CRG for Tuesday, February 12 (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge)
This reading is going to challenge what you think you know about history and the way we produce it. Most 
dictionary definitions of history will indicate that it is the study of past events; that it is the sum total of past events; that it is a continuous chronological record of past events. History comes from documents—sometimes they’re verbal documents, sometimes they’re material objects—and the historian constructs a meaningful narrative based on those documents. What sorts of assumptions go into the creation of a historical narrative? Where do the concepts that guide the production of narrative—war, countries, insanity, famine—come from? They’re not naturally given (no concept is). So how do we formulate our concepts? Are we sure those are the correct or only concepts that should guide our formulation of history?
Although Foucault probably would never have thought in these terms, let’s begin thinking about The Archaeology of Knowledge by considering how the Russian formalists invited us to view art or literature: they asked us to learn to see things strangely, that is, from a perspective that enabled us to look at things as though we had never seen them before. That permits us to see them as they are, and not as we have come to think of them. We see details that our understanding of the objects causes us to gloss over because our understanding is general and the individual object is particular.
Think of how you might apply the process of defamiliarization to history. That is, we have an understanding of how historical events occurred; we even have an understanding of how we go about determining how historical events occurred—that is, of how we uncover and write about history. The questions that Foucault identifies on the first two pages of the reading would conform to a traditional view of conceptualizing history.
But what if we defamiliarize it? What if we think not in terms of the concepts that have given rise to our notions of history—warfare, political events, long sweeping movements of cultural development, etc.—and focus instead on two things: (a) what constitutes an event or significant feature in the first place? That is, how do we know we’ve identified the correct events? (b) Why do we tend to think in terms that flow smoothly one into the other? What would happen if we focused instead on the things that don’t make sense in our current scheme of things? So, let’s try the following analogy:
Just as the Russian formalists might use a poem about a common object—a tree, for example, or a vase—to cause us to question what we think we know about the object by making us actually look at it in great detail, including its very particular features that distinguish it as a unique object (which would include its imperfections), so the Foucauldian historian makes us question what we think we know about history and how we know about it by focusing on things that fall outside of our common understanding.
Ask yourself this: where does any concept come from? How, that is, have we decided that there is such a thing as, for example, insanity? What contributes to its definition? Are we perhaps too comfortable thinking that it’s a naturally occurring concept? Think of this in terms of our discussion about how one cuts up the spectrum into colors for which we have names. Of all possible human knowledge, how and why have we cut up the world into our current concepts?
The problem to get to here is this: how do concepts arise, and are there ways of conceptualizing that might give us a different picture of the world?
As you read through the Introduction, keep all these things in mind.
Read carefully the middle paragraph on p. 7 to understand how Foucault thinks of traditional history as memory or a monument of the past, and how he suggests we might think of history as an archaeology.
On p. 8 Foucault discusses discontinuity as the “stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian’s task to remove from history.” Try thinking of it this way: since the historian’s task has always been to construct a narrative about the past, things that don’t make sense in that narrative get left out. But does history always have to make sense? Does the present make sense? That is, can we classify everything that happens today all across the world using the same set of classifications? Of course not (think of some examples).
Maybe history isn’t (1) what happened but (2) how we understand what happened and how we produce our understanding of what happened. Think about the difference between those two things.
In Chapter 1, "The Unities of Discourse," Foucault asks us to think about what makes a division or grouping distinct. "Can one accept," he asks, "the distinction between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc., and which tend to create certain great historical individualities?" (22). Understand what Foucault is getting at here, especially by considering the last sentences of that paragraph.
Foucault then moves on to interrogate unities. What makes something, well, something? What makes it distinct from whatever is right next to it, either spatially or conceptually? For example, what makes literature different from philosophy? Perhaps we shouldn't be so comfortable with those unities (literature, philosophy) until we interrogate how they're formed and what sorts of things—ideas, materials, beliefs, power structures—contribute to forming the sense of a unity (and that includes, it turns out on p. 23, books).
Difficult idea: do things precede the discourses about them? Defend the negative here. That is, argue that discourses produce things (pp. 25ff).
Card catalog photo by Gregg