Comm Gloss: Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
Parts I and II
Terms
"History"
Foucault:
"The old questions of the traditional [historical] analysis (What link should be made between disparate evens? How can a causal succession be established between them? What continuity or overall significance do they possess? Is it possible to define a totality, or must one be content with reconstituting connexions?) are now being replaced by questions of another type:[...]What types of series should be established? What criteria of periodization should be adopted for each of them?What systems of relations [...]may be established between them? [....] (3-4). History, or the work of historians, is no longer the study of causality and influence centered around a "spirit" of the period, but is now the analysis of disparate events breaking up that linear narrative. In other words, now historians are asking, with Burke, "How do you size up a situation?"--with "How" here referring to the power struggles, authorities, language choices, styles, traditions, and other forms that affect how we historicize.
"[...]thus, historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge" (5). Terministic screens go here.
Back in the day, "history" was simple: "The series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series" (7). This sounds like Bitzer's version of history and "situation": that there are objective facts we can write down in a predictable and ordered series, and these elements act as filters, sifting out what cannot be said from the totality of all utterances. Foucault sees this as a "negative" version of discourse formation; instead of seeing "constraints" and limits in the context, Foucault sees the elements as formative.
Total history: "seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle--material or spiritual--of a society[...] what is called metaphorically teh 'face' of a period" (9). General history, its opposite, looks for "series of series" and a "total description" of the relations between historical elements (10).
Foucault:
"So that the problem arises of knowing whether the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed" (32). "Space" is the important word here. What is "space"? How does that space itself get delineated?
Foucault:
Major questions arise: "[...]how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity[....]? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a text? (5). The "object" of study is not singular, does not have essence in and of itself, is not a unity, until it is embodied in discourse; nor does it exist prior to the discourse that constitutes it!
"Subject"
Foucault:
Traditional history created the conscious subject: "Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject--in the form of historical consciousness--will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what he may call his abode" (12). Several important things here: First, that the "subject" is a historical subject, that consciousness is a by product of a continuous history that accounts for cause and effect, events, purpose, and progress. Second, that the subject uses traditional senses of history (or needs it?) to order his/her consciousness and cope with (deal with, "size up") the present, to understand differentiation and division. Third, Foucault uses the word "abode"--a place, a home, a grounds from which the subject emerges. Without traditional, linear history, the subject cannot find the grounds from which s/he emerges (to use Burke's idea from the Grammar. In the "new" history, the subject is constituted by his/her position in a web of relations that don't exist prior to her/his participation in them--nor does the subject exist prior to the participation!
Excuse me while my head explodes.
"In this system [traditional history], time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness" (12). Here is where Foucault intersects with dystopian rhetoric: In the traditional dystopias, the key to revolution is recognition--"consciousness" of history, of the historicity of the characters' present moment. In the new history, however, and in PoMo dystopias, this recognition is not enough, because "history" is no longer a linear path with easy causality, marching forward in an ordered Marxist way toward Utopia. Hence the subtitle of LeGuin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. What is ambiguous is what counts as utopia, how we know we've reached it, and for whom is the situation (however we delineate "a" situation) is utopian. What is ambiguous is the totalization of a group of people in a not-yet-differentiated time: Where do we draw the lines? Thus, the rhetorical force loses ground: there is no "forward" motion toward utopia because we are no longer sure what "forward" means. In Oryx and Crake utopia only appears without narrative, without humans. If discursive formations arise from specific grounds, we must consider what grounds dystopian fiction, always already historical and historicizing, emerges from, and why this discourse can appear in multiple genres across different "eras," and still be recognized as the "same."
Discourse Formation
Foucault:
How to find a "discursive unity": "But perhaps one might discover a discursive unity if one sought it not in the coherence of concepts, but in their simultaneous or successive emergence, in the distance that separates them and even in their incompatibility. One would no longer seek an architecture of concepts sufficiently general and abstract to embrace all others and to introduce them into the same deductive structure; one would try to analyse the interplay of their appearances and dispersion" (34).
He uses the idea of "theme" as a way of identifying a discursive unity among discourses. I think this is what I mean when I refer to a "dystopian rhetoric" or a "dystopian philosophy"--a set of assumptions, values, beliefs, worldviews, etc, which lead to (somehow) a unity of style, and selects the forms of novel and film almost necessarily.
MF finds the "theme" just as problematic a way of defining a unity as "essence"--themes change over time, influence each other--it is still a somewhat arbitrary naming of this *thing*, this body of discourses, that depends more on a gut feeling of interconnectedness than any criterion we can examine here.
No comments:
Post a Comment