form the precondition of what is later revealed and which later functions as an item of knowledge or an illusion, an accepted truth or an exposed error, a definitive acquisition or an obstacle surmounted. This precondition may not, of course, be analysed as a donee, a lived experience, still implicated in the imagination or in perception, which manking in the course of its history took up again in the form of rationality, or which each individual must undergo on his own account if he wishes to rediscover the ideal meanings that are contained or concealed within it. It is not a pre-knowledge or an archaic stage in the movement that leads from immediate knowledge to apodicticity; it is a group of elements that would have to be formed by a discursive practice if a scientific discourse was to be constituted, specified not only by its form and rigour, but also by the objects with which it deals, the types of enunciation that it uses, the concepts that it manipulates, and the strategies that it employs. Thus science is not linked with that which must have been lived, or must be lived, if the intention of ideality proper to it is to he established; but with that which must have been said - or must be said - if a discourse is to exist that complies, if necessary, with the experimental or formal criteria of scientificity.
This group of elements, formed in a regular manner by a discursive practice; and which are indispensable to the constitution of a science, although they are not necessarily destined to give rise to one, can he called knowledge. Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a dis-cursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain constituted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific status (the knowledge of psychiatry in the nineteenth century is not the sum of what was thought to he true, but the whole set of practices, singularities, and deviations of which one could speak in psychiatric discourse); knowledge is also the space in which the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse (in this sense, the knowledge of clinical medicine is the whole group of functions of observation, interrogation, decipherment, recording, and decision that may be exercised by the subject of medical discourse); knowledge is also the field of coordination and subordination of statements in which concepts appear, and are defined, applied and transformed (at this level, the knowledge of Natural History, in the eighteenth century, is not the sum of what was said, but the whole set of modes and sites in accordance with which one can integrate each new statement with the already said); lastly, knowledge is defined by the possibilities of use and appropriation offered by discourse (thus, the knowledge of political economy, in the Classical period, is not the thesis of the different theses sustained, but the totality of its points of articulation on other discourses or on other practices that are not dis-cursive). There are bodies of knowledge that are independent of the sciences (which are neither their historical prototypes, nor their practical by-products), but there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may he defined by the knowledge that it forms.
Instead of exploring the consciousness/knowledge (connaissance) /
science axis (which cannot escape subjectivity), archaeology explores the discursive practice/knowledge (savoir)/science axis.' And whereas the history of ideas finds the point of balance of its analysis in the element of connaissance (and is thus forced, against its will, to encounter the transcendental interrogation), archaeology finds the point of balance of its analysis in savoir - that is., in a domain in which the subject is necessarily situated and dependent, and can never figure as titular (either as a transcendental activity, or as empirical consciousness).
It is understandable in these conditions that we should distinguish carefully between scientific domains and archaeological territories: their articulation and their principles of organization are quite different. Only pro-positions that obey certain laws of construction belong to a domain of scientificity; affirmations that have the same meaning, that say the same thing, that are as true as they are, but which do not belong to the same systematicity, are excluded from this domain: what Diderot's Le Reve de d'Alembert says about the development of species may well express certain of the concepts or certain of the scientific hypotheses of the period; it may even anticipate a future truth; it does not belong to the domain of scientificity of Natural History, but it does not belong to its archaeological territory, if at least one can discover in operation in it the same rules of formation as in Linnaeus, Buffon, Daubenton, or Jussieu. Archaeological territories may extend to 'literary' or 'philosophical' texts, as well as scientific ones. Knowledge is to be found not only in demonstrations, it can also he found in fiction, reflexion, narrative accounts, institutional regulations, and political decisions. The archaeological territory of Natural History includes Bonnet's Palingenesie philosophique or Benoit de Maillet's Telliamed, although they do not comply to a great extent with the accepted scientific norms of the period, and even less, of course, with those that came to be required later. The archaeological territory of General Grammar embraces the imaginings of Fabre d'Olivet (which were never accorded scientific status, and belong rather to the sphere of mystical thought) no less than the analysis of attributive propositions (which was then accepted as evident truth, and in which generative grammar may now recognize its prefigured truth).
