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.