Review: An Ethics of Language

Author(s): Edward Said

Source: Diacritics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1974), pp. 28-37
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464989
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28
Michel Foucault. The Archeology of
Knowledge and The Discourse on Lan-
guage. New York: Pantheon Books,
1972.
Since the publication of Les Mots et les choses
(the title of its 1971 English translation is The Or-
der of Things) in 1966, Foucault's work has been
revisionist in character and concern. For not only
have his three essays on Nietzsche and Deleuze, his
two later books L'Archdologie du savoir, and
L'Ordre du discours,' all been about thinkers and
thought, revising, reordering, reinterpreting what had
been written, ordered and interpreted differently
from them; but also Foucault now turned his
thought back towards his own previous work. Thus it Edward Said
appeared in 1969 that The Order of Things and
Madness and Civilization had tried "to measure the
mutations that operate in general in the field of his-
tory; an enterprise in which the methods, limits, and
themes proper to the history of ideas are questioned;
an enterprise by which one tries to throw off the last
JirT( It0 OF IL'GQJ(J
anthropological constraints [. . .]. These tasks were
outlined [in those two earlier books] in a rather dis-
ordered way, and their general articulation was never
clearly defined" (p. 15). Also part of this revisionist
phase has been Foucault's disenchantment with the
idea of an author, a concept he has found grossly
incapable of dealing with the trans-personal authority
of texts and documents. To revise has not meant to making very doubtful his theoretical ambition to
find himself, as he would like, "on the other side of
change opinions about which authors are more sig-
nificant than others, although one can assume that that discourse." An anonymous writer he clearly is not.
too has happened to Foucault. To revise for him has Nevertheless the ambition to write as if from the
meant primarily to understand more closely the pro- standpoint of anonymous rules has been worth main-
cess of knowledge, its formation, dispersion, trans- taining since, according to Foucault, he now knows
mission and permanence, in terms of "anonymous that discourse "is made up of a limited number of
rules" that are extremely precise and specialized. statements for which a group of conditions of exis-
Moreover he has been at pains to show that during tence can be defined." Among these conditions an
the course of this understanding he has been released author is not necessarily one of the most important.
not only from obligations to the history of ideas, but To understand this we need only recall that Freud's
also from the conventional biography of great men account of the Unconscious and its behavior is not
and the narration of important events. All told then completely dependent for its intelligibility upon the
a good deal of Foucault's revision has been negative, neurotic patient. The author of neurotic thoughts
and his description of those anonymous rules is fre- does not authorize, except in a limited way, the en-
tire system of coherence by which his thoughts can
quently an itemized list of what they are not. Usu-
be understood. Similarly, Marx's description of ide-
ally, however, the negatives are pronounced against
what he refers to as anthropology, which is the very ology envisages no particular individual; as a philo-
thing that Nietzsche had called anthropomorphism: sophic idea it has a force (in Marxist discourse) that
the habit of making all knowledge in the image of need not always be referred back to Marx's biogra-
man or, worse, making every item of knowledge re- phy. "Discourses are composed of signs; but what
ducible to an original human act without which the they do is more than use these signs to designate
item would otherwise have no cognitive status. things. It is this more that renders them irreducible
to the language and to speech. It is this 'more' that
Foucault's self-revision is theoretically consis-
we must reveal and describe" (p. 49). The questions
tent with one of the principal themes of his histor-
Foucault has been asking himself therefore are as
ical research, the disappearance in contemporary
knowledge of man's role as central subject, author
and actor. But why not also practically consistent?
Because Foucault is, as I have elsewhere said, far i These last two works now appear together in English
as The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on
too clearly the unusually impressive author of his Language. The first, whose French original appeared in
work. This is an unhesitating compliment to him as 1969, is translated by M. Sheridan Smith, and the sec-
a stylist of thought, yet I intend it also as a way of ond, which originally appeared in 1971, is translated--
less carefully-by Rupert Swyer. Unless otherwise noted,
page references appended parenthetically to quotations
Edward Said, Professor of English and ComparativeLit- from Foucault are taken from this one volume of two
erature at Columbia, is teaching at Harvard this year. translations.

follows: can one describe intellectual production
without stopping the description at terminals like
author, Zeitgeist, period, texts, ideas or language?
What gives written language a recognizable imprimt
6ver and above the signature of its author? What in
short is the regularity of language in use in relation
to which an author is a kind of eruptive irregularity?
In raising these questions Foucault, I suspect,
would prefer to be called a teacher rather than an
author, because a teacher exposes knowledge directly
before his students, he frees "a coherent domain of
description" for and with his students. The more
Foucault's work increases in volume and authority
the more he has agitated to diminish the author's
prerogatives, the more also he has become a teacher
who stands in "the field of coordination and sub-
ordination of statements in which concepts appear,
and are defined, applied and transformed" (pp. 182-
83). Nowhere does Foucault himself make the ex-
plicit distinction between author and teacher, but it
is a very useful one nonetheless. Primarily a teacher
makes explicit what an author hides inside the flow-
ing lines of his language: namely that knowledge is
dispersion, strategy, formation, discontinuity. More-
over the teacher's place of business is the class, a
site of exteriority, whereas the author's locale, a
page, is far less visible as activity (which it is), and
much more his private property. All this is a political
motif running through Foucault's Archeology as he
turns the teacher's openness upon the author's ac-
cumulated reserves of power. Class struggle within
knowledge pits man-the-author as historian (whose
security is "the destiny of rationality and the teleo!-
ogy of the sciences, the long, continuous labor of
thought from period to period, the awakening and
the progress of consciousness, its perpetual resump-
tion of itself, the uncompleted, but uninterrupted
movement of totalizations, the return to an ever-
open source, and finally the historico-transcendental
thematic," p. 39) against a revolutionary teacher
whose vocabulary replaces history of ideas with
"archeology," documents with "monuments," texts
with "discourses," language with "statements"
(enonces). The teacher's aim
is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their com-
plexity and density; to show that to speak is to do some-
thing-something other than to express what one thinks;
to translate what one knows, and something other than
to play with the structures of a language (langue); to
show that to add a statement to a pre-existing series of
statements is to perform a complicated and costly ges-
ture, which involves conditions (and not only a situa-
tion, a context, and motives), and rules (not the logical
and linguistic rules of construction); to show that a
change in the order of discourse does not presuppose
'new ideas,' a little invention and creativity, a different
mentality, but transformationsin a practice, perhaps also
in neighboring practices, and in their common articula-
tion. (p. 209)
Thus the teacher deprives the sovereign subject (or
cogito) "of the exclusive and instantaneous right" to
change discourse.
