The Discourse of Michel Foucault: a Sociological Encounter with the
Archaeology of Knowledge
By Peter Armstrong
Paper for presentation at the 10th Interdisciplinary Conference on Accounting
11th -13th July 2012
Cardiff Business School
Contact details: p.armstrong@le.ac.uk
Abstract
Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (the Archaeology) is a major source for the concept of
discursive constitution in critical accounting. This return to the text is intended as a clarification of what
Foucault says about discourse in that work and to ask those questions of it which occur to a sociologist.
The major conclusions are as follows.
Foucault’s topic is not discourse but the discursive formation. This means that discourse constitutes only
within a particular formation. Different formations constitute the same objects, events and persons
differently, and perhaps synchronically.
Foucault’s picture of the discursive formation excludes human agency as a matter of principle. The
account is solely in terms of discursive events. This means that the ‘subjects’ constituted in the
Archaeology are subject positions, with the question of ‘subjectivities’ suppressed. It also means that the
discursive formation is depicted as a self-referential, self-generating system. As social theory it is
functionalist. As description, alternatively, it is positivist.
Throughout the Archaeology, Foucault illustrates by reference to the ‘human sciences’ of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Despite his insistence that these illustrations have no wider significance, they
underscore the importance of social dynamics in shaping the bodies of knowledge concerned. The antihumanist premise of the Archaeology, however, disbars all reference to these social processes which,
arguably, present the appearance of intra-discursive processes when they are filtered through
Foucault’s principle of exclusion.
Foucault’s anti-humanist premise could be defended from a charge of arbitrariness by an appeal to
philosophical tradition. That, however, would be to justify the Archaeology as contiguous with a
discursive formation with its own constitutive rules. This raises the question of what it means to ‘apply’
the Archaeology. Could it say something of accounting to an audience which is not conversant with, or
not convinced by, the discursive formation of which it is an expression? Or must its ambitions be limited
to the constitution of ‘truth-effects’ which have currency only within that discursive formation. Certain
of Foucault’s remarks on his own intentions incline towards the latter view, in which case critical
accounting scholars might ask themselves if that is what they want too.
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Introduction
‘Read More Foucault’
Anthony Hopwood, editor’s comment to author circa 1992
The first objective of presenting this reading of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge to an
interdisciplinary conference on accounting is to clarify the approach to discourse set out therein, not
least in the mind of the writer. The second is to ask those question of it which occur to a sociologist. In
the light of these, I then consider what it might mean to ‘apply’ the Archaeology to empirical cases, a
question which relates to the ontological status of Foucault’s text. The justification for this return to
basics in relation to a work which is hugely influential and has now been available in English translation
for forty years is that it appears to be the subject of a certain trepidation and confusion.
Though not the most widely cited of Foucault’s works, the Archaeology (as it will be called here) is
probably the most influential. As Alvesson and Kärreman (2011: 1129) point out, it is the major source
for what they call the ‘Big D’ view of discourse, an approach in which ‘discourse’ refers to ‘historically
specific systems of meaning which form the identities of subjects and objects ’ (Howarth, 2000: 9).
Examining a number of well-known Foucaultian applications in the field of organizational studies ,
Alvesson and Kärreman conclude that the a priori attribution of constitutive powers to discourse results
in a self-validating form of analysis: ‘It will seem as if discourse determined this or discourse determined
that, when, in fact, the main – and sometimes only – reason things looks [sic] decided from discourse is
because it is assumed.’ (ibid, 1134). The tendency towards circularity in these analyses throws a great
deal of weight onto the text of Foucault’s Archaeology: as the major source of credibility external to that
circularity, their truth-claims depend both on its validity and on its precise meaning.
That meaning is circumscribed at the outset. Foucault’s analysis is not concerned with discourse in the
broad sense of language-in-use. As the title ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’ implies , ‘Discourse in the
Foucauldian sense is less about everyday linguistic interaction, and more about historically developed
systems of ideas that forms institutionalized and authoritative ways of addressing a topic, to “regimes of
truth”’ (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2011: 1129). Even with this clarification, there remain ambiguities.
