Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge
Several days ago, I posted something on twitter about how I’d brought my copy of the Archaeology with me as I was waiting for a colonoscopy. Given Foucault’s, uh, reputation for medical knowledge this was risky enough. Worse however, was the fact that I was using my medical letters as a bookmark and so was walking around with ‘Creutzfeld Jacob Disease Risk’ visible to any passerby. Anyway, the correspondent wasn’t so far concerned with this - but rather with ‘why’ I was reading Archaeology. Fun, I replied. ‘I don’t know how to respond to that’, replied the literature scholar. Fair enough.
I’d read Madness and Civilisation and the Birth of the Clinic some years ago. Both styled themselves as pharmaco-cultural. The Archaeology by contrast, sees itself more as a meta-epistemology, a setting out of the analysis used in his other works. He draws deeply if implicitly on the annales school of history at its apogee in his contemporary France, and I have to say that I enjoyed this work immensely. I think there’s something to be said for his explanation of how contemporary schools - whether intellectual history, medicine, science - create and sustain totalising claims. But I also think that, viewed from a contemporary lens, critics are wrong to call decolonised history ‘post-modern’. Though I don’t doubt Foucault would be sympathetic, the Archaeology proves such attempts to re-assert a ‘true’ version of history, and thereby reclaim agency from the marginalised, as a fundamentally conservative endeavour.
Key here is Foucault’s descriptions of history, archaeology, and discourse. Archaeology used to take disjointed objects and seek to place them in a historical web of relationships, thereby creating meaning. It aspired to History, which took continuity as granted. In recent decades however, Foucault tracked how history takes disjunction for granted. History is now histories, layers of disrupted sediments that criss-cross one another.Now, however, it is history which ‘transforms documents into monuments. [...] In our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology.’ One can no longer hope for a coherent narrative, but rather a series of series, which the historian-as-geologist must impose and categorise.
‘Discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian’s task to remove from history. It has now become one of the basic elements of historical analysis.’
As Derrida raises in Spectres of Marx, we are haunted by the spectre of past promises of continuity. Why? Because ‘continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject. Without a coherent story, there is no coherent self. The guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him: the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject - in the form of historical consciousness - will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all the things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode’.
This applies not just for history, but for medicine, physics, mathematics, surgery. Each discipline is a world unto itself. One way of thinking about what Foucault means is a game of Dungeons and Dragons. The gameworld has its own language, in which strings of characters that might be nonsense outside that world instead take on real meaning. Each new event, act, character, that emerges pristine has to be reconciled with the history that has brought the party to that stage in the narrative. A chacun ses gouts, a chacun ses vocab. Just as grog the destroyer makes no sense outside that game world, so too is ‘polypectomy’ meaningless outside the medical discourse.
What, then, does this fractured world mean for decolonisation? Decolonisation - and to say the word is contested is putting it lightly - is at the very least an attempt to recover marginalised life, we mean an attempt to [re]place the subaltern at the centre where they had always been. But in light of Foucault this raises a problem. If marginalised groups seek to reclaim subjecthood by the destruction or complication of statues, art, and naming, then Foucault might respond that such a project must fail as there can be no true, all encompassing narrative on which to build an emancipated subjecthood. We return to Audre Lorde’s tools: replacing statues of one person with statues of another merely recycles the individualist narrative on which western supremacy is predicated. In other words, you cannot change the nature of the car by replacing the driver. A diesel car does not become electric because the politics of the person behind the wheel has shifted slightly to the left. So too with history.
The activists, the rioters, the thinkers, they all know this of course. None of this is novel - and nobody truly believes that pulling down a statue and forming a committee to agree a replacement could be the revolutionary spark. But they would still rightly defend the validity of such an act: to pull down the statue of a slaver is still good and worthy, even if it changes nothing. So why do it? Why defend it? Fundamentally, because it’s fun. To be swept up in a moment of anarchic violence is a glimpse of a community denied with all its heady mix of agency and power. The world has been turned upside down, the servant becomes the master, and the individual no longer acted upon but the actor.
How to reconcile this with Foucault? An answer lies somewhere between Girard and Hobbes. At synagogue the other week, the reading had been ezekiel, with its rather exacting descriptions of sacrifice, and its necessity despite its lack of utility for G-d. Dr Weiss pointed out that Girard helps us understand the paradox. Go-d of course doesn’t need the aroma of sacrifice like the Roman deities. Humans, on the other hand, do. Sacrifice at the temple was a displacement activity. Humans are violent creatures. Much better for that violent urge to be displaced onto a sacrificial animal than neighbouring tribes. In this sense, Girard owes a lot to Hobbes. Just as the sacrifice at the temple served as a displacement, so too does the modern state hold a monopoly on the violence which would otherwise plague humanity left in a state of nature. So far, so esoteric.
What I want to suggest though is that the BLM protests, any supposedly violent or anarchic behaviour that targets art or property is best understood not as a dry statement of revolution, but rather as a carnivalesque episode. This is not a vulgar destruction of capitalist property, but rather a field budding, flowering, and dissipating, a world within itself. These are joyous moments, and it is through the carnivalesque that they are best understood. Just as the downfall of capitalism and the modern state is as unthinkable as the downfall of the great chain of being to our ancestors, so too does the riotous assembly provide a ‘unthinkable’ and exhilarating moment of reversal. Swept up in the moment, the swell of the chanting crowd, the group effort, the participant finally finds their subjectivity in the spark of a new discipline and the ghost of a totality.
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Reading ‘Man is not alone’ by Heschel, so commentary on that coming next week.