Course Encyclopaedia, continued
Foucault, Parts 3 and 4 (The Statement and the Archive and Archaeological Description).
Terms for this section
In French: l'énoncé, the said. Past participle of enoncer. Other uses: "Wording", "Utterance", "lecture", "declaration", "exposition"
What an énoncé is not: "We have put to one side, not in a definitive way, but for a time and out of methodological rigour, the traditional unities of hte book and the oeuvre; that we have ceased to accept as a principle of unity the laws of constructing discourse...or the situation of the speaking subject...; that we no longer related discourse to the primary ground of experience, nor the a priori authority of knowledge" (79).
And/nor: "I do not think that the necessary and sufficient condition of a statement is the presence of a defined propositional structure, or that one can speak of a statement only when there is a proposition" (80).
And: Statements can sort of be seen as a "sentence" bu "the equivalence is far from being a total one; and it is relatively easy to cite statements that do not correspond to the linguistic structure of sentences" (82).
It is also not "an act of formulation--something like the speech act referred to by the English analysts" (82-83).
Relationship to Burke: "...whether, while analyzing 'objects' or 'concepts,' let alone 'strategies', I was in fact still speaking of statements" (79-80).
An attempt at definition: "Must we admit that any series of signs, figures, marks, or traces--whatever their organization of probablity may be--is enough to constitute a statement .....? In which case, we would have to admit there is a statement whenever a number of signs are juxtaposed--or even, perhaps--when there is a single sign. The threshold of the statement is the threshold of the existence of signs" (84). This is still problematic, because MF is trying to talk about statements without talking about the situation or linguistic system (system of differences) or something external to the enunciative moment--and yet, "signs" are only signs in that they are agreed-upon substitutions for the signified. As he says, "If there were no statements, the language (langue) would not exist" (since language systems are rules based on acceptable statements). So clearly he must try again:
The statement is a unique formation, "neither entirely linguistic, nor exclusively material"; instead, it is "caught up...in a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus. It is not so much one element among others, a division that can be located at a certain level of analysis....it is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they 'make sense', according to what rule they foolow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation" (86-87).
Relationship to the referent: "A statement is not confronted...by a correlate--or by the absence of a correlate as a proposition has (or has not) a referent....It is linked rather to a 'referential' that is made up not of 'things', 'facts', 'realities', or 'beings', but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it" (91). In this description, there seems to be something logically prior to the statement that allows it to mean--things are named--this implies someone doing the naming in the past, some consensus on what counts or doesn't count as a "thing" that can be discussed, about which something can be said (énoncé).
And, at last, the clearest definition: "We will call statement that modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation wtih a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality" (107). My emphasis here--the statement positions us--it Situates us. Hence, "situation", the way things are positioned in relation to one another. These positions are hard to imagine, to theorize (to See) without imagining a corresponding space/time, and it is tempting to map these situations onto a geographical map or a timeline. To Place. But while some situations are dependent on physical space or "real time", some are not. My relationship to my father is a situation, a "placement" of subject positions created by our statements to and about each other, but these cannot be mapped onto a map of Ohio or Indiana. Likewise, statements made online cannot be mapped onto the space of the internet, despite our attempts to call them websites or William Gibson's dream of a navagatable matrix that corresponded exactly to ISP locations of servers. As a non-spatial person, I am most bothered by the attempts to describe all of these philosophical and theoretical concepts in terms of space, or diagrams or flow charts: I'm afraid this adds extra elements or makes relationships far more descrete and finite than they really are.
Enough ranting.
Genre [See also Genre in contemporary rhetorical theory]
MF seems to avoid the subject of "genre" as we think of it, probably because naming and thinking of things in terms of genres is itself a unique aspect of our discursive field. Still, there are times when his discussion of "discursive field" seems to border on what we call "genre"--something that is regular, with rules, but formed from the mass of statements. An appropriate response, if you will.