Does the discursive formation of ‘subjects and objects’ (Howarth, 2000:9) simply refer to their linguistic
representation or does it carry a Whorfian implication that objects are perceived through to the
differentiations of language ? (for a summary of evidence against this view see Pinker, 1994: 57-65).
Where human beings are at issue, does their ‘formation’ in discourse refer to their conceptions of
themselves, as in the social process of ‘labeling’ (Becker, 1953)?. Could discursive constitution even
imply a form of linguistic idealism in which both ‘subjects and objects’ are held to hover in some limbo
of non-existence unless and until summoned into being by human conversation?
More ambiguity lurks within the word ‘subject’. As well as the by-now-routine confusion of subject-asactor and subject-as-acted-upon, there is the characteristic post-structuralist tendency to conflate
‘subject’ as subject position (a social rôle) with ‘subject’ as the person who occupies that position (the
performer of the rôle) and even with the ‘subjectivity’ (self-awareness) of that performer (for an
example of this confusion in action see Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 115). The objection to these ‘playful’
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uses of language, is not so much that they have grown wearisome with repetition, but that they embody
a number of unexamined and unwarranted assumptions to do with the positioning of human beings
within flows of power and their susceptibility to the demands which power places upon them.
Adding to these confusions, the theme of the Archeology has been the subject of misrepresentation by
some of the most authoritative writers in the field of managerial social science. Notwithstanding the
cogency of their 2011 observations, Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) are culpable here, presenting a
thoroughly confused account of the archaeology /genealogy distinction:
Archaeology can be seen as directly related to the clarification of the history of the rules that
regulate particular discourses. Genealogy looks after the forces and events that shape discursive
practices into units, wholes and singularities.
Alvesson and Kärreman (2000: 1128,italics in original)
Matters have not been helped by certain comments by Foucault himself. An example was his disavowal
of any interest in the theorization of power except as deployed in the production of subjectivity (Dreyfus
and Rabinow, 1982: 208). Confusingly, this remark was immediately followed by what looked exactly like
a theorization of power, albeit in relation to oppositional movements rather than subjectivity. Worse,
Foucault’s passing reference to ‘subjectivity’ was seized upon by an advocate for whom subjectivity has
been an abiding preoccupation. In the process, Foucault’s passing remark was inflated into the major
focus of the Archaeology: ‘By examining those discourses claiming the status of a science, Foucault
clearly focused on the conditions of subjectivity that made it possible, for example, to generate
representations of a linguistic, economic and biological nature …’ (Knights, 2002: 588, italics added). So
it came about that a statement which began as merely confusing ended up as thoroughly misleading:
‘subjectivity’ in its usual sense of human self-awareness is specifically excluded from the treatment of
discourse in the Archaeology.
As a ‘difficult’ work, the Archaeology has also suffered more than most from the slippages of secondary
citation. It is understandable perhaps that a hard-pressed academic should rely on secondary sources to
name check Foucault on a point that is incidental to their main line of argument. To speak frankly, we all
do it. The problem is that the practice of citation by hearsay can set up a chain of Chinese whispers
wherein the sense of the original is distorted out of all recognition. Consider the following statement of
the theme of the Archaeology from a recent conference paper:
Michel Foucault (1970, 1972) introduced us to another type of archeology in which the objective is
to “outline particular configurations in order to reveal relations between discursive formations and
nondiscursive domains” (Foucault, 1972, p. 157; Hopwood, 1987, p. 230).
