The Archaeology of Knowledge (French: L'archéologie
du savoir) is a 1969 methodological and historiographical
treatise by the French philosopher Michel
Foucault, in which he promotes "archaeology"
or the "archaeological method", an analytical
method he implicitly used in his previous
works Madness and Civilization (1961), The
Birth of the Clinic (1963), and The Order
of Things (1966).
It is Foucault's only explicitly methodological
work.
Foucault's premise is that systems of thought
and knowledge ("epistemes" or "discursive
formations") are governed by rules (beyond
those of grammar and logic) which operate
beneath the consciousness of individual subjects
and define a system of conceptual possibilities
that determines the boundaries of thought
and language use in a given domain and period.
Foucault also provides a philosophical treatment
and critique of phenomenological and dogmatic
structural readings of history and philosophy,
portraying continuous narratives as naïve
ways of projecting our own consciousness onto
the past, thus being exclusive and excluding.
== Summary ==
Foucault argues that the contemporary study
of the history of ideas, although it targets
moments of transition between historical worldviews,
ultimately depends on continuities that break
down under close inspection.
The history of ideas marks points of discontinuity
between broadly defined modes of knowledge,
but the assumption that those modes exist
as wholes fails to do justice to the complexities
of discourse.
Foucault argues that "discourses" emerge and
transform not according to a developing series
of unarticulated, common worldviews, but according
to a vast and complex set of discursive and
institutional relationships, which are defined
as much by breaks and ruptures as by unified
themes.Foucault defines a "discourse" as a
'way of speaking'.
Thus, his method studies only the set of 'things
said' in their emergences and transformations,
without any speculation about the overall,
collective meaning of those statements, and
carries his insistence on discourse-in-itself
down to the most basic unit of things said:
the statement (énoncé).
During most of Archaeology, Foucault argues
for and against various notions of what are
inherent aspects of a statement, without arriving
at a comprehensive definition.
He does, however, argue that a statement is
the rules which render an expression (that
is, a phrase, a proposition, or a speech act)
discursively meaningful.
This concept of meaning differs from the concept
of signification: Though an expression is
signifying, for instance "The gold mountain
is in California", it may nevertheless be
discursively meaningless and therefore have
no existence within a certain discourse.
For this reason, the "statement" is an existence
function for discursive meaning.Being rules,
the "statement" has a special meaning in the
Archaeology: it is not the expression itself,
but the rules which make an expression discursively
meaningful.
These rules are not the syntax and semantics
that makes an expression signifying.
It is additional rules.
In contrast to structuralists, Foucault demonstrates
that the semantic and syntactic structures
do not suffice to determine the discursive
meaning of an expression.
Depending on whether or not it complies with
these rules of discursive meaning, a grammatically
correct phrase may lack discursive meaning
or, inversely, a grammatically incorrect sentence
may be discursively meaningful - even meaningless
letters (e.g. "QWERTY") may have discursive
meaning.
Thus, the meaning of expressions depends on
the conditions in which they emerge and exist
within a field of discourse; the discursive
meaning of an expression is reliant on the
succession of statements that precede and
follow it.
In short, the "statements" Foucault analysed
are not propositions, phrases, or speech acts.
Rather, "statements" constitute a network
of rules establishing which expressions are
discursively meaningful, and these rules are
the preconditions for signifying propositions,
utterances, or speech acts to have discursive
meaning.
However, "statements" are also 'events', because,
like other rules, they appear (or disappear)
at some time.
Foucault's analysis then turns towards the
organized dispersion of statements, which
he calls discursive formations.
Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is
outlining is only one possible procedure,
and that he is not seeking to displace other
ways of analysing discourse or render them
invalid.Foucault concludes Archaeology with
responses to criticisms from a hypothetical
critic (which he anticipates will occur after
his book is read).
== Reception ==
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, writing in
Foucault (1986), describes The Archaeology
of Knowledge as, "the most decisive step yet
taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities."
== 
See also ==
Foucauldian discourse analysis
== Notes