Use of Genre: When discussing the difference between statements and propositional structures, MF finds that two similar sentences, while propositionally the same, are quite different statements: "If one finds the formulation 'No one heard' in the first line of a novel, we know, until a new order merges, that it is an observation made either by the author, or the character (aloud or in the form of an interior monologue); if one finds the second forumulation, 'It is true that no one heard', one can only be in a group of statements constituting an interior monologue, a silent discussion with oneself, or a fragment of dialogue, a group of questions and answers" (81). Here, the placement of the statement in a novel matters: the statement would belong to quite a different discursive formation if it were found, say, in a newspaper, or between friends. Genres, for MF, seem to be here to help us analysts limit the possibilites when we encounter a new statement. We use the idea of "genre" to limit the possible discursive field the statement could belong to, but this does not mean that genre and discursive field are the same thing, for the discursive field of, say, nursing, has many genres involved. Some discursive fields are named for the genres that seem to dominate them (although, I assume, that any genre can participate in the formation of the discourse surrounding an object, subject, or idea). Genres, for Foucault, seem to be more for the analyst--something after the fact that we construct to help us better talk about the rules of formation with some regularity (instead of spinning off into a million clauses as Foucault finds himself doing). In Burkeian terms, we have the recurring situation of needing to discuss the rules that govern statements belonging to a particular discursive formation, and so we create a proverb, a strategy, a Name that can stand as short hand for all of those rules, contexts, authorities, etc that are part of the statement. Archaeology, then, is undoing this naming process, translating this shorthand back into its original grammar and signs.
A discursive formation is not a genre: A discursive formation does "not form a rhetorical or formal unity", but it is "made up of a limited number of statemetns for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time...." (117). Genre study, however, does try to trace the evolution of the genre--which, as Carolyn Miller notes, carries with it the assumption that the genre is now "fixed" ("ideal, timeless form"), that it is a Thing, not a process. Unlike genre, discursive formation does not address a rhetorical or formal unity--while Miller attempts to downplay the requirement of "formal" by moving genre into the realm of social action and speech act theory, there is still a rhetoricality to those things we call genre--a repeatablility, something that can be templated and parodied.
Relationship to Archaeology:
"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 enteredc it; one cannot establish a bi-univocal relation between established disciplines and discursive formations" (178-9). If by "discipline" he means "statements recognized belonging to the discipline, what I describe above as the dominant forms that help us identify a discourse formation, then clearly he is saying that genre--disciplined texts, texts of a discipline--analysis is different from what he calls archaeology.
Subject [See also Subjectivity from Parts II and III]
Relationship to statement: "A statement also differs from any series of linguistic elements by virtue of the fact that it possesses a particular relation with a subject" (92).
"We must not, in fact, reduce the subject of the statemetn to the first-person grammatical elements that are present within the sentence" (92). And thus, the author dies.
Foucault on Free Indirect Discourse (a literary theory term, style indirect libre): In a novel, we know there is an author whose "name" (George Eliot? Currier Bell?) appears somewhere on the cover. But there are many problems with simply attributing all sentences in the novel to the person who gets paid all the royalties: "(...we are still faced with teh problem of the dialogue, and the sentences purporting to express the thoughts of a character; we are still faced iwth the problem of texts published under a pseudonym: and we know all the difficulties that these duplications raise for practitioners of interperative anlaysis when they wish to relate these formations, en bloc, to the author of the text, what he [sic] wanted to say, to what he[sic] thought, in short, to that great, silent, hidden, uniform discourse on which they build that whole pyramid of different levels); but, even apart from those authorities of formulation that are not identical with the individual/author, the statemetns of the novel do not have the same subject which they provide when they describe things as they would be seen by an anonymous, invisible, neutral individual, who moves magically among the characters of the novel, or when they provide, as if by an immediate, internal decipherment, the verbal version of what is silently experienced by a character" (93). A long quote, yes, but important for those of us concerned with narrative voice in 18th and 19th C novels. The "Free Indirect Discourse" utilized best by Jane Austen is a rhetorical puzzle that many literary scholars try to PoMo their way out of by using the Death of the Author and Foucualt's comments on the author as function. But Foucault here is only pointing out what is bothering the critics in the first place: This other voice that interrupts the normal direct/indirect quote diad is not that of the author, and it is not enough to simply call it part of the author function and throw it away. I want to think through what this not-author, not-narrator voice does to the reader reading. How does it change the truth-value, the "realism" of the novel? How does it try to mold the inner reading voice of the reader to that of this non-author narrator?