What has become more clear than ever in
Foucault's revisionist assault upon scholarship is the
particular will to knowledge pushing his work for-
ward. On the one hand, in his most recent series of
diacritics/Summer1974
29
lectures at the College de France he has been study-
ing the regular transformations which a "polymor-
phous" appetite for knowledge can undergo; on the
other hand, the trajectory of his own intellectual
project has re-formed itself to accommodate certain
actualities in research elucidated by his practice. I
think it is imperative to understand that his vocabu-
lary of working terms-monument, archeology,
statement, discourse, etc.-is not a fussy way of de-
claring his originality, but is rather a design to meet
the actualities and the desires of will to knowledge
in general, and his own search for knowledge in par-
ticular. If his most recent work appears to be more
explicitly political and revolutionary than the work
that brought him great fame, then that is because, I
think, he has only lately apprehended the latent pub-
lic quality of his historical investigation in Madness
and Civilization and The Order of Things. Probably
the May 1968 events in Paris played a major role in
bringing him out from behind his work: two espe-
cially important and extended interviews, in which
Foucault began to draw forth the political meaning
of "archeology," date from that period. One is
"R6ponse 'aune question," Esprit, No. 5 (May 1968),
pp. 850-74; the other is "R6ponse au Cercle d'6pis-
t6mologie," Cahiers pour l'analyse, 9 (Summer 1968),
pp. 9-40.
From then on, I believe that Foucault's inter-
ests are dominated by a symptomatic group of pres-
sures on him (one can just as well call them desires
or condititons or obsessions). Taken all together
these pressures have kept him responsible for the
goals and the results of his research, and responsive
to the encroachments on him of the academy, the
community of radicals, the injustices of contempo-
rary society, and his own popularity. The first of
these pressures is the simplest to state and the hardest
to deal with. It is the historian's need to see history
as a mass of historical documents intended, necessi-
tated, by certain condititons, not as chance produc-
tions willed into existence by the flukes of genius
or time. An intellectual rejection of the watery ra-
tionale usually employed in determining the setting
of a text in time and place, this pressure enables
Foucault to search for rigor in explanation where
none had been possible previously. Yet in order to
resort neither to mechanically determinist explana-
tions nor to simple causal arguments, Foucault re-
draws the terrain in which, as a historian, he can
function systematically.
To asnwer the question why did X (not A)
say Y (not B) on occasion Z (not W), X, Y, Z,
A, B and W must be re-defined as belonging wholly
to an historically and particularly apprehensible or-
der. This order Foucault calls discourse. Hence:
"The question posed by language analysis of some
discursive fact or other is always: according to what
rules has a particular statement been made, and con-
sequently according to what rules could other sim-
ilar statements be made? The description of the
events of discourse poses a quite different question:
how is it that one particular statement appeared
rather than another?" (p. 27). Obviously statement
is the key word here, and consequently, as we shall
see, Foucault must make the nature of the statement
coherent both from the standpoint of its retrospec-
3D
tive historical analysis and of its rationally intel-
ligible method of production. However the place of
discourse, its setting, in which statements occur, is
specified by Foucault as the archive. The retrieval
of the archive from its own time and place in the
past and its description is what, with only the most
unavoidable geological analogy intended, he calls
archeology.
The next pressure has already been implied in
my initial definition of discourse and archive. Par-
adoxically history no longer can be conceived of as
a domain which is entirely, or even mainly, temporal
(if by time one means, generally, the linear succes-
sion of dates and events). Foucault begins The
Archeology of Knowledge with a stocktaking of the
extent to which recent historical research is about
"the great silent, motionless bases that traditional
history has covered with a thick layer of events" (p.
3). To uncover those bases is to admit that an
"epistemological mutation" has overtaken the study.
of history. Its essential point is what Foucault and
others have called decentering, which is fundamen-
tally opposed to anthropological and humanistic at-
tempts to write total history radiating out from man.
For the new kind of history there is no quasi-divine
archi, or telos, no Weltanschauung, no smug con-
tinuity, no immobile structures necessarily to be
found in it. The effects of ethnology, linguistics, psy-
choanalysis, and generally of Nietzschean interpre-
tation have been to dissolve the priority of these
given calendars which supposedly typify time. Rather
the historian must now write general history: "a total
description draws all phenomena around a single
centre-a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-
view, an overall shape; a general history, on the con-
trary, would deploy the space of a dispersion" (p.
10). How else is one to deal with such questions as
the "apparently unmoving histories" of "sea routes
[...] of corn or of gold-mining [...] of drought and
of irrigation [...] crop rotation [...] of the balance
achieved by the human species between hunger and
abundance" (p. 3)? No longer is the historian simply
to link events in a causal series; he must now ask
about different sorts of series, new criteria of period-
ization, differently articulated systems of relation
between series. Dates, by which a sequential calendar
miming the line of a man's life was formerly con-
structed and given priority, acquire diminished and
qualified significance. Recurrent distributions and
architectonic unities, displacements and transforma-
tions-these are the spatial indicators of historical
activity today, and it is Foucault's goal to formulate
a method sensitive to these indicators.
But the linear image of time, based on the se-
quential calendar of a man's life, is itself abetted by
"two models that have for so long imposed their
image: the linear model of speech (and partly at
least of writing) in which all events succeed one an-
other, without any effect of coincidence and super-
position; and the model of the stream of conscious-
ness whose presence always eludes itself in its open-
ness to the future and its retention of the past" (p.
169). It is to break the hold of these models that
Foucault describes discourse and archive, with their
own forms of sequence and succession. Here we
come to the third and the most complex pressure up-
on the new method. For just as history is not tem-
poral sequence, because the birth-to-death span of
man's life is an adequate measure neither of large
units like demographic expansion, of phenomena of
rupture, discontinuity, coincidence, and complemen-
tarity, so too the spatial dispersion enacted by his-
tory cannot be filled with objects that are analogies
(disguised or not) or direct unmediated representa-
tions of human life. Textual evidence, in other
words, is based on historical documents, but these
documents are formed and persist monumentally,
according to their own laws, and not according to a
human image. A text does not simply record-is
not the pure graphological consequence of-an im-
mediate desire to write. Rather it distributes various
textual impulses, regularly and on several axes; what
gives these impulses unity is what Foucault calls a
discursive formation, bound neither by an individual
author, a "period," a "work," nor an idea. A text,
to those who persist in making of a contingent print-
ing device an ontological unit having final value, is a
fundamentally inconstant epistemological judgment.
