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

Organisation of concepts, via what may be a regrouping of objects, of certain modalities or types of enunciation, occurs in statements of theme or theory. Foucault names these themes and theories as ‘strategies’, and identifies the problem of discovering how they are distributed in history. Necessity or chance may define the links between them.

Madness and Civilisation is identified by Foucault as being a discursive formation where the ‘theoretical points of choice’ were easy to locate, the conceptual systems were few and easy to identify, the enunciative rules were repetitive and homogenous, but also for which the emergence of the theoretical points was a highly complex and interwoven web.

Looking over his progress in other works, Foucault summarises the directions for research as:

1.       Finding the points of diffraction in a discourse –

Incompatibilities

Equivalences

And links of systematisation

So, for these equivalent but incompatible elements a coherent series of objects, forms of statement and concepts has been derived (and new points of incompatibility arise in each series). Note that the description opens up a field of possible options and enables various mutually exclusive architectures to appear, either through time or in the same instance.

2.       An economy of discursive constellation will emerge and need to be described as the guiding authority for that which has been chosen as that to be enunciated. This may take form as appropriate to the context – for example applications of semantic fields will provide different authorities to those of the concrete models for General Grammar as they were defined in the 16^th century. Discourses may also be defined as an analogy, an opposition or a complementarity in relation to the first field. Sometimes there is a mutual delimitation that emerges where a differentiation according to the domain of application becomes apparent and pertinent (the distinction made in history between psychiatry and medicine being one example that has had significant implications for emerging theory and practice by psychiatrists and doctors since that time).

3.       Theoretical choices that are made are usually dependent upon the existence and acts of another authority, in a field of non-discursive practices.

-          The rules and processes of appropriation of the discourse and

-          The possible positions of desire in relation to the discourse.

An example offered by Foucault is the existence of the field of General Grammar as occurring within the pedagogical space of the Western 17^th century. I love his last sentence:

‘[The authorities] are not disturbing elements which, superimposing themselves upon its pure, neutral, atemporal, silent form, suppress its true voice and emit in its place a travestied discourse, but on the contrary, [are] its formative elements.’

Maybe I just like the word travesty. J

A basis of the same set of relations for a series of strategies is therefore indicative of an individualised discursive formation. Per Foucault, it is important to recognise that there is no anterior, silent choice that lies as an originating point for these strategies. Strategies are not world-views neatly coined into words, nor are they a ‘hypocritical translation of an interest masquerading under the pretext of a theory’. Rather, the strategies are systematic ways of:

-          Treating a discourse (delimiting, regrouping, separating, linking objects and making them derive from one another;

-          Arranging forms of enunciation (choosing, placing and constituting a series)

-          Manipulating concepts (giving them rules for use, inserting them into regional coherences and thus creating conceptual architectures.

‘These strategies are not seeds of discourse, they are regulated ways...of practicing the possibilities of discourse.’ Foucault steps firmly away from idealism, identifying that there is no perfect, ultimate or timeless discourse. There is no intermingling of discourses for nature or the economy, for example – one that would proceed slowly, accumulating and completing (something described in the teleological confines of history), the other perpetually rupturing into heterogeneous fragments. There is no fundamental project or secondary play of opinions in the formation of an object.

Ref: 

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