Defining the Statement - 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' by Michel Foucault

In adopting an attitude that seeks to investigate the emergence of discursive formation, Foucault has  enquired into:

-          The emergence of objects;

-          The system of the appearance and distribution of enunciative modes;

-          The system of the placing and dispersion of concepts;

-          The system of deployment of strategic choices.

In doing so, Foucault proposes that perhaps he was seeking to identify the ground of a statement, as it arose out of the field of formless discourse.

Examining his use of the term ‘statement’ – Foucault identifies that he used the word to refer to both a population of statements, and as a point of distinction from his use of the word ‘discourses’ (ie as a part distinguished from the whole).

On first glance, he proposes, statements look indivisible – ‘a point without a surface, but a point that can be located in planes of division and in specific forms of groupings...the atom of discourse’. Looking at whether a statement equates with a proposition which equates with a sentence which equates with a speech act, Foucault proposes that none of these equations are true. It is not propositional structure that defines statements – ‘no one heard’ is propositionally indistinct from ‘It is true that no one heard’, and yet, for ‘no one heard’ we understand an observation is being made, whereas for the second statement ‘it is true that no one heard’ we read a dialogue or an interior monologue. Distinct enunciative characteristics emerge in each case.

Statements do not equate to sentences – a simple nominal syntagma (‘That man!’) an adverb (‘Absolutely’) or a personal pronoun (‘You’) all are not defined by the typical subject-copula-predicate structure of a canonical sentence. Foucault also points to classificatory tables for Latin or botanical species, genealogical trees, and accounting reports as existing as ‘statements’ that do not conform to the grammatical characteristics of the sentence.

The speech act isolates an act of formulation in it’s emergence, be it a promise , an order, a decree, a contract, an agreement or an observation, each in it’s own specific circumstances. Speech acts however often have criteria that determine their form outside of the criteria that legitimates a statement – an oath, a prayer, a contract or a promise all have distinct formulas and separate sentences. Speech acts will often constitute more than one statement.

Statements are less charged and more omnipresent than sentences, propositions or speech acts. One way to characterise a statement might be to say that it is a series of signs, figures, marks and traces, and then invoke grammar to define whether it is a sentence, invoke logic to indicate whether propositional form is apparent, and analysis to determine whether it is a speech act or otherwise.

Statements do not exist in the same way, or at the same level, that a language exists – the signs that make up the elements of a language are forms that are imposed upon statements and control them from within. If there were no statements, language would not exist, but no statement is indispensable for a language to exist. Language exists as a system that allows construction of statements, but in another respect it exists only as a description obtained from a collection of real statements.

Foucault undertakes the analysis of a string of haphazardly typed letters, and proposes that this may or may not constitute a statement, depending on the context of the construction. A statement is not an object presented for inspection, with limits and independence. It is not so much an element among others, or a function vertically situated in relation to other units and it is not a structure. It is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs an on the basis of which one may then decide through analysis or intuition, whether or not they make sense.

Ref:

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