The background for this more than simply
relativist thought was first sketched in detail by Fou-
cault in the final pages of The Order of Things. He
remarked there how mimetic representation after
such writers as Sade, Mallarm6 and Nietzsche could
convey neither their desires nor their psychological
discoveries. Concurrently the logic of syntax as well
as the linear sequence of printed language in their
work is assaulted (and found wanting) by a wish to
express non-syntactic, non-sequential thought. To-
gether with these writers, Marx, Saussure and Freud
put forward systems of thought for which no image
was adequate. Thus writing could not have a predic-
tive form based either upon biological growth or up-
on a representative governing image. Instead writing
sought to constitute its own realm, inhabited entirely
by words and the spaces between them. In turn the
relations between this realm and empirical reality
were made possible according to particular strategies
and enunciative functions. What ideas one has about
a text therefore change definitively as one examines
a novel by Virginia Woolf, or a textbook of organic
chemistry, or a political pamphlet, all dating from
roughly the same period.
The Archeology of Knowledge takes the pro-
cess of defining the realms of language and "reality"
commonly known by all three such "texts" a step
closer to formalization. The vocabulary and the
problematics of that kind of knowledge are articu-
lated by Foucault with the principle negative aim of
avoiding descriptions equivalent to, or understand-
able in terms of, sense impressions. Since no image
is capable of containing knowledge-formal knowl-
edge cannot be immediately seen, heard, smelled,
felt, or tasted-it can neither be produced nor sought
after (desired) in the simple experiential terms of
daily life. The will to knowledge expresses itself in
what Foucault calls an element of rarity very special
to it. Hence the pertinence of Foucault's choice of
savoir over connaissance (English regrettably trans-
lates both as knowledge) for the object of his study:
the former is unthinkable without reference to condi-
tions and appropriations that make it knowledge, the
latter-as Foucault says in a summary of his 1970-

71 course of lectures at the Collkge-is best studied
as something fundamentally subjective and selfish
(interessde), produced as an event of desire (produite
comme evenement du vouloir), and determining
truth by falsification (determinant par falsification
l'eflet de vdritd). Therefore knowledge (savoir)
is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice,
and which is specified by that fact: the domain consti-
tuted by the different objects that will or will not acquire
a scientific status (the knowledge of psychiatry in the
nineteenth century is not the sum of what was thought
to be true, but the whole set of practices, singularities,
and deviations of which one could speak in psychiatric
discourse); knowledge is also the space in which the
subject may take up a position and speak of the objects
with which he deals in his discourse (in this sense, the
knowledge of clinical medicine is the whole group of
functions of observations, interrogation, decipherment,
recording and decision that may be exercised by the sub-
ject of medical discourse); knowledge is also the field
of coordination and subordinationof statementsin which
concepts appear, and are defined, applied and trans-
formed (at this level, the knowledge of Natural History,
in the eighteenth century, is not the sum of what was
said, but the whole set of modes and sites in accordance
with which one can integrate new statement with the
already said); lastly, knowledge is defined by the possi-
bilities of use and appropriation offered by discourse
(thus, the knowledge of political economy, in the Clas-
sical period, is not the thesis of the different theses sus-
tained, but the totality of its point of articulation on
other discourses or on other practices that are not dis-
cursive). There are bodies of knowledge that are inde-
pendent of the sciences (which are neither their histor-
ical prototypes, nor their practical by-products), but
there is no knowledge without a particular discursive
practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by
the knowledge that it forms. (pp. 182-83)
Knowledge is specified by discourse, and vice
versa. The tautology does not matter, if only be-
cause what it thereby banished is a conception of
knowledge as the free-floating, spontaneous emana-
tion of genius and/or individual hard work. Fou-
cault is not the first modern to attack this romantic-
ally humanist vision of knowledge, although I think
he does more to regularize the irregularities of
knowledge, to specify knowledge that is, than most
others. The importance of the attack has gone far
too long unnoticed, however, especially in the United
States. In the first place romantic knowledge (con-
naissance), signifies property quite narrowly, the
property of the big brain whose inspiration knowl-
edge therefore seems. Secondly it is antidemocratic,
not in any vague counter-culture sense, but rather
in the sense that permits its votaries to wave the ban-
ner of science and knowledge and, at the same time
to conceal the privilege-but not the rigor or real
science, which are absent-that entitles them to act
as thought-producers. In March 1972 Foucault be-
gan explicitly to speak of an interplay of desire,
power and interest as being the radical intellectual
target in the struggle to uncover the hidden strategies
of social power (L'Arc, number 49, p. 9). The con-
tinuity between such a statement and Foucault's at-
tack upon anti-democratic epistemology in The
Archeology is plain. Thirdly, and this realization I
believe is necessitated by the first two, romantic
knowledge is anti-intellectual and anti-rational. Yet
diacritics/Summer1974
31
nowhere does Foucault say as a result that knowl-
edge (savoir) is immediately accessible to introspec-
tion, to direct questioning, or even to consciousness.
What he does say is that knowledge is produced, dis-
seminated and reformed in ways that can be intelligi-
bly specified and characterized, albeit with difficulty.
In one or two places Foucault carefully distinguishes
between his archeological method and Chomsky's
methods (never mentioned by name) of linguistic
analysis based upon the generative model. While
both theories appear to have a strong libertarian
thrust, archeology,
by seizing, out of the mass of things said, upon the
statement defined as a function of realization of the
verbal performance, distinguishes itself from a search
whose privilegedfield is linguistic competence:while such
a description constitutes a generative model, in order to
define the acceptability of statements, archeology tries
to establish rules of formation, in order to define the con-
dition of their realization. (p. 207)
The opacity of this disclaimer thins out a bit if it is
read with the following, earlier, passage in mind:
"it is vain to seek, beyond structural, formal, or in-
terpretative analyses of language, a domain that is at
last freed from all positivity, in which the freedom
of the subject, the labour of the human being, or the
opening up of a transcendental destiny could be ful-
filled" (p. 112).
Positivity and specification: these make up the
tough, almost material, rind of knowledge. Yet like
an archive (as understood conventionally) they are
not wholly corporeal either, for they inhabit a spe-
cial medium of rarity. Mainly, positive and specifi-
able knowledge is regular, it absorbs discontinuity
and individual effort, it conceals its structure, it is
eminently capable of being there, even if it is not
visible, and it is repeatable. This is not as unimag-
inable a constellation of features as its seems. Fou-
cault has assembled together various characteriza-
tions made by other writers, some of whom he names
and acknowledges, others he probably did not have in
mind. It is a useful exercise to describe a few of
these correlative discoveries made by others. They
have the virtue of placing Foucault against a rela-
tively familiar background where, if my irony is not
mis-interpreted, the almost oppressively novel vocab-
ulary of his methodology itself seems more regular.
Nevertheless one must note that Foucault's own
thought about originality is highly ambivalent. I
shall return to that critical problem a little later.
One brings Foucault together with Thomas S.
