According to Foucault, Archaeology Is a Method, Whereas Genealogy Is a Tactic. What Is the Difference?
There are a number of continuities of themes and interests in Foucault’s work. There is also evidence of shifts of emphasis, changes of direction, developments and reformations, which have led to a number of critiques of Foucault’s work to talk about breaks, differences and discontinuities within his work. One moment least a shift of emphasis does appear to be present is in the writings which emerged after the Archaeology of Knowledge and after the brief cultural and political event known as May 68 in France.
Archaeology constitutes a way of doing historical analysis of systems of thought or discourse. To be more precise archaeology seeks to describe the archive, he term employed by Foucault to refer to “the general system of formation and transformation of statements’ existent at a given period within a particular society. The archive determines both the system of enunciability of a statement-event and its system of functioning in other words it constitutes the set of rules which define the limits and forms of expressibility, conservation, memory, reactivation and appropriation.
The object of archaeological analysis is then a description of the archive, literally what may be spoken of in discourse; what statements survive, disappear, get re-used etc. The ultimate objective of such an analysis of discourse is not to reveal a hidden meaning or deep truth, neither is to trace the origin of discourse to a particular mind or subject, but to document its conditions of existence and the field in which it is deployed.
Hence, if the object of archaeological analysis is a description of the archive, a description of systems of statements, of discursive formations, the question arises as to possible similarities with the history of ideas. Foucault’s archaeological analysis represents “an abandonment of the history of ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures, an attempt to practise a quite different history of what men have said.”
Foucault’s
Archaeology constitutes a way of doing historical analysis of systems of thought or discourse. To be more precise archaeology seeks to describe the archive, he term employed by Foucault to refer to “the general system of formation and transformation of statements’ existent at a given period within a particular society. The archive determines both the system of enunciability of a statement-event and its system of functioning in other words it constitutes the set of rules which define the limits and forms of expressibility, conservation, memory, reactivation and appropriation.
The object of archaeological analysis is then a description of the archive, literally what may be spoken of in discourse; what statements survive, disappear, get re-used etc. The ultimate objective of such an analysis of discourse is not to reveal a hidden meaning or deep truth, neither is to trace the origin of discourse to a particular mind or subject, but to document its conditions of existence and the field in which it is deployed.
Hence, if the object of archaeological analysis is a description of the archive, a description of systems of statements, of discursive formations, the question arises as to possible similarities with the history of ideas. Foucault’s archaeological analysis represents “an abandonment of the history of ideas, a systematic rejection of its postulates and procedures, an attempt to practise a quite different history of what men have said.”
Foucault’s
References: - In D.F. Bouchard (ed), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Blackwell Oxford 1977)) The Archaeology of Knowledge Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault (ed) Barry Smart 2002 Cornwall Routledge Foucault (ed) Robert Nola Cass1998 Foucault, Marxism and Critique Barry Smart 1983Routledge & Kegan Paul