The Formation of Concepts - 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' by Michel Foucault

Concepts are rarely placed in a virtual deductive edifice, but rather the field where concepts first appeared and were circulated can be defined as:

a)      Being organised in forms of succession –

-          in ordering of enunciative series – for example reasonings, inferences, descriptions, generalisations;

-          in ordering types of dependence of the statements;

-          the rhetorical schemata by which statements may be combined.

b)       Having forms of coexistence. These include -

-          a field of presence

which is the collection of statements acknowledged as forming the background to a field, established by relations in ‘experimental verification, logical validation, mere repetition, commentary, tradition, analysis of error, a search for hidden meanings.

-          a field of concomitance

which are statements belonging to different domains of objects but become relevant here as a source of analogy or as a higher principle to which it is possible to refer

-          a field of memory

which are statements no longer accepted or discussed as relevant to the concept, but which historically plays an important part in the formation of the concept.

c)       Identified by procedures of intervention which appear as –

-          techniques of rewriting (the changing way of defining chemical composition over the Classical period, for example)

-          methods of transcribing (a more versus less formal language use, for example)

-          modes of translating (qualitative into quantitative approximations, delimited, transferred, or systematised propositions, as appropriate).

Discursive formations are most defined by the links between these elements – the way the ordering of description might be related to the technique of rewriting. In this method it is not sought that we arrive at a valid and reliable analysis of any one particular concept – rather, we look for how recurrent elements of statements reappear, dissociate, recompose, extend, are absorbed into new logic, acquire new semantic content. We define at a preconceptual level the field by where the concept can exist, and the rules to which it is subjected.

Foucault gives an example from ‘The Order of Things’ analysing General Grammar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where he identifies a schema of attribution, articulation, designation and derivation as useful for discovering:

1.       What forms of succession are possible in analyses of nouns, verbs, adjectives, phonetics, syntax.

2.       How a domain of validity including its normativity and actuality is constituted.

3.       What relations General Grammar has with Maths, Natural History, and so forth.

4.       How various conceptions are possible for statements such as ‘to be’, or for proper and common nouns, for example.

The preconceptual level is not a definition apropos reality or a horizon of ideality. It is not proposed at the level of the discourse itself  - rather it looks to and for the emergence of concepts. It is not a series of abstractions – rather the rules of formation emerge as apparent not only in the mind of individuals, but in the discourse itself, with uniform anonymity.

Ref:

Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

The Formation of Enunciative Modalities - 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' by Michel Foucault

This chapter looks at the laws operating behind diverse statements, and in fact asks:

a)      Who is speaking? Who uses this language and is qualified to do so? How does he/she presume that what she says is right and true? Who is permitted to proffer such a discourse? The title of doctor, for example, involves criteria of competence and knowledge, pedagogic norms, legal conditions. There are systems of differentiation and relations - for example attributions, hierarchical subordinations, functional complementarities,  exchanges of information.

b)      From what institutional sites has this individual made their discourse? Is it a place of constant, coded systematic observation (like a hospital) or is it a field where background and environment can be acknowledged (the documentary field)

c)       The enunciations of the subject are also in part determined by the relations between the various domains she occupies. These grids of explicit or implicit interrogation give the subject a certain stance – she asks certain questions, perceives  certain things within the boundaries of relevant information, occupies particular places in information networks. These enunciations, allowed to the subject by certain social discourse, thus changes substantially in availability and optimality over time.

It can be imagined then that there is substantial disparity regarding the types of enunciation possible in a field of discourse. These cannot be reduced to a single founding act or to a founding consciousness. Enunciative modalities allow space for the occupation of many perspectives – the modalities show up the field of dispersion, and it is not by recourse to a transcendental subject nor to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of enunciations should be defined.

Ref:

Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

The Formation of Objects - 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' by Michel Foucault

Foucault suggests for an abstract field that represents a discipline, map:

1)      The surfaces of emergence

According to the theory, where do we find what is designated and analysed. This shifts over time as to content, but this gives us a means of limiting the domain, of defining what it is talking about, and of making it manifest and describable.

2)      Authorities of delimitation

Which bodies or institutions are responsible for setting the rules – medicine, law, religion, professional bodies and sometimes literary and art critiques have all had a hand in helping define ‘psychology’ for example.

3)      Grids of specification

Systems according to which the field is divided, contrasted, related, regrouped, classified and derived from one another.

A description thus derived is still inadequate because objects so defined are not neatly layed out, by virtue of the above definition, one after the other. Rather, the coordinates of the map interact, substantially, and these relations, and the way that these relations are formed in the real world, are highly dispersed.

These objects only exist in positive conditions of a complex group of relations. The relations are not present in the object, and are not deployed when the object is being analysed, the relations themselves do not reveal the immanent web of rationality among them.

The relations referred to above should not be confused with primary relations – definitive relationships between institutions, for example. The relations of dependence at the primary level are not necessarily what makes the formation of objects at the discursive level possible. A discursive space unfolds articulated with possible discourses – a system of real, primary relations and reflexive, secondary relations.

Discursive relations are neither interior (defining of a certain rhetorical structure) nor exterior (imposing limits upon) statements. They are at the limit of discourse, characterising not the language that is used, nor the circumstances within which the discourse is employed, but they delineate discourse itself, as a practice.

So, the unity of a discourse is completed through the setting up of relations that characterises the discursive practice to discover not a configuration, or a form, but a group of rules that is immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity. Of the term that is used to describe a field, we can discover it’s etymology, but this is not the same as the emergence of unity of use of the term over time, which is defined by a reflexive, secondary, classificatory rubric.

In looking at the field of psychopathology now, for example, we are typically trying to reconstitute it into something that it is not, nor neutralise the present discourse in its own presently engaged signs and symbols, rather, we are attempting to conjure up these symbols, in their ‘rich, heavy, immediate plenitude (pg 52). The symbols are typically regarded as a primitive law of discourse, an irrelevant tradition, or perhaps even as an unconscious desire, not seen nor directly spoken.

We seek to define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.

Note that this is not the analysis of lexical content nor the semantic structure that appears at the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken. Rather we look at a tangled plurality, at once superimposed and incomplete.

A quote from the great man himself:

‘I would like to show that ‘discourses’, in the form in which they can be heard or read, are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, coloured chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language, the intrication of lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice.

These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects. The task of articulating these rules consists not in treating discourses as a group of signs but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.'

Ref:

Foucault. M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge.

Obscure Mythology

It's not in the archetype of the Queen, the Nun or the Deaconess that I find myself really,

Childhood lost at 4
Child gained at 21
And lost at 22
Spiritual marriage untied by fate
Asceticism sewn through addiction
To fall over, tired
And be reborn, anew, at 31.

The bare bones might speak to an age old pattern, tread worn through time
But the lived detail begs that I acknowledge the star

The imagination, enlivened by the Nirmanakaya, the Sambhogakaya, the Dharmakaya,

(the pure, the non differentiated, the non discriminated)

The magic of the words half understood, half uttered, half met,
And the cold, empty structures,
That grace me with the space to breathe,

with life.