Kuhn, Georges Canguilhem and Michael Polanyi
only with trepidation. Nevertheless I have ventured
to do so and find the attempt instructive. All of
these writers on the structure of scientific knowledge
stress the regularity of that knowledge, that is, the
shared paradigms discussed by Kuhn that comprise a
"research consensus." This consensus enables further
research, accommodates or is radically altered by
anomaly, and always, according to Kuhn, performs
the function of providing in ongoing time "a new
and more rigid definition of the field" of scientific
research. "Men whose research is based on shared
paradigms are committed to the same rules and
standards for scientific practice. That commitment
and the apparent consensus it produces are prereq-
32
uisites for normal science, i.e. for the genesis and
continuation of a particular research tradition" (The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, rev. ed. 1970; p. 11). If new
problems emerge as anomalies it is because they are
in disharmony with "the background provided by
the paradigm" (p. 65). Within the paradigm, as
Canguilhem showed in a very early study that pre-
dates Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions by nineteen
years, criteria are formed in medicine, for instance,
that determine "the normal" and "the pathological."
He concludes that "every empirical concept of illness
retains a disciplined relation with an axiological con-
cept of illness. Consequently it is not an objective
method that characterizes a biological phenomenon
as pathological. It is always the relation between ob-
server and individual patient, mediated by the clinic,
which justifies the label pathological" (Le Normal et
le pathologique. Paris: P. U. F., rev. ed. 1962; p.
156). Canguilhem dispels the subjectivist fallacy by
saying that there is such a thing as objective path-
ology so long as it is understood first that that objec-
tivity is absolutely tied to a specific biological history
(with its own time, events, sequence, sociology, or-
der) and second, that the object of objective path-
ological practice "is not so much a fact as a value"
(p. 157).
In 1966 Canguilhem refined this view by say-
ing that within a science like pathology there are
norms that regulate even the concept of error. Thus
"health is a genetic and enzymatic correction of an
error [in the substitution of one molecular arrange-
ment for another: the conceptual structure of bio-
chemistry here is borrowed from information-
theory]. To be sick is to have been wrong, wrong not
in the sense of a counterfeit note in the sense of a
false brother, but in the sense of a mistaken fold of
the page, or of a wrong line of verse" (Canguil-
hem, p. 208). In Personal Knowledge (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958)-to which Kuhn re-
fers-and in his Lindsay Memorial Lectures, The
Study of Man (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1959), Polanyi demonstrates that what he calls tacit
knowledge can be incorporated, and is indeed an
important part of what passes for "objective" scien-
tific research. Tacit knowledge need not be immedi-
ately formulable in a set of rules; nonetheless it is
consentual and works as a basis upon which scien-
tific research conducts itself. The point is that even
the apparently contradictory status of explicit and
implicit knowledge, as well as the discontinuity be-
tween them, does not inhibit the regularity of the
whole body of scientific knowledge at any given
time. Kuhn's brilliant analysis of the role played
by textbooks in contributing to the scientific par-
adigm stands in a fairly close relation to Foucault's
account of discursive practice "as a body of anon-
ymous, historical rules, always determined in the
time and space that have defined a given period, and
for a given social, economic, geographical, or lin-
guistic area, the conditions of operation of the enun-
ciative function" (p. 117).
Foucault's archeology of knowledge scants the
difference between science, social science and hu-
manities. All of these divisions are subject to the
laws of discursive practice, and the relations between
them are equally a function of these laws. If from
the "archeological" historian's viewpoint, a society
can be studied as a quasi-transcendental form of dis-
course (I adapt this notion from Angus Fletcher's
theory of a transcendental art-form in his The Tran-
scendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's "Comus."
Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), then the intra-
social exclusions and incorporations that comprise
the penal system, the organization of university cur-
ricula, the structure of the political bureaucracy, in-
sofar as these are coherent positivities, are discursive
practices, too. Thus a positvity is that acted-upon
knowledge which can be rationally ascertained and
articulated, no matter how implicit or hidden it may
first appear to be. The more one reads in Foucault
the more one notices the extent to which he is sus-
picious of, and attracted to, knowledge whose prac-
tice conceals the fact of its fabrication. He has this
in common obviously with a number of modern
thinkers, of whom Barthes the structuralist, Lukics
and Adorno, the neo-Marxists, furnish the most
directly relevant analogies. Barthes' anatomy of
myth (in Mythologies) construes the bourgeois habit
of appeals to immutable "reality" as a form of illu-
sionment, by which what is present is falsely given
as not-made and always-there. Lukics' definition of
proletarian class-consciousness also demonstrates
how the bourgeois status-quo masks a discourse or a
theory that denies its own self-preserving activity.
And Adorno, whose philosophical investigations of
contemporary reality play an important role in Fred-
eric Jameson's excellent Marxism and Form (Prince-
ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), equates the so-
called autonomy of a work of art in class society
with the class-derived concealment of work:
Works of art owe their existence to the social division
of labor, to the separation of mental and physical work.
In such a situation, however, they appear under the
guise of independent existence; for their medium is not
that of pure and autonomous spirit, but rather that of a
spirit which having become object now claims to have
surmounted the opposition between the two. Such con-
tradiction obliges the work of art to conceal the fact
that it is itself a human construction. (p. 408)
Jameson continues Adorno's argument as follows:
"There is thus given within the very concept of work
-either in the form of the division of labor in gen-
eral or in the more specialized types of production
characteristic of capitalism-the principle of a cen-
sorship of the work process itself, of a repression of
the traces of labor on the product."
Yet if the work process is not to remain occult,
a certain order must be assumed for it. How, if one
does not wish to employ crude sensationalist meta-
phors, can one depict rational work as a process hav-
ing significant material consequences? How does one
deal with the problem of showing discourse in its
persistence to be what Foucault has called a material-
istic incorporeal? Val6ry's Leonardo comes to mind
here. What interests Val6ry in Leonardo is not his
biography but his constructive power as a mind.
Construction itself has its own logic whose basis is
an "intervention in natural things." The initial step
in a construction is a decision to move away from
nature and into the constructive element. (There is
an interesting study of Leonardo's use of sketches
that develops this theme further than Valry: E. H.
