Archaeology of Knowledge by Foucault Michel

Author:Foucault, Michel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780203604168
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

II

I must now turn to the second group of questions: how can the description of statements, thus defined, be adjusted to the analysis of discursive formations, the principles of which I outlined above? And inversely: to what extent can one say that the analysis of discursive formations really is a description of statements, in the sense in which I have used this word? It is important to answer these questions; for it is at this point that the enterprise to which I have devoted myself for so many years, which I have developed in a somewhat blind way, but of which I am now trying — even if I readjust it, even if I rectify a number of errors or imprudences — to recapture the general outline, must close its circle. As has already become clear, I am not trying to say here what I once tried to say in this or that concrete analysis, or to describe the project that I had in mind, the obstacles that I encountered, the attempts that I was forced to abandon, the more or less satisfactory results that I managed to obtain; I am not describing an effective trajectory in order to indicate what should have been and what will be fromnow on: I am trying to elucidate in itself — in order to measure it and to determine its requirements — a possibility of description that I have used without being aware of its constraints and resources; rather than trying to discover what I said, and what I might have said, I shall try to reveal, in its own regularity — a regularity that I have not yet succeeded in mastering — what made it possible to say what I did. But one can also see that I am not developing here a theory, in the strict sense of the term: the deduction, on the basis of a number of axioms, of an abstract model applicable to an indefinite number of empirical descriptions. If such an edifice were ever possible, the time for it has certainly not yet arrived. I am not inferring the analysis of discursive formations from a definition of statements that would serve as a basis; nor am I inferring the nature of statements from what discursive formations are, as one was able to abstract them from this or that description; but I am trying to show how a domain can be organized, without flaw, without contradiction, without internal arbitrariness, in which statements, their principle of grouping, the great historical unities that they may form, and the methods that make it possible to describe them are all brought into question. I am not proceeding by linear deduction, but rather by concentric circles, moving sometimes towards the outer and sometimes towards the inner ones: beginning with the problem of discontinuity in discourse and of the uniqueness of the statement (the central theme), I have tried to analyse, on the periphery, certain forms of enigmatic groupings; but the principles of unification

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.