(Baker, 2004: 2)
From this, the reader would be quite entitled to draw the erroneous conclusion that this was Foucault’s
own statement of intent, and thence that the archaeology sets out a dialectic theory of the interplay
between the discursive and the non-discursive, or even that it could be compatible with a materialist
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analysis of discourse. Consulting the cited p. 230 of Hopwood’s Archaeology of Accounting Systems, the
forensically-inclined reader finds this:
An “archaeology tries to outline particular configurations” (Foucault, 1972, p. 157) in order to reveal
“relations between discursive formations and non-discursive domains (institutional, political events,
economic practices and processes)” (p. 162).
Hopwood, 1987: 230
In the interests of avoiding presentational clutter, no doubt, Baker has run together Hopwood’s
separate quotations from Foucault and inserted into them Hopwood’s own connecting comment (‘in
order to reveal’). The resulting composite is then attributed both to Hopwood and to Foucault himself as
if Hopwood were merely relaying Foucault’s own statement of method and purpose.
By now thoroughly alert, the reader will have noticed that Hopwood has juxtaposed two phrases from
Foucault which were five pages apart in the original. In addition, he has connected the phrases with his
own attribution of intent. Now it is no part of the intention of this essay to question the legacy of a
scholar who has done more than anyone else to establish and advance the sub-discipline of critical
accounting. In the writer’s opinion, in fact, Hopwood’s amendment of Foucault is actually an
improvement on the original. Nevertheless it is an amendment and in order to see the respects in which
this is so, it is necessary to contextualize.
The reason given by Foucault for the concentration of archaeology on ‘particular configurations’ is not in
order to illuminate the relationship between the discursive and non-discursive but because he wants to
analyze the relationships between different discourses in respect of the commonalties and divergences
between their respective rules of formation (The ‘Comparative Facts’ as the title of his chapter calls
them). In order to preserve the tension between these similarities and differences, he needs to avoid
any move to subsume them within wider discursive totalities. This is the reason for the concentration of
his archaeology on particularity. Contra Hopwood, it is not there in order to facilitate an analysis of the
relationship between the discursive and non-discursive.
Turning now to Hopwood’s second excerpt: this gives the impression that these relations between the
discursive and non-discursive are the primary concern of the Archaeology. Regrettably this is not the
case. Whilst the non-discursive certainly figures in Foucault’s analysis, it does so as grist to the mill of
the rules of formation which define a particular discourse. It is these rules of formation which place
limits on the statements which are possible within a discourse and hence the manner in which it is
possible to speak of the non-discursive. The emphasis is on the relationships internal to a discursive
formation: the non-discursive is taken to be assimilated in a manner which preserves these
relationships. As Howarth puts it, the archaeology ‘treats discourses as autonomous systems of scientific
statements’ (2000: 49, italics added). Foucault himself states his objective thus, ‘One is led therefore to
the project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that
form within it [i.e. ‘the space of discourse in general’] (27, italics in original). Again, ‘its problem is to
define discourses in their specificity; to show in what way the set of rules that they put into operation is
irreducible to any other . . .’ (p. 139).
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For all of these reasons, Foucault’s Archaeology seems to have become influential in the absence of a
settled understanding of the approach which it sets out. This is partly because its thematic has been misstated by certain of Foucault’s advocates, partly because it has been filtered through the soft-focus
prose of post-structuralism and partly because it has been subject to the distortions of secondary
citation, Whether or not this matters depends on one’s point of view. What Hopwood (1987) has to say
about the mutation of accounting systems, for example, remains of enduring value irrespective of its
take on Foucault. Despite its pioneering reputation, in fact, the paper’s reliance on Foucault is minimal.
Though its bibliography includes no less than six of his major works they are cited only on two pages of
concluding commentary, and mainly to the non-specific effect that they have ‘informed’ the arguments
of the paper (ibid: 230-1, footnote). If, on the other hand, is still believed that Foucault’s Archaeology
has something of substance to bring to the study of accounting systems, a return to the text seems to be
in order.
The Formation Rules of Archaeological Statements
Foucault’s Archaeology is divided into five parts, the first of which is an introduction. In what follows,
these chapters will be cited as (Part number. Chapter number). All page references henceforth will be to
the Routledge Classics edition of 2002, the Tavistock edition of 1972 being out of print. These will be
given as (Page number).