Gombrich's "Leonardo's Method of Working out
Compositions" in his Norm and Form: Studies in
the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon,
1966). Thereafter Val6ry meditates upon Leonardo's
architectural projections for monuments which, al-
though they have no empirical equivalent, neverthe-
less have a special empirical validity. Leonardo saw
"the air [as being] full of infinite lines, straight and
radiating, intercrossing, and interweaving without
ever coinciding one with another." In this element of
rarity Leonardo puts his monuments:
The monument (which composes the City, which
in turn is almost the whole of civilization) is such a com-
plex entity that our understandingof it passes through
several successive phases. First we grasp a changeable
background that merges with the sky, then a rich tex-
ture of motifs in height, breadth, and depth, infinitely
varied by perspective, then something solid, bold, resis-
tant, with certain animal characteristics-organs, mem-
bers-then finally a machine having gravity for its mo-
tive force, one that carries us in thought from geometry
to dynamics and thence to the most tenuous speculations
of molecular physics. (Valkry. Collected Works. Prince-
ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972; vol. III, pp. 49-50)
"In our time," says Foucault, "history is that which
transforms documents into monuments" (p. 7). Val-
6ry's account of the constructed monument corre-
sponds to Foucault's concept of the duration in his-
tory of texts as monument: the historian's discipline
is archeology ("the intrinsic description of the monu-
ment") which also passes through several successive
phases. A document's monumentality can only
emerge when discourse is not elided with reality.
The time of its construction, the time of monumen-
tal duration, the time of its analysis: these three are
correlates that tend differently to repeat each other
without being copies of nature or of an ideal. Monu-
mentality is the general mode of presence of dis-
course, although in the special sense of the word in-
tended by Foucault (like Valery before him) monu-
mental presence does not exclusively mean empirical
visibility. A library, for instance, is one particular
mode of presence for discourse as monument: as vis-
ible objects the books in the stacks are less important
than the infinitely interwined lines that connect the
books to each other and keep the word on the pages.
Moreover in the conception of books and
language as a universe that Borges has made cur-
rent, each discourse becomes a sort of cross-refer-
ence to every other discourse. In such a universe
there is no determinable origin and no final goal,
since repetition underlies cross-reference. Foucault's
philosophical affinity with Gilles Deleuze derives
from this interest in repetition, although recently the
affinity has become political as well. Deleuze's Dif-
ference et repetition (Paris: P. U. F., 1968) goes a
very long way towards laying forth a philosophy of
repetition with which Foucault, whose recognition
that there is no Origin is pre-supposed by his interest
in repetition and discourse, has publicly agreed.
What makes such comparative abstractions like dif-
ference and repetition clear in Deleuze's otherwise
very complex argument is his way of describing
those things as forms of action. "Repetition [in time]
is a condition of action before it becomes a concept
dkccri IS/Summer1974
of reflection" (Deleuze, p. 21). Using examples from
3
Marx, H61derlin, Vico, and Nietzsche, Deleuze con-
structs before his reader the drama of repetition that
is capable of producing the absolutely different.
Aside from being an appealingly surprising volte-face,
this argument reveals the extent to which repetition,
as a device or a mode or a philosophic habit, is not
the opposite of originality in the romantic sense of
that word. If as a concept or a description, original-
ity concealed an appeal to some extra-positive "priv-
ilege" (the Muse, inspiration, a "raptus") it also
contained an anxiety about the value of what one
was saying. As Vico was one of the first to argue,
all utterance is a form of re-inscription: hence orig-
inality is a far more unstable quality. Instead, it and
creativity belong inherently to what Harold Bloom
calls misprision, one of whose signs is parody, the
form of writing relied upon to a great extent by
many of the modern masters like Eliot, Mann and
Joyce. This deliberate mis-taking characterizes in-
ventiveness. Far from being the -realization of an
"interiority" like inspiration, discourse for Foucault
is only misprision and exteriority: "it is a practical
domain that is autonomous" (p. 121). Therefore,
"the time of discourse is not the translation, in a
visible chronology, of the obscure time of thought"
(p. 121). Here we can begin to understand how
repetition produces difference.
Discursive language is like a repertory theatre
that stages numerous spectacles. This figure connects
Foucault with Kenneth Burke's dramatistic analysis
of literature, although Foucault holds that discursive
practice is neither benign nor necessarily artistic:
effectiveness is its main criterion of success. Effec-
tiveness can be judged in several ways but Foucault
is right, I think, not to make effectiveness dependent
upon so fickle a perception as the retrospective crit-
ic's. Yet neither is effectiveness passive conformity to
a sort of general will. Discursive practice is modified
constantly by each statement made within it, just as
in Kuhn's discussion of the research paradigm every
research worker re-articulates a special aspect of the
paradigm and extends and refines it further. We
must still ask, however, where discursive practice
actually takes place, how is its effectiveness measured
or realized, and what sort of activity it is really. In
answering these questions in The Archeology of
Knowledge Foucault admits that what he supplies is
not yet a theory but only a possibility (pp. 114-15).
One ought to be willing to accept this qualification
if, in exchange, the possibility provides enough of an
indication that a possibility now is not just an excuse
for the absence of theory. In other words, is a possi-
bility described at length forceful enough to prepare
the ground for a theory? I think it is, in this case.
For Foucault is proposing a method for under-
standing social behaviour as what it is that people
must do in order to speak and write as contributors
to an ongoing system of the values, discoveries, er-
rors, and institutions that we call knowledge (savoir).
Since knowledge is neither a mysterious jumble of
ideas nor a fact of nature, and since it is not some-
thing that one has but something that one does, it is
best conceived of initially as occupying a group of
hypothetical spaces. One of them might be where
one stands in order to speak, another might be from
3J
where he draws forth the elements he combines to
make a statement, another might be where he puts
his statement, and a fourth might be where his state-
ment is either preserved, modified, accumulated, or
passed on. Surrounding all these places is a set of
general boundaries, or limits, that holds all the other
spaces in. This constraint is the dpistm&e, which,
when it is specified as an actively populated expanse
of knowledge-acts at a given moment in history, is
not an open space but rather a system of distances.
Thus in the eighteenth century, for example, the dis-
tance between religion and psychology as discipline is
closer than it is a hundred years later. The whole
map of such relations is what Foucault means by
dpistime. This is very different from describing a
Zeitgeist, or an ideology, or a Weltanschauung. What
distinguishes dpisteme from them is not that all are
unconscious or communal, but that only the episteme
is not an implicit belief-system sometimes projected
by individuals or institutions. Rather the dpistmrne"is
a constantly moving set of articulations, shifts, and
coincidences that are established only to give rise to
others" (p. 192).
The rules collectively governing these move-
ments of the dpistem'-governing their appearance
as events, for the dpistime is usually described by
Foucault as a set of moving constraints that estab-
discourse
lish an outer limit of knowledge-make
possible. The historical economy of discourse is the
archive:
The archive is first the law of what can be said,
the system that governs the appearance of statements as
unique events. But the archive is also that which deter-
mines that all these things said do not accumulate end-
lessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in
an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the
mercy of chance external accidents;but they are grouped
together in distinct figures, composed together in accor-
dance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in
accordance with specific regularities. ... The archive is
not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards
the event of the statement, and preserves, for future
memories, its status as an escape; it is that which em-
bodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunci-
ability. Nor is the archive that which collects the dust
of statements that have become inert once more, and
which may make possible the miracle of their resurrec-
tion; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of
the statement-thing;it is the system of its functioning.