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Discursive practice does not coincide with the scientific develop-ment that it may give rise to; and the knowledge that it forms is neither an unfinished prototype nor the by-product to be found in daily life of a constituted science. The sciences - ignoring, for the moment, the difference between discourses that have the status of scientificity, or pretensions to it, and those that really present the formal criteria of a science - appear in the element of a discursive formation and against the background of knowledge. This opens up two series of problems: what can be the place or role of a region of scientificity in the archaeological territory in which it appears? In accordance with what order and what processes is the emergence of a region of scientificity in a given discursive formation accompished? We cannot, at present, pro-vide solutions to these problems: all we can do now is to indicate in what direction they might be analysed.
(c) KNOWLEDGE (SAVOIR) AND IDEOLOGY Once constituted, a science does not take up, with all the interconnexions that are proper to it, everything that formed the discursive practice in which it appeared; nor does it dissipate - in order to condemn it to the prehistory of error, prejudice, or imagination - the knowledge that surrounds it. Morbid anatomy did not reduce to the norms of scientificity the positivity of clinical medicine. Knowledge is not an epistemological site that disappears in the science that supersedes it. Science (or what is offered as such) is localized in a field of knowledge and plays a role in it. A role that varies according to different discursive formations, and is modified with their mutations. What, in the Classical period, was offered as the medical knowledge of dis-eases of the mind occupied a very small place in the knowledge of madness: it constituted scarcely more than one of its many surfaces of contact (the others being jurisprudence, casuistics, police regulations, etc.); on the other hand, the psychopathological analyses of the nineteenth century, which were also offered as scientific knowledge (connaissance) of mental diseases, played a very different, much more important role in the knowledge (savoir) of madness (the role of model, and decision-making authority). Similarly, scientific discourse (or scientific pretension) does not perform the same function in the economic knowledge of the seventeenth and in that of the nineteenth century. In any discursive formation, one finds a specific relation between science and knowledge; and instead of defining between them a relation of exclusion or subtraction (by trying to discover what in knowledge still eludes and resists science, what in science is still compromised by its proximity to and the influence of knowledge), archaeological analysis must show positively how a science functions in the element of knowledge.
It is probably there, in that space of interplay, that the relations of ideology to the sciences are established. The hold of ideology over scientific discourse and the ideological functioning of the sciences are not articulated at the level of their ideal structure (even if they can be expressed in it in a more or less visible way), nor at the level of their technical use in a society (although that society may obtain results from it), nor at the level of the consciousness of the subjects that built it up; they are articulated where science is articulated upon knowledge. If the question of ideology may be asked of science, it is in so far as science, without being identified with knowledge, but without either effacing or excluding it, is localized in it, structures certain of its objects, systematizes certain of its enunciations, formalizes certain of its concepts and strategies; it is in so far as this development articulates knowledge, modifies it, and redistributes it on the one hand, and con-firms it and gives it validity on the other; it is in so far as science finds its place in a discursive regularity, in which, by that very fact, it is or is not deployed, functions or does not function, in a whole field of dis-cursive practices. In short, the question of ideology that is asked of science is not the question of situations or practices that it reflects more or less consciously; nor is it the question of the possible use or misuse to which it could be put; it is the question of its existence as a discursive practice and of its functioning among other practices.
Broadly speaking, and setting aside all mediation and specificity, it can be said that political economy has a role in capitalist society, that it serves the interests of the bourgeois class, that it was made by and for that class, and that it hears the mark of its origins even in its concepts and logical architecture; but any more precise description of the relations between the epistemological structure of political economy and its ideological function must take into account the analysis of the discursive formation that gave rise to it and the group of objects, concepts, and theoretical choices that it had to develop and systematize; and one must then show how the discursive practice that gave rise to such a positivity functioned among other practices that might have been of a discursive, but also of a political or economic, order.
This enables us to advance a number of propositions.
I. Ideology is not exclusive of scientificity. Few discourses have given so much place to ideology as clinical discourse or that of political economy: this is not a sufficiently good reason to treat the totality of their statements as being undermined by error, contradiction, and a lack of objectivity.
2.Theoretical contradictions, lacunae, defects may indicate the ideological functioning of a science (or of a discourse with scientific pretensions); they may enable us to determine at what point in the structure this functioning takes effect. But the analysis of this function-ing must be made at the level of the positivity and of the relations between the rules of formation and the structures of scientificity.
3.By correcting itself, by rectifying its errors, by clarifying its formulations, discourse does not necessarily undo its relations with ideology. The role of ideology does not diminish as rigour increases and error is dissipated.