It is in chapter (2.1) that Foucault begins his investigation – the manner of his writing invites this term –
with a consideration of the ‘unities of discourse’. If Foucault’s work is to be ‘applied’, the theme is an
important one. If social consequences are to be attributed to particular discourses (e.g. Burchell, Clubb
and Hopwood, 1985) there needs to be some way in which they can be identified.
Over the course of two chapters (2.1, 2.2), Foucault examines and discards the ‘given’ unities of the
genre, the book and the oeuvre, together with four other ‘obvious’ principles of unification: reference to
the same object, and recourse to the same group of hypotheses, core concepts and common themes. By
this process of elimination he is driven, so he says, to seek his principle of unity through the ‘pure
description of discursive events’ (29). He finds it, as will presently appear, in the ‘rules of formation’
which govern the objects, modes of statement, concepts and thematic choices within a discourse’ (42).
Put this way, the procedure does not sound unreasonable. Examined more closely, doubts begin to
creep in. Consider the reasoning behind Foucault’s rejection of reference to ‘one and the same object’
as a unifying principle (35-6). This is argued through the example of ‘madness’ in the discipline of
psychopathology (this willingness to illustrate is a very attractive feature of Foucault’s writing).
According to Foucault the object ‘madness’ cannot define a unity of discourse because ‘madness’ is not
an entity which existed prior to its formation in discourse and because, as a matter of historical fact, the
content of the term changed over time. The conclusion does not follow from either premise. The fact
that ‘madness’ could refer to various objects as the term was used in psychopathology proves only that
a unity of discourse constructed around one of these objects would not coincide with a discourse of
psychopathology. That could only justify the rejection of the object as a principle of unity if it were
specified in advance that it had to yield psychopathology as a possible answer. Foucault’s rejections of
the other possible criteria of discursive unity suffer from the same logical flaw, with other ‘disciplines’
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(as he calls them) standing in for the role of psychopathology. Later in the Archaeology, moreover,
Foucault undercuts the tacit assumptions behind even this reasoning by insisting that discursive
formations do not coincide with the ‘disciplines’ (as he alternatively terms the ‘human sciences’): ‘The
discursive formation which was mapped by the psychiatric discipline, was not co-extensive with it, far
from it: it went well beyond the boundaries of psychiatry.’ (197) and ‘In the Classical period, therefore,
there were a discursive formation and a positivity perfectly accessible to description to which
corresponded no definite discipline which corresponded with psychiatry’ (198).
Despite this insistence that ‘the disciplines’ (as Foucault calls them) do not define discursive unities,
Foucault uses them time and again to illustrate arguments which properly refer to discursive
formations. He finds it perfectly acceptable, for example, ‘to speak of clinical discourse, economic
discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse.’ (121). This tension between an overt
insistence on the specificity of the discursive formation and a tacit assumption that (mostly and for most
purposes) it coincides with a ‘discipline’ runs through the whole of the Archaeology and it raises a
further question concerning Foucault’s justification of his method. Why doesn’t the social organization
of these disciplines, particularly in respect of their tendency to create and claim authority over their
discursive aspects, figure amongst the principles of unity which are considered before opting to seek
one within the processes of discourse itself?