Far from being that which unifies everything that has
been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse,
far from being only that which insures that we exist in
the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differ-
entiates discourses in their multiple existence and speci-
fies them in their own duration. (p. 129)
Discourses exist within the archive. They are special-
ized modes of utterance (clinical discourse, for in-
stance, or sociological discourse) that must not be
confused with simple jargon. A discourse is syste-
matic, and it has epistemological, social, political,
economic and historical relations with other dis-
courses in the archive. Most important, the discourse
is not dialectical-"without flaw, without contradic-
tion, without internal arbitrariness" (p. 114)-and
is made up of statements, which "bear an enuncia-
tive function" (p. 115).
We are back to effectiveness, and it now be-
comes possible to see that Foucault is most interested
in defining the statement: the dpisteme', the archive,
even discourse, all these are analytic instruments
more or less invented by the archeologist in order
to approach the statement, in order to provide a
suitable terminology for apprehending the statement,
which is after all the very mode and presence of
effectiveness. For Foucault the statement is not a
sentence necessarily, nor any unit describable by
grammar or logic. Moreover since it is in and of
discourse it cannot be something latent that is real-
ized by discourse. The more Foucault enumerates
what a statement is not, the more it is evident that
a statement is difficult both to make and to describe:
it is rare.
The statement is not just another unity-above or be-
low-sentences and propositions; it is always invested
in unities of this kind, or even in sequences of signs
that do not obey their laws (and which may be lists,
chance series, tables); it characterizesnot what is given
in them, but the very fact that they are given, and the
way in which they are given. It has the quasi-invisibility
of the "there is," which is effaced in the very thing of
which one can say: "thereis this or that thing." (p. 111)
Perhaps a prefiguration of what Foucault means by
a statement is to be found in the smile of the Chesh-
ire cat or, as he himself says in the opening pages of
The Order of Things, in the list of animals given in
a Chinese encyclopedia referred to in "The Analyt-
ical Language of John Wilkins" by Borges. "Al-
though the statement cannot be hidden it is not vis-
ible either [...] it is like the over-familiar that con-
stantly eludes one" (pp. 110-11). Another important
aspect of the statement is that it is correlative with
a lack: "There may in fact be-and always are-in
the conditions of emergence of statements, exclu-
sions, limits, or gaps that divide up their referential,
validate only one series of modalities, enclose groups
of coexistence, and prevent certain forms of use"
(p. 110). Thus a statement emerging prevents an-
other utterance from emerging; conversely, with re-
gard to a whole series of possibilities, a statement
emerges to be something else, namely, a statement,
but not an idea, or a sentence, or a passing remark.
At all events, one thing at least must be empha-
sized here: that the analysis of discourse [and of state-
ments in and by discourse] thus understood, does not re-
veal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light
the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power
of affirmation.Rarity and affirmation:rarity, in the last
resort of affirmation[Swyer's translation here is impos-
sibly garbled: Foucault says, "the rarity of affirmation"]
-certainly not any continuous out-pouring of meaning,
and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier. (p. 234)
The peculiar, and I think the crucial, problem
of The Archeology of Knowledge is its attempt to
define effectiveness without theory, that is, to regard
practice not as a cause of effectiveness but as the
main part of it. To affirm with force even as one ex-
cludes much else-this is effectiveness. Effectiveness
is also to modify other effective statements, and it is
also to last, to be re-activated (as when a later age
returns to Marx or to Freud), to be consciously ex-
cluded (as when The Wasteland excludes Christian-
ity), to be re-appropriated (as in his essay "Kafka

and his Precursors" Borges gives Kafka his forgotten
patrimony).
Lest it be assumed that statements in discourse
during a given epistime make up a unity resembling
either the Great Chain of Being or a Hegelian total-
ity Foucault goes out of his way to show that this
is not what he has in mind. Two of his most com-
plex chapters in The Archeology-"Contradictions"
and "The Comparative Facts"-insist yet more
strongly on the discontinuous nature of statements
in the archive. To the archeologist discourse is a
space of dissension. Eighteenth-century Natural His-
tory, for instance, is essentially a set of "intrinsic
oppositions [... . distributed over different levels of
the discursive formation" (p. 154). These opposi-
tions articulate divergence, incompatibility, and ex-
clusion. "In the case of the systematic analysis of
plants [in eighteenth-century Natural History], one
applies a rigorous perceptual and linguistic code,
and in accordance with a constant scale; for method-
ical description [during the same period], the codes
are relatively free, and the scales of mapping may
oscillate" (p. 154). When; however, there are no
contradictions-that is, if one wishes to show, as
Foucault did in The Order of Things, that eighteenth
century General Grammar and Natural History are
related after all-there is "a region of interpositiv-
ity," which is tangled but is also a set of fairly well-
articulated correlations.
Everything I have so far said of Foucault in-
terprets, rather than summarizes, his archeology as
simultaneously the expression of radical dissatisfac-
tion and radical affirmation. Let us take dissatisfac-
tion and doubt first. I think he is correct to judge
Western historical understanding as being based very
generally upon two forms of explanation, one ver-
tical, and one horizontal. Both generally work to-
gether since both mix the temporal and the spatial
modes. Written historical evidence is judged to be
a trace, which when it is explained vertically is con-
ceived of as the exterior residual expression of an
interior, or underlying, force, rationale, meaning,
image, or idea. When it is explained horizontally it
is conveived of as having been preceded by some-
thing that gives it meaning: other events, a succes-
sive line of development, an Origin. To Foucault
any form of understanding that sends one away to
given or assumed ontologically prior forms such as
an author, a period, an idea, a source, a world-view
-in short, a genealogy of order-discounts the pres-
ence of the evidence, its sheer persistence as event
or as evidence, in favor of deterministic hyposta-
tizations. Moreover these determinisms assume a priv-
ilege in the understanding without account being
taken of their very circumstantial nature. When
Nietzsche said that discussions of poets like Homer
(about whom as authors nothing was known) were
judgments made by later generations and not at all
accurate descriptions of reality, he was saying some-
thing that Foucault would agree with readily. To say
that Shelley wrote "Adonais" is not sufficiently to
describe the fact that "Adonais" was written. In or-
der to do that one would have to grasp first of all
why to the critic in 1973 it matters that the poem
was written (and this involves an archeological de-
scription of literary discourse today), then to grasp
1974
diacritics/Summer
35
how as writing the poem was received, modified and
preserved in poetico-elegiac discourse in the early
nineteenth century. While one may never to able to
complete such an archeological description-and
Foucault is under no illusion that it is anything but
interminable-its stated requirements are at least a
didactic way of showing that the concept of author
as origin is an unsatisfactory terminal from which
to begin or conclude. So too with Weltanschauungen
and similar ideas of order.