4.To tackle the ideological functioning of a science in order to reveal and to modify it is not to uncover the philosophical presuppositions that may lie within it; nor is it to return to the foundations that made it possible, and that legitimated it: it is to question it as a dis-cursive formation; it is to tackle not the formal contradictions of its propositions, but the system of formation of its objects, its types of enunciation, its concepts, its theoretical choices. It is to treat it as one practice among others.
(d) DIFFERENT THRESHOLDS AND THEIR CHRONOLOGY It is possible to describe several distinct emergences of a discursive formation. The moment at which a discursive practice achieves individuality and autonomy, the moment therefore at which a single system for the formation of statements is put into operation, or the moment at which this system is transformed, might be called the threshold of positivity. When in the operation of a discursive formation, a group of statements is articulated, claims to validate (even unsuccessfully) norms of verification and coherence, and when it exercises a dominant function (as a model, a critique, or a verification) over knowledge, we will say that the discursive formation crosses a threshold of epistemologization. When the epistemological figure thus outlined obeys a number of formal criteria, when its statements comply not only with archaeological rules of formation, but also with certain laws for the construction of propositions, we will say that it has crossed a threshold of scientificity. And when this scientific discourse is able, in turn, to define the axioms necessary to it, the elements that it uses, the propositional structures that are legitimate to it, and the transformations that it accepts, when it is thus able, taking itself as a starting-point, to deploy the formal edifice that it constitutes, we will say that it has crossed the threshold of formalization.
The distribution in time of these different thresholds, their succession, their possible coincidence (or lack of it), the way in which they may govern one another, or become implicated with one another, the conditions in which, in turn, they are established, constitute for archaeology one of its major domains of exploration. Their chronology, in fact, is neither regular nor homogeneous. The discursive formations do not cross them at regular intervals, or at the same time, thus dividing up the history of human knowledge (connaissances) into different ages; at a time when many positivities have crossed the threshold of formalization, many others have not yet attained that of scientificity, or even of epistemologization. Moreover: each discursive formation does not pass through these different thresholds in turn, as through the natural stages of biological maturation, in which the only variable is the latency period or the length of the intervals. They are, in fact, events whose dispersion is not evolutive: their unique order is one of the characteristics of each discursive formation. Here are a few examples of these differences.
In some cases, the threshold of positivity is crossed well before that of epistemologization: thus psychopathology, as a discourse with scientific pretensions, epistemologized at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Pinel, Heinroth, and Esquirol, a discursive practice that largely antedated it, and that had acquired its autonomy and system of regularity long before. But there are also cases in which these two stages are confused in time, when the establishment of a positivity involves at the same time the emergence of an epistemological figure. Sometimes the thresholds of scientificity are linked with the transition from one positivity to another; sometimes they are different; thus the transition from Natural History (with the scientificity that was proper to it) to biology (as a science not of the classification of beings, but of specific correlations of different organisms) did not take place at the time of Cuvier without the transformation of one positivity into another: on the other hand, the experimental medicine of Claude Bernard, then the microbiology of Pasteur, modified the type of scientificity required by morbid anatomy and physiology, without the dis-cursive formation of clinical medicine, as then established, being made inoperable. Similarly, the new scientificity established in the biological disciplines by evolutionism did not modify the biological positivity that had been defined at the time of Cuvier. In the case of economics the disconnexions are particularly numerous. In the seventeenth century, one can recognize a threshold of positivity: it almost coincides with the practice and theory of mercantilism; but its epistemologization did not occur until later, at the very end of the century, or the beginning of the next century, with Locke and Cantillon. However, the nineteenth century, with Ricardo, marks both a new type of positivity, a new form of epistemologization, which were later to he modified in turn by Cournot and Jevons, at the very time that Marx was to reveal an entirely new discursive practice on the basis of political economy.
If one recognizes in science only the linear accumulation of truths or the orthogenesis of reason, and fails to recognize in it a discursive practice that has its own levels, its own thresholds, its own various ruptures, one can describe only a single historical division, which one adopts as a model to be applied at all times and for all forms of knowledge: a division between what is definitively or what is not yet scientific. All the density of the disconnexions, the dispersion of the ruptures, the shifts in their effects, the play of the interdependence are reduced to the monotonous act of an endlessly repeated foundation.