From the sociological point of view all of the disciplines to which Foucault refers - medicine, grammar
and political economy, (35), psychopathology (44), psychology, economics, grammar, medicine (51),
grammar, economics and the study of living beings (62), clinical medicine, political economy, natural
history (80), clinical medicine (180-2) – all of them are fields of knowledge which feature some degree of
social organization. Some, indeed, are full-blown professions, although the achievement of this status
was some way off in the nineteenth century, the period to which Foucault most frequently refers. Even
as bodies of knowledge they feature some form of recognized education, channels of dissemination and
means of recognizing outstanding achievement. On the basis of this last, there are authority figures and
gatekeepers who exert a degree of control over the field of knowledge itself, including the boundarywork which decides what shall and shall not count as a valid element of it. Where these features have
hardened into the institutional machinery of professionalism, they take the form of jurisdictional claims
not only in relation to the knowledge itself but also to concrete practices based upon it (Larson, 1977,
Abbott, 1988). Thus all of Foucault’s examples exemplify the unification of a discourse through the
agency of a governing oligarchy which exerts some control over its concepts, procedures and
boundaries. That control over these aspects of a discourse is indeed what Foucault has in mind when he
writes of the ‘unities of discourse’ is confirmed by the discussion of the formation of objects, of
enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies which follows (2, 3-6). For Foucault, however, the locus
of control of these processes resides not within the institutional machinery which strikes the sociologist
as the obvious common feature of his illustrations, but within the workings of discourse itself. From the
sociological point of view, the direction taken by Foucault’s search for the unities of discourse seems
arbitrary, and his justification for it unconvincing. This suggests that the real reason lies elsewhere.
An explicitly-stated ‘real reason’ is to be found in Foucault’s introduction, and it has nothing to do with
his parade of candidate principles of unity. Over the course of two pages (16,17), he declares that his
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intention is ‘to throw off the last anthropological constraints’, ‘to define a method of historical analysis
freed from the anthropological theme’ and ‘to define a method of analysis purged of all
anthropologism’. Etymologically, ‘anthropologism’ must mean something like ‘the doctrines of
anthropology’, and given the domain assumptions which have prevailed within that discipline for a long
time, it cannot possibly be a synonym for ‘essentialism’. That seems to drive the reader to the
conclusion that Foucault’s intention from the outset was to theorize discourse without reference to
human agency as such (c.f. Power 2011: 46, Hacking, 1979). This interpretation is confirmed in
Foucault’s conclusion (220-1, 228). It is in this ontological sense (rather than the ethical, pace Knights,
2002) that one can speak of Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’.
This means that Foucault has declared in advance the rules by which he will conduct his investigation. In
the terminology of his own analysis (which will be explained presently), he has announced two key
formation rules for archaeological statements: that they must not appeal to a concept of human agency
and, within that restriction, that they are to refer only to discursive events. In the terminology of Searle
(1995: 27-8), the first is a regulative rule: it places a restriction on an investigation which is otherwise
open. The second rule, however, is constitutive (ibid.): it closes the investigation by defining all the
legitimate moves in the language-game which is to be played. The significance of such constitutive rules
is that the game itself cannot validate them. The most it can do is demonstrate that such a game is
playable, and, possibly, that it is interesting. This means that the Archaeology cannot legitimately be
cited as evidence that discourse is the exclusive constitutive agent of objects, persons or discourse itself.
On the terms he has announced, Foucault is quite entitled to declare, ‘the project of a pure description
of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it.’ (29). But the
uncommitted reader is equally entitled to suspect that a) Foucault’s rules foreground minor intradiscursive effects at the expense of more important social influences on the formation of discourse and
b) that what appear to be intra-discursive processes within the boundary conditions of Foucault’s
analysis are really surface manifestations of underlying social processes.
In justice to Foucault it should be pointed out that he is no methodological legislator. Time and again,
albeit not in connection with a social action perspective, he stresses that other approaches to the
analysis of discourse have their own legitimacy (e.g. 185). The problem lies rather in the fact that
Foucault’s influence has given rise to an investigative paradigm the rules of which have tended to
become naturalized as they have sedimented in the ‘collective scientific unconscious embedded in the
discipline’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 40). When this happens, the institutional facts of a research
tradition become confused with brute facts concerning its subject matter (for the distinction between
brute and institutional facts, see Searle, 1995: 27ff.).