Deleuze has said quite ingeniously that Fou-
cault has rejected horizontal and vertical explana-
tions in favor of "diagonal mobility." This is an
interesting suggestion but it strikes me as too me-
chanical somehow. An image I prefer is that in his
almost exclusive attention to exteriority and surface
while discussing statements, Foucault is like a man
who runs across rooftops, never descending into the
houses, never going straight, always really moving
from side to side. This perhaps silly picture begins
to get at the combination of realism, freedom and
discipline with which he negotiates the discontinuous
order of knowledge. He is interested in describing
the fact that knowledge is both produced and there,
in knowing, for example, what concatenation of
events (not mere happenings) made it possible for
Linnaeus to produce his system of classification and
one, (I shall permit myself a solecism) not not to
produce it, two, to produce it when he did, three, to
have produced it as it was produced. This is the
aspect of Foucault's work that exemplifies radical
affirmation. Since all knowledge is rarity, which is
the affirmation of a process of exclusion (to know
B is not to know A), then knowledge ("le savoir du
savoir") must also be affirmative. Foucault's lists of
negatives, e.g. archeology is not history of ideas, a
statement is not a sentence, discourse is not made up
of ideas-all these affirm the positive exclusions that
add to knowledge. The will to knowledge therefore
is an effort made to exclude that which is not suit-
able as knowledge.
This has been one of Foucault's constant
themes, and the extent to which he has shown how
an affirmation exclusion means that what is excluded
is systematically organized and in turn refers to what
it has excluded and organized, is one of the things
that distinguishes him from structuralism and its
more simply appropriated linguistic models. I have
said in another essay that structuralism begins with
linguicity: structuralism assumes that things can be
apprehended by and as signs in a language, and the
pertinent task for the analyst is attention to a sys-
tem of signs with perpetual, even if theoretic, pres-
ence. Foucault's position is that an existing system
of signs is a judgment already made that those par-
ticular signs shall be. He investigates the process of
signs being made. In this insistence upon a judgment
made both to exclude and include, Foucault there-
fore describes language ethically, in the literal sense.
The source or pure origin of language is something
he cannot discuss; however, for every statement in
discourse he can show that there is a beginning made
up of organized exclusions and inclusions, a setting
amidst other permitted statements, a continuity, and
ascertainable transformations.
Discourse is therefore the organized social
36
ethic of language: "I am supposing that in every so-
ciety the production of discourse is at once con-
trolled, selected, organized and redistributed accord-
ing to a certain number of procedures, whose role is
to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with
chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome
materiality" (p. 216). In 1916 Walter Benjamin put
a similar ethical insight into language at the centre
of an essay on language in general and human lan-
guage in particular. Before the Fall in Eden, Benja-
min says, the only knowledge without a name was
the knowledge of good and evil. All things have a
name, all knowledge is nouns. The serpent tempts
man with new knowledge, Good and Evil, which
thereafter
abandons the name. [This new knowledge] is exterior
knowledge, the uncreative imitation of [God's] creative
verb. The name steps away from itself in this knowledge:
the Fall is the moment of birth of man's language (des
menschlichen Wortes), that in which the name no longer
remains intact, that which has left behind a language
that names and the language-one can say-that knew
its own immanent magic, all this in order for language
now to make itself deliberately magical from the out-
side. The word must communicate something now, out-
side itself. (Das Wort soll "etwas" ausser sich selbst).
This is really the original sin of the spirit of language.
As it communicates outside of itself the word is some-
thing of a parody, by an explicitly mediate word, of the
explicitly immediate word, of God's creative word (das
schaffende Gotteswort); it is the Fall of a fortunate es-
sence of language (der Verfall des seligen Sprachgeistes)
in Adam, who stands in the middle. There is indeed a
basic sameness between the word which, according to the
serpent's promise, perceives good and evil and the word
which on the surface conveys information. The cogni-
tion/perception of things/objects is based on the name,
but perception of good and evil is, in the profound
sense in which Kierkegaardconceives this word, idle talk
or chatter, capable only of the purificationand elevation
to which the babbling man, i.e. the sinner, also had to
submit, namely Judgment. (Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1955; vol. II, pp. 414-15)
Discourse, says Foucault, is things that are said (les
choses dites)-profoundly, chatter-whose rarity
(purification and elevation) is the form of judgment
(on what is being excluded and on whomever does
the exclusion), exteriority, and knowledge.
One reason therefore that Foucault seems to
give artists, visionaries, madmen, and deviants
(Hblderlin, Sade, Nietzsche, Beckett) so important
a place in his historical and theoretical studies is
that they, more than the average user of discourse,
exaggerate and make plain in their solitude and
alienation the exteriority of discursive practice by
outdoing discourse. What is heroic about such men
is, paradoxically, their willingness to accept the ter-
rifying freedom that comes from hyper-individuality.
To make "I speak" into what Foucault calls a soli-
tary sovereignty is to be free of all social and psycho-
logical limitations: the individual act of speech upon
which all is made deliberately to depend is no longer
communication of something, but the stretching-
forth (dtalement) of language in its raw state, as
pure, deployed exteriority. Modern literature in the
main is the result of this exteriority, which is not the
result of signs returning to a point of origin for val-
idation, and not mimetic representation. Modern lit-
erature escapes the mode of being of discourse, but
one result is that the speaking subject who inaugu-
rates the freedom of exteriority has, by the time of
Beckett's work, become a victim of language. Molloy:
"I must go on; I can't go on; I must say words as
long as there are words, I must say them until they
find me, until they say me-heavy burden, heavy sin;
I must go on; maybe it's been done already; maybe
they've already said me; maybe they've already borne
me to the threshold of my story, right to the door
opening onto my story; I'd be surprised if it opened"
(cited by Foucault, p. 215).
But the role of the modern artist, mainly in
the nineteenth century, is in his quasi-madness to
stimulate discourse to change. Many readers of Fou-
cault have been troubled by the seeming absence in
his work of any way of explaining how one epistime
changes into another. I think the answer one finds
is largely symbolic: it is that any alienated man or
group of men, who are hidden beneath discourse as
the insane are hidden in asylums, nevertheless speak
from their own exteriority to society. These bursts
across the fabric of discourse create rents that dis-
course is forced to repair. I suspect that Foucault
regards Nietzsche and Freud as the most severe and
the most recent of challengers to discourse: as au-
thors he says that they are founders of discourse.