There is perhaps only one science for which one can neither distinguish these different thresholds, nor describe a similar set of shifts: mathematics, the only discursive practice to have crossed at one and the same time the thresholds of positivity, epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization. The very possibility of its existence implied that which, in all other sciences, remains dispersed throughout history, should be given at the outset: its original positivity was to constitute an already formalized discursive practice (even if other formalizations were to be used later). Hence the fact that their establishment is both so enigmatic (so little accessible to analysis, so confined within the form of the absolute beginning) and so valid (since it is valid both as an origin and as a foundation); hence the fact that in the first gesture of the first mathematician one saw the constitution of an ideality that has been deployed throughout history, and has been questioned only to be repeated and purified; hence the fact that the beginning of mathematics is questioned not so much as a historical event as for its validity as a principal of history: and hence the fact that, for all the other sciences the description of its historical genesis, its gropings and failures, its late emergence is related to the meta-historical model of a geometry emerging suddenly, once and for all, from the trivial practices of land-measuring. But if one takes the establishment of mathematical discourse as a prototype for the birth and development of all the other sciences, one runs the risk of homogenizing all the unique forms of historicity, of reducing to the authority of a single rupture all the different thresholds that a discursive practice may cross, and reproduce endlessly, at every moment in time, the problem of origin: the rights of the historicotranscendental analysis would thus be reinstated. Mathematics has certainly served as a model for most scientific discourses in their efforts to attain formal rigour and demonstrativity; but for the historian who questions the actual development of the sciences, it is a bad example, an example at least from which one cannot generalize.
(e) THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF THE HISTORY OF THE SCIENCES The multiple thresholds that we have succeeded in mapping make distinct forms of historical analysis possible. First, analysis at the level of formalization: it is this history that mathematics never ceases to recount about itself in the process of its own development. What it possesses at a given moment (its domain, its methods, the objects that it defines, the language that it employs) is never thrown back into the external field of non-scientificity, but is constantly undergoing redefinition (if only as an area that has fallen into disuse or temporary sterility) in the formal structure that mathematics constitutes; this past is revealed as a particular case, a naive model, a partial and insufficiently generalized sketch, of a more abstract, or more powerful theory, or one existing at a higher level; mathematics retranscribes its real historical trajectory into the vocabulary of vicinities, dependences, subordinations, progressive formalizations, and self-enveloping generalities. For this history of mathematics (the history that is constituted by mathematics itself and which mathematics recounts about itself), the algebra of Diophantus is not an experience that remains in sus-pense; it is a particular case of Algebra as we have known it since Abel and Galois; the Greek method of exhaustions was not an impasse that had to be escaped from; it is a naive model of integral calculus. Each historical event has its own formal level and localization. This is a recurrential analysis, which can be carried out only within a constituted science, one that has crossed its threshold of formalization.'
The second type of historical analysis is situated at the threshold of scientificity, and questions itself as to the way in which it was crossed on the basis of various epistemological figures. Its purpose is to dis-cover, for example, how a concept - still overlaid with metaphors or imaginary contents - was purified, and accorded the status and function of a scientific concept. To discover how a region of experience that has already been mapped, already partially articulated, but is still over-laid with immediate practical uses or values related to those uses, was constituted as a scientific domain. To discover how, in general, a science was established over and against a pre-scientific level, which both paved the way and resisted it in advance, how it succeeded in overcoming the obstacles and limitations that still stood in its way. G. Bachelard and G. Canguilhem have provided models of this kind of history. Unlike recurrential analysis, it has no need to situate itself within the
8- ((footnote))
science itself, to redistribute every episode in its construction, to recount its formalization in the formal vocabulary that it still possesses today: indeed, how could it do so, since it shows what the science has freed itself from, everything that it has had to leave behind in its pro-gress towards the threshold of scientificity. Consequently, this description takes as its norm the fully constituted science; the history that it recounts is necessarily concerned with the opposition of truth and error, the rational and the irrational, the obstacle and fecundity, purity and impurity, the scientific and the non-scientific. It is an epistemological history of the sciences.
The third type of historical analysis takes as its point of attack the threshold of epistemologization - the point of cleavage between dis-cursive formations defined by their positivity and epistemological figures that are not necessarily all sciences (and which may never, in fact, succeed in becoming sciences). At this level, scientificity does not serve as a norm: in this archaeological history, what one is trying to uncover are discursive practices in so far as they give rise to a corpus of knowledge, in so far as they assume the status and role of a science. To undertake a history of the sciences at this level is not to describe discursive formations without regard to epistemological structures; it is to show how the establishment of a science, and perhaps its transition to formalization, have come about in a discursive formation, and in modifications to its positivity. Such an analysis sets out, therefore, to outline the history of the sciences on the basis of a description of discursive practices; to define how, in accordance with which regularity, and as a result of which modification, it was able to give rise to the processes of epistemologization, to attain the norms of scientificity, and, perhaps, to reach the threshold of formalization. In seeking the level of discursive practice in the historical density of the sciences, one is not trying to place the discursive practice at some deep, original level, one is not trying to place it at the level of lived experience (on this earth, which is given, irregular and fragmented, before all geometry; in the heaven that glitters through the grid of all astronomies) ; one is trying to reveal between positivities, knowledge, epistemological figures, and sciences, a whole set of differences, relations, gaps, shifts, independences, autonomies, and the way in which they articulate their own historicities on one another.
