Archaeology
from 1969 The Archaeology of Knowledge; the practice runs from 1961
Do not ask who was right; ask what could be said at all in that period, what counted as a serious statement, and who was allowed to make one.
- Active
- from 1969
- Where
- Paris
- Also
- archéologie du savoir
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Archaeology examines the rules that governed what could be said in a period — not the beliefs people held but the conditions under which a statement counted as sensible, serious and worth arguing about at all.
The deliberate refusal is to ask whether the statements were true, or to trace continuity between periods. Foucault treats each formation as having its own rules, and the transitions between them as breaks rather than developments.
How it works
Assemble the statements actually made in a period, including the dull and the institutional. Identify what they treat as going without saying. Identify who was authorised to speak and in what settings. Compare with an adjacent period and locate the discontinuity. Describe the rules rather than evaluating the statements.
The last instruction is the discipline and the source of most objections to the method.
The moves, in order
- Assemble the statements actually made, including the routine ones
- Identify what they treat as not needing to be said
- Identify who was authorised to speak, and where
- Compare with an adjacent period and locate the break
- Describe the rules without judging the statements
The procedure
Proposition The two planning schemes are not two answers to one question.
- Take the shire's planning documents from 1975 and from 2015 and read what each treats as going without saying.
- In 1975 the object of the document is land, described by area, slope, soil class and productive capacity. Amenity appears once. The authorised speakers are the shire engineer and the agricultural extension officer.
- In 2015 the object is character, described by streetscape, view lines, vegetation and the visual impact of built form. Productive capacity does not appear. The authorised speakers are a heritage adviser, a landscape architect and an urban designer, none of which were positions in 1975.
- The 2015 scheme does not disagree with the 1975 one about what constitutes good use of land. It cannot: the question the earlier scheme was answering is not posed in it at all.
- The break is visible in the objections too. A 1975 objection that a subdivision would waste class two soil is not a weaker version of a 2015 objection about visual impact. It is unintelligible in the later document's terms.
Therefore The two schemes belong to different formations, and reading the earlier as a primitive attempt at what the later does misdescribes both — which matters, because the transitional provisions assume they are commensurable.
The method's refusal to say which scheme is better is not evasion. The finding is that the question of which is better cannot be posed without first choosing one scheme's terms to pose it in.
What it is good for
Comparing periods, professions or institutions whose vocabularies have diverged, and diagnosing arguments where the parties are not disagreeing so much as speaking from different formations.
Where it fails
The discontinuity is asserted rather than demonstrated. Historians have repeatedly shown continuities across Foucault's breaks, and the method has no way of settling whether a resemblance across a boundary is real or superficial, since it has already ruled that continuity is not what it looks for.
The archive is also chosen, and the choice does the work. Assembling a different set of documents from the same period produces a different formation, and nothing in the method constrains the selection or makes it visible.
And the refusal to evaluate cannot be sustained by its own users. Foucault plainly thought some of the formations he described were worse than others, and the method gives him no standing to say so — a tension he acknowledged and never resolved.
Common misconceptions
That it is intellectual history. It is close to the opposite: intellectual history traces how ideas developed and who influenced whom, and archaeology deliberately brackets influence and development in favour of describing the rules of a period on their own terms.
Where it came from
Practised in Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things through the 1960s, and given its methodological statement in The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969, which is Foucault explaining what he had been doing.
What became of it
Largely superseded in Foucault's own work by genealogy, which reintroduced power and change, and which he thought did what archaeology could not.
Lasting influence
The history of science, the sociology of professions, and the whole practice of asking what a period could not have said.
Why it still matters
Useful wherever two vocabularies have to be compared without one being treated as the mature version of the other.
Put another way
Reading a rulebook nobody wrote and everybody followed.
Texts
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
The demonstration rather than the manifesto, and much the better book. The preface, on the Borges taxonomy, is the clearest statement of what the method is for.
Where to start
Read the preface to The Order of Things. Four pages, and the whole idea is in them.
The surprising bit
Foucault effectively abandoned the method within a few years of publishing its manifesto, on the grounds that describing rules without asking what enforced them left out everything that mattered.
In their own words
The archive is first the law of what can be said
Who held it
Georges Canguilhem
Connections
The verdict
A real discipline of not reading the present backwards into the past, resting on breaks it cannot demonstrate.