Foucault’s aim in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969/2013) is to pin down a methodology for the studying of discourse. The question of what ‘discourse’ is for The Archaeology of Knowledge is one of the central problems of the book, and thus difficult to summarise. We can perhaps start, provisionally and simply, by saying that a discourse is a wide scale ‘conversation’ being carried out. For example, in recent years a feature of the political discourse in the west (the conversation about politics) has been the ‘return’ or ‘rise’ of extremist right wing nationalist movements. Analyses have been offered, touching on, or quilting together, a wide number of other discourses: economics, anthropology, media studies, history etc. This ‘conversation’ is carried out as much in the mass media, and houses of politics, as it is carried out in its own way between individuals in bars and lounge rooms or on message boards and twitter feeds. What is important is that we can demarcate a particular style, a set of observations, and a way of organizing the facts around this conversation, and thus can speak of ‘a discourse’.

What’s more, insofar as the identification of a phenomenon, emerging or otherwise, is done down the lines of this or that discourse, and the objects that they take to be their targets of inquiry, we need to refer to a discourse for the rules and methods of demarcating phenomenon in the first place. It is because ‘ideology’ is an object for a discourse that we can bring into clear view an ‘emerging’ ideological phenomenon, which can then be traded, or offered to, other discourses (economic, historical, etc).

Rarity

Now, one way of approaching Foucault’s work is to see it as an analysis of historical discourses, with a specific aim to explain and trace the ‘law of rarity’ (Foucault, 2013, p.134). This phenomenon is only vaguely perceptible in our ‘conversations’ in the present (us being too close to them), but becomes starker as we move back into the past (or as we travel across cultural borders in the present). What becomes remarkable upon the examination of past discourses are the absences — both of objects or properties that seem to us as ‘self-evident’, as well as steps between ideas/premises that we take to be necessary. Thus, past discourse avails itself of strange ‘jumps’ that we feel are ‘obviously’ illegitimate, as well as paying no attention to solutions, paths, and objects that we feel are loudly and ‘self-evidently’ there.

Furthermore, insofar as the field of possible language is vast (though still smaller than the field of ‘possible vocal noises’), it far outstrips what presents itself in the discourses of any age (ours included), even combined. What we find in a discourse is a very modest set of claims, manoeuvres, and sequences of ideas that cling tightly together relative to the expanse of possibilities. We can thus ask, in the style of the Fermi Paradox, when we survey all of historical recorded knowledge, taking into account the incredibly wide limits of what is possible to say, to perceive, and to posit, “Where are all the ideas?”

It may seem attractive to say that ideas build upon ideas, and that certain breakthroughs in ‘science x’ needed to happen for breakthroughs in ‘science y’ to occur, but there are two responses to this:

Firstly, this observation is more based on the staggering complexities of 20th century physics and 21st century technology. The theory of evolution, for example, in its 19th century Darwinian formulation, did not depend on advances in mathematics or microscope technology, or biology, or so on. It was merely an interpretation of the observation (often made throughout history) of the fittedness of living things to each other and their environments. All of the pieces of the theory had been lying around for millennia. There’s nothing intrinsically absurd about the idea of the exact formulation of Darwin’s (hereditable characteristics, mutation, competition) appearing verbatim in Lucretius, or Heraclitus, or Lao Zi, or even the book of Genesis. Yet the fact remains that even though the elements of Darwin’s theory have been on hand for so long, and their connection so simple, their particular stating needed to wait so long. From this it would seem that it’s not the case that there exists an infinite freedom for thought to connect up observations and data points into myriad theories, but seemingly heavy limitations on how these connections are made. The structures of discourse.

Secondly, going in the other direction, this observation about the preconditions of certain ideas requiring other ideas reinforces the notion of rarity. From time to time claims arise that, say, modern particle physics was pre-empted by some ancient (usually exotic) text, the Upanishads for example. However, it is difficult to know what this means. If the text features a statement that can only be translated into the claim that a ‘125 GeV Higgs Boson should decay into a pair of tau leptons’, we would be right to claim forgery just on the grounds that it beggars belief that a 2,500 year old text would have distinct terms for a GeV scale (what did it need it for?), and make discriminations between bosons and leptons. Terms like ‘boson’ or ‘lepton’ have no meaning outside of modern particle physics — not just terminologically speaking, but even in regards to their referents. The Higgs Boson is an entity that emerges from a model, that is inseparable from the other elements and entities of that model (such as leptons), against which it is constrasted. It is then determined in relation (and in opposition) to these other entities in the model. An ancient text, then, can only pre-empt modern particle physics in a meaningful way by demonstrating a near full congruence with all of the entities, and their relations of, say, the Standard Model (of which the Higgs Boson is an element). That is to say that the claim that some ancient discourse pre-empts a modern one requires a more far reaching identity than just the similarity of some one element, mood, or theme. The atom of the Atomists is not the atom of the physicists.

Then, insofar as the entities of modern physics are dependent upon one another and their organization into a theoretical model that defines their relations, and this model is a precondition for the positing of these objects, we can see how the development of future knowledge is beholden to its present and past. But, then, knowledge forms of a kind of tree within a possibility space, like an evolutionary, ‘tree of life’ structure. So, the question returns: what rules and events and principles determined its evolution in just this way that it did, occupying these branches of the possibility space? In the case of species, we can look at the whole ‘tree of life’ and be satisfied with the explanation that it is blind historical contingency all the way through (extant species being just those forms that have not had their cycle of reproduction destroyed yet), but in the case of knowledge the temptation is to say that the forms our developing knowledge take, over time, trace the contours of something really there. But this assumes a liquidity and nimbleness to the institutions of knowledge which runs counter to fact. Historically, these institutions have moved by the slow, plodding along, processes of accumulation. We like to highlight exciting ‘paradigm shifts’ and births of entirely new disciplines, but these are the exception rather than the rule — the rarity of these being due to the fact that sciences possess their own conditions for the verification of statements made within them concerning the objects they have defined as belonging to them, and insofar as new statements concerning these objects satisfy these conditions then the science plods along in a steady trajectory, accumulating, but insofar as statements don’t satisfy these conditions, then they are excluded as false or senseless.