The analysis of discursive formations, of positivities, and knowledge in their relations with epistemological figures and with the sciences is what has been called, to distinguish it from other possible forms of the history of the sciences, the analysis of the episteme. This episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular period cannot escape - a great body of legislation written once and for all by some anonymous hand. By episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresholds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices. The episteme is not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities.
The description of the episteme presents several essential. characteristics therefore: it opens up an inexhaustible field and can never be closed; its aim is not to reconstitute the system of postulates that gov-erns all the branches of knowledge (connaissances) of a given period, but to cover an indefinite field of relations. Moreover, the episteme is not a motionless figure that appeared one day with the mission of effacing all that preceded it: it is a constantly moving set of articulations, shifts, and coincidences that are established, only to give rise to others. As a set of relations between sciences, epistemological figures, positivities, and discursive practices, the episteme makes it possible to grasp the set of constraints and limitations which, at a given moment, are imposed on discourse: but this limitation is not the negative limitation that opposes knowledge (connaissance) to ignorance, reasoning to imagination, armed experience to fidelity to appearances, and fantasy to inferences and deductions; the episteme is not what may be known at a given period, due account taken of inadequate techniques, mental attitudes, or the limitations imposed by tradition; it is what, in the positivity of discursive practices, makes possible the existence of epistemological figures and sciences. Lastly, we see that the analysis of the episteme is not a way of returning to the critical question ('given the existence of something like a science, what is its legitimacy?'); it is a questioning that accepts the fact of science only in order to ask the question what it is for that science to be a science. In the enigma of scientific discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that it exists. And the point at which it separates itself off from all the philosophies of knowledge (connaissance) is that it relates this fact not to the authority of an original act of giving, which establishes in a transcendental subject the fact and the right, but to the processes of a historical practice.
(f) OTHER ARCHAEOLOG I ES One question remains in suspense: could one conceive of an archaeological analysis that would reveal the regularity of a body of knowledge, but which would not set out to analyse it in terms of epistemological figures and sciences? Is an orientation towards the episteme the only one open to archaeology? Must archaeology be - exclusively - a certain way of questioning the history of the sciences? In other words, by confirming itself up to now to the region of scientific discourses, has archaeology been governed by some insuperable necessity - or has it provided an outline, on the basis of a particular example, of forms of analysis that may have a much wider application?
At the moment I am not sufficiently advanced in my task to answer this question. But I can readily imagine - subject to a great deal of further exploration and examination - archaeologies that might develop in different directions. There is, for example, the archaeological description of 'sexuality'. And I can see very well how it might be orientated towards the episteme: one would show how in the nineteenth century such epistemological figures as the biology and psychology of sexuality were formed; and how a discourse of a scientific type was established through the rupture brought about by Freud. But I can also see another possible direction for analysis: instead of studying the sexual behaviour of men at a given period (by seeking its law in a social structure, in a collective unconscious, or in a certain moral attitude), instead of describing what men thought of sexuality (what religious interpretation they gave it, to what extent they approved or disapproved of it, what conflicts of opinion or morality it gave rise to), one would ask oneself whether, in this behaviour, as in these representations, a whole discursive practice is not at work; whether sexuality, quite apart from any orientation towards a scientific discourse, is not a group of objects that can be talked about (or that it is forbidden to talk about), a field of possible enunciations (whether in lyrical or legal language), a group of concepts (which can no doubt be presented in the elementary form of notions or themes), a set of choices (which may appear in the coherence of behavior or in systems of prescription). • Such an archaeology would show, if it succeeded in its task, how the prohibitions, exclusions, limitations, values, freedoms, and transgressions of sexuality, all its manifestations, verbal or otherwise, are linked to a particular discursive practice. It would reveal, not of course as the ultimate truth of sexuality, but as one of the dimensions in accordance with which one can describe it, a certain 'way of speaking'; and one would show how this way of speaking is invested not in scientific discourses, but in a system of prohibitions and values. An analysis that would be carried out not in the direction of the episteme, but in that of what we might call the ethical.
