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Michel Foucault:
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Ch. 3: The Formation of Objects | Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language.
40: Notice that medical jargon, naming both physical & psychological diseases, illustrates the chapter title. Strictly speaking, these diseases did not exist – as concepts understood by contemporary physicians – until they were named or invented in elaborating medical theory.
41: “. . . Psychiatric discourse finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it [what it is talking about, e.g., a jargon term like neurosis] the status of an object -- & therefore of making it manifest, nameable, & describable.” It becomes grist for the mill of medical practice. Is anyone entirely healthy? Is it possible to consult a psychiatrist who tells you that you have no symptoms & require no therapy? Woody Allen's movies poke fun at how psychiatric technique endless elaborates leaving the patient remote & relatively unimportant.
42: F. identifies the usual 4 discourse communities that are so pervasive that it is difficult to opt out of them. All of us seem to be variously involved in:
· Medicine or science, which is dedicated to the truth about empirical phenomena.
· Law, which is dedicated to justice.
· Religion, which is dedicated to meaning or the quality & depth of our experience.
· Art, which is dedicated to beauty.
“Grids of specification” means what? Evidently it means elaborating professional methods to specify social roles or identities & to confer authority. Professional methods are employed “to list, classify, name, select, & cover with a network of words . . . that decide who is mad, & present the ‘patients’ to the psychiatrists for analysis & judgement.” Someone is hale & healthy & dressed; someone else is sick & deficient & naked. The mental “patient” is strapped to a bed or sedated. The doctor holds the key to the asylum cells & explains the misaligned thoughts of the inmate to those who aspire to also hold the keys to power.
44: F. recognizes the pragmatist priority: that practice or technique creates objects or jargon terms. The priority is Aristotelian: verbs produce nouns, not the other way around. Notice how many times F. begins sentences talking about “The relation between” doctors & judges, who “define,” “determine,” “analyse” & again “determine.” “The relation between . . . interrogation . . . information, investigation, & the whole machinery of judicial information. “The relation between the family . . . .” “The relation between therapeutic confinement . . . .” These are the relations that . . . made possible the formation of a whole group of various objects.” F.'s claim is that nothing was found or discovered. Everything was invented through praxis or technique, which is (as Nietzsche told us) always about power.
45:
“The object does not await in limbo the order
that will free it & enable it to become . . . visible.” An object
“does not pre-exist itself . . . .” Objects are made. Objects of
perception are made by gestalt formation. Foreground & background are not
given. They are perspectives made or intended by the judgment of an
observer. Conceptual objects are made by language. Embodied processes
(verbs) produce objects (nouns).
In #2 F. describes adjectives or relationships, which are not empirical
objects. “These relations are not present in the object.” David Hume
exasperated many readers by pointing out that a Newtonian universe of
atomic stuff could not be explained by science, because science relies on
relationships, such as cause & effect, which cannot be empirically
located. Relationships are judgments, concepts, words – culture.
In #3 F. distinguishes between so-called common sense & professional
methods – “the secondary relations that are formulated in [professional]
discourse.” F. speculates that we have “a system of real or
primary relations,” evidently constructed by common experience & “a
system of reflexive or secondary relations” that arise from
professional methods designed to analyze – & often enough claiming – to
“fix” or repair ordinary life.
46:
Why does F. say that “discursive relations are not, as we can see,
internal to discourse: they do not connect concepts or words with one
another; they do not establish a deductive or rhetorical structure”?
Because if that were the case, advocates of a discourse system could shift
the operation of power away from social or personal responsibility to
claim that the function of power is internal to the discourse; that
judgments are universal, self-evident, & automatic. Much of the point of
F.’s analysis is to argue the opposite: that people invent language.
Reality is a social or linguistic construction. Colonialism was not the
working out of some automatic, universal process.
Psychology, economics, grammar, medicine” do not photocopy a pre-existing
order or set of relationships to offer “a reconstruction after the
event.” “What we discover is neither a configuration, nor a form, but
a group of rules that are immanent in a practice.”
47: We cannot write “a history of the referent” or object, because the object is construed by praxis, habit, custom, & professional practice. “We are not asking ourselves whether witches were unrecognized” at various times or in various cultures . . . “or whether . . . a mystical or aesthetic experience was . . . unduly medicalized,” e.g., in 19th c. Vienna. There are no witches as such. There are women who may lead lives that disturb others who brand them as witches. There is no mystical or even aesthetic experience as such. These are hermeneutic or interpretative judgments that exist within the context or outlook supplied by a specific community. F. claims that reality arises from “the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.”
48: Philosophy & science want something more primal & objective. They want the “things themselves” before they are distorted by culture. But how? How can we escape language & still hope to answer the questions of science & philosophy? How can we escape perception & embodied experience to somehow know an objective order? “We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse – in which nothing has yet been said . . . we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created & left behind.” Like Samuel Beckett’s characters, we are condemned to speak.
49: The rules of grammar & logical association are linguistic. “These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality . . . but the ordering of objects” for social use. Discourse is not a collection of signs pointing to atomic, pre-existing elements. Various discourse communities are types of social praxis “that systematically form the objects of which they speak” about.
What F. does not yet say is that to deconstruct or abandon secondary relations cannot put us in touch with some primal & pristine order (as Zen Buddhism & Daoism, e.g., hope for). The bedrock of order or pattern – for human beings – must be primary relations elaborated by embodied experience, habit, repetition, custom, & ritual. These constitute the threads or knots of human life. If there is something more primal, we cannot know it; we cannot say it. Thus, the Hindu Vedas say, It (Brahman) is that from which the words turn back or fail to connect. It is silence.
F. would castigate my allusions to Buddhism, Daoism, & Hinduism as tainted by interpretation. I am guilty of dragging perception unto the ground or foundation (p. 48) supplied by the praxis of various discourse communities we identify as religious. This does not diminish the significance of this move, nor reject its authenticity. What it does is suggest that this movement tells us more about us than it does about putative objects in spiritual or physical space.
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