The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language by Michel Foucault

Introduction

For many years historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if they were trying to reveal the stable processes beneath the thick surface layer of events created by traditional history. The tools that enable historians to carry out this work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: quantitative analysis, models of economic growth, demographic analysis, climate studies, sociology, the description of technological changes and of their spread. Beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars and famines, there emerge other, apparently unmoving histories: sea routes, mining industries, drought and irrigation, crop rotation, the global balance between hunger and abundance.

At about the same time, in those disciplines we call the history of ideas, the history of science, philosophy, thought, and literature, attention has been turned away from vast unities like 'periods' or 'centuries' to various forms of discontinuity. There's the idea that the accumulation of knowledge over time has limits, that knowledge must be rediscovered and restarted regularly. There's the idea that history is not progressive, that it is not moving gradually towards refinement and civilization. There's the idea that you can't write a history from both a macroscopic perspective and microscopic perspective at the same time. There are various simultaneous histories at work for any field. There's the search for axioms and principles beyond historical causalities. And there's the historicizing of a history of ideas, which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and revealing this past as ideological. And there's the centering of the text in place of the history it once served primarily to reveal.

In fact, the same problems are being posed in history and the history of ideas, but they have provoked opposite effects on the surface. Both problems have to do with the way we use documents. We use to try to interpret documents to determine what happened in the past; now we use documents to understand the history of documents themselves, its unities, series and relations.

This has several consequences:

1. The surface effects already mentioned: the proliferation of discontinuities in the history of ideas, and the emergence of long periods in history proper.
2. Discontinuity, which it was once the historian's task to remove from history, has now become one of the basic elements of historical analysis: it's the means by which a historian can distinguish between possible levels of analysis, it's the refined result of his analysis, it's what makes ever more specific analyses possible.
3. Historians must now determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series; what vertical system they are capable of forming.
4. There are new methodological problems to consider now: the building up of coherent corpora of documents; the choice to treat documentation exhaustively, by representative elements or random sampling; the level of analysis and the relevant elements to be analyzed; the method of analysis; the delimitation of sub-groups that articulate the material.