Archeology of Knowledge

Foucaults *Archaeology Of Knowledge* could well be viewed as the culmination of years of effort invested in getting people to stop calling him a structuralist: what we have here is a "series" of pragmatic reflections (on a body of prior work too "theoreticist" to be properly so comprehended, for which see the "Discourse on Language" economically appended to this volume). If you are looking for the traditional intellectual high, even the one promised under the name "Foucault", this is not the book to turn to -- it "represents" Foucaults attempt to reconcile his rather fantastically illiberal analyses of modern social systems producing knowledges with the responsibilities of his new office as colleague of France. This is to say, the task of "overhauling" Foucaults idiosyncratic and frequently challenging appropriations of contemporary thought from *all* disciplines cannot begin here; really, what you are being offered is light entertainment.

If so, and if the millions of readers who are now today living were not lying when they reported this to be an impossibly rebarbative read, what possibly purpose is there today to tarrying with Foucaults early-70s "positivities"? Well, to my mind this is still an exemplary document in one respect: namely, as a lexicon for the description of effects worked by *Informatik*, i.e. a "playbook" for non-misleading descriptions of MIS projects and prospects -- and thusly the fun and frolicking caused by Foucaults rather effortless later efforts, including the deliciously intransigent consternation provoked by the recently-translated College de France lectures are not as suggestive as his linguistic difficulties here in terms of the tasks facing "knowledge workers" in situations where more than the sky is promised. This would a good book to buy someone trying to get work as a software engineer.

"Moreover, at the end of such an enterprise, one may not recover those unities that, out of methodological rigour, one initially held in suspense: one may be compelled to dissociate certain oeuvres, ignore influences and traditions, abandon definitively the question of origin, allow the commanding presence of authors to fade into the background; and thus everything that was thought to be proper to the history of ideas may disappear from view."

Understanding the implication of Foucaults thought process from a first read requires a refflective reader and in many ways requires a far-reaching mind from the start. This work is composed of a terminal plethora of architectures and teleological plethoras of exemplifications from science and history. Economics, stats, documents, records, and items from all discourses are examined and presented as artifacts of discursive knowledge. The Archeaology itself is the thematic for the Archive, and the archive is the preservatory of knowledge, that such discursive knowledge is preserved is archaeology. Foucaults task then is to undermine the archives of knowledge and present that knowledge back upon the structural framework of rational discourse. With observational power and radical ability, Foucault goes beyond the framework and invisibly subordinates its needs to be observed and its intention to be ritcheous (ritcheous in all that it accounts for, and ritcheous of the observer.) From the most primordial archean, to the revival of the primal archaic state, to the archaology of all knowledge, Foucault shows that in a way discourses built upon historical facts are like artifacts themselves. Here in the conclusion we see that the problematic of language (langue) as the derivational principal of discourses, cannot be made paletable (literaly!)

And so the audition fails because language or the "langue" is not sufficiently constructed for what it represents in discursive practice. At the zenith of the teleological project, when temporal conceptualization extinguishes itself from being quantified into being qualified, at the last quarter of the era, perhaps this work will be gleamed from the resevoire and conrgessively discussed.