Their work requires so great an adjustment in modes
of interpretation-together with Marx, Nietzsche
and Freud make interpretation a literally unending
task since they begin by saying that there is no be-
ginning-that interpretation itself becomes a special
discursive formation. It is within the discourse of
interpretation that Foucault's archeology is to be
found, although presumably it is modifying the dis-
course as it takes its course. The coherence of Fou-
cault's work, despite its visions and revisions, is that
he has always returned to the past in order to re-
lease from their silence those utterances blanketted
by discourse. The Archeology of Knowledge con-
structs, with a terminology that often threatens to
overcome the matter with which it purports to deal,
the skeleton of discourse, archive and statement,
whose ethic is hidden in the exteriority of practice.
Who then is Foucault? To me he typifies, in
a more complex and interesting form than any con-
temporary writer I know, the problem of modern
beginnings, a predicament to be found lurking every-
where in modern rationalism. He himself seems very
aware of the difficulty of his position. His most im-
portant work, his inaugural Legon at the College de
France delivered on December 2, 1970 opens as
follows:
I would like to have slipped imperceptiblyinto this lec-
ture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps
over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be en-
veloped in words, borne away beyond all possible be-
ginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to
have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me,
leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its
cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking,
in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in sus-
pense, to beckon to me. There would have been no be-
ginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while
I stood in its path-a slender gap-the point of its pos-
sible disappearance.(p. 215)
This, he says later, is an expression of anxiety, for
to be an author is to take on the responsibility for
what one says. But what Foucault discovers is that
the order of discourse, and discourse itself, allay
this fear of responsibility. By being the order of
spoken things, organized, controlled, and made to
function by society, discourse reduces the author's
authority. His "real" beginning then is his awareness
of being already inserted in the order of discourse.
And yet Foucault himself in his work says, by almost
any literary standard, original things. His oeuvre
has a unity all its own, and indeed a beginning all its
own in the perceptions he has of history and lan-
guage. As author then he dramatizes a vacillation be-
tween writing as discourse (the author is a function
of the discourse, in this case, of interpretation) and
writing against discourse.
This vacillation I take to be of the greatest in-
terest. For it emphasizes the extent to which writing
is necessarily caught between conflicting pressures
which, in a large, relatively unforced view of them,
are ultimately cultural and political. Every writer, as
he writes, uses other writing, draws upon his ego,
addresses others and his own sense of himself. How
much in his writing is originality, how much repeti-
tion and re-combining of "the order of discourse,"
how much exploitation of the discourse, how much
exploitation by the discourse, how much exploitation
of whatever silent voices may be hidden and ex-
cluded by discourse? Foucault has recently begun
to devote himself to a study of the penal system,
which is an economic, social and political organiza-
tion put together, in its operative forcefulness, as a
discourse. What he has already said about discourse
leaves this particular undertaking prey to the doubt
that his decision to study penal laws is a beginning
that may, on the one hand, be a re-assertion of a
discourse concerning crime in contemporary France,
but may, on the other hand, begin a new system of
thought about crime. Similarly, since Foucault has
always explicitly addressed Western discourse, we
must ask whether such an archeological project as
his has not further intensified the ethnocentricity of
Western discourse in its appropriation of the op-
pressed races everywhere under its domination, or
whether archeology can supply other cultures with
the instruments with which to withstand further
domination?
These problems have everywhere appeared
whenever a method has taken on the task of con-
necting the most minute particulars of human ex-
perience with the most common and universal of
human concerns. Vico, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud are
notable examples. As with most contemporary writ-
ers Foucault is saturated with their discoveries and
emboldened by their examples. Yet still more ex-
plicitly than they, he acknowledges that their work
places drastic limitations upon the idea of man as
author of his work. So much so that discourse-the
monumentality of man's organized utterance-is an
order of, indeed is, repetition. To begin therefore is
to repeat. If I have understood The Archeology of
Knowledge correctly, however, consciousness of
repetition, as a rational method of understanding, is
a way of beginning to stand openly in the path of
mistaken originality. When a society oppresses its
diocritics/Summer 1974
citizens in the name of an original spirit of laws, or 31
when a writer masks his opportunism behind a com-
mon original "tradition," or, conversely, when rev-
olution is derided as the repetition of hopeless uto-
pianism, then in response one can begin again to
study, act, write-again. Learning and, consequently,
writing, as the author alternates between them, ex-
emplify the cycle of repetition and beginning, but it
is when the distance between them is not made either
into a fetish or a commodity (called, with market-
oriented affirmation, originality or creativity) that
they lead to knowledge and freedom.
Much of Foucault's latest work is a kind of
formalized recapitulation of Western historical un-
derstanding, done with such complex instruments of
rational exposition as to give that understanding, and
the accumulation of power that it represents, an al-
most physical presence. For such a presence a re-
course to romantic originality is no response, and
neither are dropping out, the recitation of revolu-
tionary-sounding slogans, or empty appeals to a
long-gone past. Although they are very much
his own invention, Foucault's array of "anonymous
rules" binding knowledge together, along with his re-
peated insistence upon their anonymity, are, I think,
an invitation to the intellectual to see knowledge
practically as a collective responsibility. When he
says that he presents not a theory but a possibility
Foucault is saying also that such a possibility calls
for judgment, analysis, consideration on the part of
other workers in knowledge. That the validation of
the possibility cannot restore what Benjamin calls
the fortunate essence of language should be quite
evident: so long as one recognizes that there is such
a thing as knowledge, alas there is no disinterested
language.
Those observations comprise the rational ele-
ment of Foucault's relevance to Western cultural
radicalism and also to the radical nationalism of the
non-Western world. Foucault's support of these two
disparate movements has been unstinting, but he has
never, and hopefully will never, take the step of sub-
stituting agitation dominated by undigested philos-
ophies of unrepeatable revolution for study and
analysis conceived of as making differences within
the order of repetition. Notwithstanding Sartre's
profoundly ill-considered attack on Foucault (in
1966) for his alleged anti-historical attitude, Fou-
cault has been concerned with what men have made
with what they have. If what they have is "doxolog-
ical" there is no reason whatever for saying conse-
quently that because a doxology is maintained on a
level of its own (the archive), it is therefore outside
of history. Quite the contrary. Archeology has sought
to describe systematically the systematic exchanges
between knowledge and the historical conditions
which gave rise to it. If system here is repetition, we
can be expected to examine first the need for repeti-
tion (in laws of exclusion that society has always
employed), and then we can go on to investigate
whether what has been excluded has impoverished
a large part of society justly or unjustly. One can
work rationally on this basis, and historically as well,
for to be concerned with knowledge is to be of his-
tory without being uniformly subject to its repeated
illusions.