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Edward Said
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lectures at the College de France he has been studying the regular transformations which a "polymorphous" 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 vocabulary of working terms-monument,
archeology,
statement, discourse, etc.-is not a fussy way of declaring 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 particular. 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 public 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 especially 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'6pist6mologie," Cahiers pour l'analyse, 9 (Summer 1968),
pp. 9-40.
From then on, I believe that Foucault's interests are dominated by a symptomatic group of pressures 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 contemporary 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as a mass of historical documents intended, necessitated, by certain condititons, not as chance productions willed into existence by the flukes of genius
or time. An intellectual rejection of the watery rationale 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 explanations nor to simple causal arguments, Foucault redraws 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 order. 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 consequently according to what rules could other similar 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-
diacritics/Summer1974
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3D
tive historical analysis and of its rationally intelligible 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. Paradoxically 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 succession 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 fundamentally opposed to anthropological and humanistic attempts 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 continuity, no immobile structures necessarily to be
found in it. The effects of ethnology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and generally of Nietzschean interpretation 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 worldview, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, 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 periodization, differently articulated systems of relation
between series. Dates, by which a sequential calendar
miming the line of a man's life was formerly constructed and given priority, acquire diminished and
qualified significance. Recurrent distributions and
architectonic unities, displacements and transformations-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 sequential 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 another, without any effect of coincidence and superposition; and the model of the stream of consciousness whose presence always eludes itself in its openness 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 temporal 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 complementarity, so too the spatial dispersion enacted by history cannot be filled with objects that are analogies
(disguised or not) or direct unmediated representations 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 immediate 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 printing 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 Foucault 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. Together with these writers, Marx, Saussure and Freud
put forward systems of thought for which no image
was adequate. Thus writing could not have a predictive form based either upon biological growth or upon 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 process 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 articulated by Foucault with the principle negative aim of
avoiding descriptions equivalent to, or understandable in terms of, sense impressions. Since no image
is capable of containing knowledge-formal knowledge 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 translates both as knowledge) for the object of his study:
the former is unthinkable without reference to conditions and appropriations that make it knowledge, the
latter-as Foucault says in a summary of his 1970-
nowhere does Foucault say as a result that knowledge (savoir) is immediately accessible to introspection, to direct questioning, or even to consciousness.
What he does say is that knowledge is produced, disseminated and reformed in ways that can be intelligibly 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 condition 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 interpretative 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 fulfilled" (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 special medium of rarity. Mainly, positive and specifiable 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 unimaginable a constellation of features as its seems. Foucault has assembled together various characterizations 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 relatively familiar background where, if my irony is not
mis-interpreted, the almost oppressively novel vocabulary 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-
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ethic of language: "I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according 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 language in particular. Before the Fall in Eden, Benjamin 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 outside. The word must communicate something now, outside 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 something 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 essence 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 cognition/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: Suhrkamp, 1955; vol. II, pp. 414-15)
Discourse, says Foucault, is things that are said (les
chatter-whose
rarity
choses dites)-profoundly,
(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 terrifying freedom that comes from hyper-individuality.
To make "I speak" into what Foucault calls a solitary sovereignty is to be free of all social and psychological limitations: the individual act of speech upon
which all is made deliberately to depend is no longer
communication of something, but the stretchingforth (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 validation, and not mimetic representation. Modern lit-
diocritics/Summer 1974
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