But here is an example of another possible orientation. In analysing a painting, one can reconstitute the latent discourse of the painter; one can try to recapture the murmur of his intentions, which are not tran-scribed into words, but into lines, surfaces, and colours; one can try to uncover the implicit philosophy that is supposed to form his view of the world. It is also possible to question science, or at least the opinions of the period, and to try to recognize to what extent they appear in the painter's work. Archaeological analysis would have another aim: it would try to discover whether space, distance, depth, colour, light, proportions, volumes, and contours were not, at the period in question, considered, named, enunciated, and conceptualized in a discursive practice; and whether the knowledge that this discursive practice gives rise to was not embodied perhaps in theories and speculations, in forms of teaching and codes of practice, but also in processes, techniques, and even in the very gesture of the painter. It would not set out to show that the painting is a certain way of 'mean-ing' or 'saying' that is peculiar in that it dispenses with words. It would try to show that, at least in one of its dimensions, it is discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects. In this sense, the painting is not a pure vision that must then he transcribed into the materiality of space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty meanings must be freed from subsequent interpretations. It is shot through - and independently of scientific knowledge (connaissance) and philosophical themes - with the positivity of a knowledge (savoir).
It seems to me that one might also carry out an analysis of the same type on political knowledge. One would try to show whether the political behavior of a society, a group, or a class is not shot through with a particular, describable discursive practice. This positivity would obviously not coincide either with the political theories of the period or with economic determinations: it would define the element in politics that can become an object of enunciation, the forms that this enunciation may take, the concepts that are employed in it, and the strategic choices that are made in it. Instead of analysing this knowledge - which is always possible - in the direction of the episteme that it can give rise to, one would analyse it in the direction of behaviour, struggles, conflicts, decisions, and tactics. One would thus reveal a body of political knowledge that is not some kind of secondary theorizing about practice, nor the application of theory. Since it is regularly formed by a discursive practice that is deployed among other practices and is articulated upon them, it is not an expression that more or less adequately 'reflects' a number of 'objective data' or real practices. It is inscribed, from the outset, in the field of different practices in which it finds its specificity, its functions, and its network of dependences. If such a description were possible, there would be no need of course to pass through the authority of an individual or collective consciousness in order to grasp the place of articulation of a political practice and theory; there would he no need to try to discover to what extent this consciousness may, on the one hand, express silent conditions, and, on the other, show that it is susceptible to theoretical truths; one would not need to pose the psychological problem of an act of consciousness
(prise de conscience); instead, one would analyse the formation and trans-formations of a body of knowledge. The question, for example, would not be to determine from what moment a revolutionary consciousness appears, nor the respective roles of economic conditions and theoretical elucidations in the genesis of this consciousness; it would not attempt to retrace the general, and exemplary, biography of revolutionary man, or to find the origins of his project; but it would try to explain the formation of a discursive practice and a body of revolutionary knowledge that are expressed in behaviour and strategies, which give rise to a theory of society, and which operate the interference and mutual transformation of that behaviour and those strategies.
To the questions posed above - Is archaeology concerned only with sciences? Is it always an analysis of scientific discourse? - we can now give a reply, in each case in the negative. What archaeology tries to describe is not the specific structure of science, but the very different domain of knowledge. Moreover, although it is concerned with know-ledge in its relation to epistemological figures and the sciences, it may also question knowledge in a different direction and describe it in a different set of relations. The orientation towards the episteme has been the only one to be explored so far. The reason for this is that, because of a gradient that no doubt characterizes our cultures, dis-cursive formations are constantly becoming epistemologized. It is by questioning the sciences, their history, their strange unity, their dispersion, and their ruptures, that the domain of positivities was able to appear; it is in the interstice of scientific discourses that we were able to grasp the play of discursive formations. It is hardly surprising, there-fore, that the most fruitful region, the one most open to archaeological description should have been that 'Classical' age, which from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century saw the epistemologization of so many positivities; nor is it surprising that the discursive formations and specific regularities of knowledge are outlined precisely where the levels of scientificity and formalization were most difficult to attain. But that was no more than a preferential point of attack; it is not, for archaeology, an obligatory domain.
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Author: Michel Foucault