The subject, the situation, and the statement: The ennunciative function is not "some additional relation that is superimposed on the others, one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation. A statement always has borders peopled by other statements. These borders are not what is usually meant by 'context'--real or verbal--that is, all the situational or linguistic elements taken together that motivate a formulation and determine its meaning" (97). The statement is something other than a sentence said in the right kind of "situation" (as Bitzer imagines there are rhetorical and non-rhetorical ones). What sets a statement apart is that it is unique, although connected to other statements--but these situations are not what "motivates" (as in exigency) a statement to arise. Nor is there any speaking subject bringing it into being, declaring it a statement and thus making it so--"it is not simply the manipulation by a speaking subject of a number of elements and linguistic rules" (99). Nope. Not Bitzer at all.
When analyzing statements we must "operate thereofre with out reference to a cogito." This analysis "does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his sovereign freedom, or who, without realizing it, subjects himself to constraints of which he is only dimly aware" (121). In a single sentence, Foucault does away with most of the assumptions that went into Bitzer's rhetorical situation, which required a speaking subject who evaluated the exigencies, tailored a speech to his audience (yes! His!), according to constraints such as genre, time, space, ethos, etc. To analyze the nature of, the thing behind (sub-stance?) a statement, then, we should not analyze it via Bitzer's hermeneutic.
Authority
"...the materiality of the statement is not defined the space occupied...but rather by its status as a thing or object.....we know, for example, that for literary historians the edition of a book published with the agreement of the author does not have the same status as posthumous editions, that the statements in it have a unique value..." (102). This unique value, however, comes not from the authority of the author, but the authority of the institutions of Literary History that bestow that unique value on special editions. The reason why, MF implies, we do value the version of Great Expectations that Dickens wrote first over the one his editor made him write, or the versions edited 100 years later by Dickens scholars (corrected texts, added illustrations, etc), is that the first edition, the edition with Dickens's hand on it, cannot be repeated once Dickens is dead. What is valued is the un-repeatablility.
Authorship: See Subjectivity above.
Constraints [See also Constraints in contemporary rhetorical theory]
Bitzer's constraints seem to imply a silencing--that if conditions were different, so much more would have been said. Bitzer's rhetorical situation can be seen as a filter: it sifts out from the mass of all utterances that which can be said for a given situation, and the mesh of the sieve is made up of situational constraints such as time, place, audience, etc. What emerges is what is left over once all of the unsaid things have fallen through.
Foucault's version of what is said (enonce) is just the opposite. Instead the Said being what is left after all else is silenced, a subtractive process, Foucault's system is one of Positivities. Foucault asserts that "the words, sentences, meanings affirmations, series of propositiosn do not back directly onto a primeval night of silence; but that the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning...always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function; that between the language as one reads and hears it, and also as one speaks it....there is not a profusion of things half said, sentences left unfinished, thoughts half expressed, an endlessm onolgue of which only a few fragments emerge" (112). Instead, statements are generated by the positivities of a given discursive field (125).
[See also Badiou's Event above
Relationship to "regularity": "An analysis that reinvests in the empirical element of history...the problematic of the origin: in every oeuvre, in every book, in the smallest text, teh 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 aquired opinon, the law of discursive fatalities, and the vivacity of creation, the leap into irreducible difference" (142). This, Foucault says, is what the history of ideas attempts to do: to find the "tipping point" (as Malcolm Gladwell class it) of an era, idea, movement, discourse. This poses two possiblities: resemblance and procession--either the new idea resembles an old one or it is simply the natural evolution of a series of ideas.
On rarity: the analysis of statements and discourse formations seeks to "establish a law of rarity" (118), to determine what might have been said in a given situation compared to the statements that did appear.
Events and rarity: "...archaology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse....[including]a fourth level, at which the substitution of one discursive formation for another takes place. These events, whic hare by far the most rare, are, for archaeology, the most important" (171). The rarity of a truly new discursive formation is what interests the archaeologists. Here, the event is a linguistic one: the changing out of one form for another in an abrupt and radical way.
Archaeology
In true Foucauldian fashion, we are given more about what archaeology is not than what it is. The chapter "Archaeology and the History of Ideas" contrasts the two methods extensively--but it is simple enough to state that Archaeology seems to do exactly the opposite of the history of ideas, it seems throw out many of "history"'s main thinking tools (like "object" and "subject"), and has a very different understanding of the "progression" of history--Archaeology is concerned with the gaps, not the continuity.
Other, more positive definitions:
"Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to which teh facts of sucession must be referred if one is not to establish them in an unsystematic and naive way, that is in terms of merit" (144).
"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, disctinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time scale...[etc. A lot}" (157).
"Archaeology tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute 'change'; it tries to develop this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analysable status of transformation" (173).
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