To sum up so far: Foucault’s investigation of the taxonomy and dynamics of discourse is one which is
subject to a principle of exclusion which is announced at the outset: that there will be no recourse to a
concept of human intentionality. This has two major consequences. The first is that the machinery of
quasi-professional organization – which, to a sociologist, is the obvious feature common to his empirical
illustrations - is legislated out of his analysis. The second is that the analysis presented in the
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Archaeology cannot justify the constraints within which it is conducted. At most it can demonstrate is
that these constraints do not make the analysis impossible.
From this point, the argument of this paper will move in two directions: inward to the manner in which
Foucault applies these rules in his theorization of discourse and outward to their implications for the
status of the Archaeology as a text and how it might be applied.
3. Discourse as System: Functionalism and Positivism in Foucault’s
Archaeology
A search for the formations rules which define a discourse within the workings of discourse itself tends,
almost by definition, to depict the discursive formation as a self referential system – an autopoiesis
(Luhmann, 1986). In describing such a system, the point of entry is somewhat arbitrary. However, since
Foucault’s declared intention was to describe the operation of discourse in terms of discursive events,
the statement seems a logical starting point.
Foucault uses the term ‘statement’ in quite a particular sense. It is the ‘elementary unit of discourse’, its
‘atom’ (90). This ‘unit’, he further explains, is ‘not a sentence, not a proposition and not a speech act’
(93-8); indeed it is it ‘not in itself a unit [sic.], but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and
possible units’ (98). Over the course of the succeeding chapter (3.2) Foucault expands on the nature of
that function.
Primary is the creation of reality – what counts as reality within a particular discursive formation, that is.
The statement is neither a proposition nor a sentence, though it may overlap or coincide with both.
Where a proposition asserts something which is subject to truth-conditions, a statement actually creates
truth. Where a sentence may or may not refer to something, the statement is inherently referential. It is
distinctive in creating that to which it refers. This ‘referential’, as Foucault calls it, ‘is made up not of
‘things’, ‘facts’, ‘realities’, or ‘beings’, but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are
named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it’ (103).
As Foucault points out, this idea is not as mysterious as it sounds: it is familiar to every reader of fiction.
He illustrates using a famous sentence which Bertrand Russell once used to illustrate his theory of
descriptions: ‘The present King of France is bald’. As a proposition the sentence is meaningless because
there is no present king of France. As a statement within a fiction, on the other hand, the sentence
would have the effect of conjuring up a bald king of France – or of referring to a French Monarchy
already established, and with a truth value relative to that fiction (101). As this illustration suggests, the
statement is inherently contextual as well as inherently referential, a fact which places limits on the
range of possible statements (Foucault’s ‘principle of rarity’, Ch. 3.4). The fiction instanced earlier could
not include a statement referring to a revolutionary Committee for Public Safely: within that discourse it
would simply not qualify as a statement.
Thus the statement is far from autonomous in its capacity to create reality: It is always associated with a
domain (108) whereby it is subject to ‘conditions and limits . . that are imposed by all the other
statements amongst which it figures’ (129). Conversely, a statement always evokes others within this
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domain, and depends on that evocation for its full meaning (111). Taxonomically speaking, the domain
of statements as Foucault describes it, resembles Quine’s ‘web of belief’(1978).
However, the statement creates more than a reality; taken together, the statements which comprise a
discourse also define an ‘enunciative function’ (consisting of ‘enunciative modalities’) through which
statements themselves can be made (119, Ch. 2.4). At first Foucault introduces his chapter on the
modalities (2.4) as if statements emanate from active human subjects. Thus, ‘First question: who is
speaking? Who amongst the totality of speaking individuals is accorded the right to use this sort of
language?’ (55). As the paragraph develops, however, it becomes clear that his answer is to be in terms
of subject positions and institutional sites rather than human subjects as such. This means that the
subject of discourse is not a ‘cogito’ (138). Rather it is a ‘vacant space’ (103), an enunciative function
dispersed amongst the various possible enunciative modalities (60). As will be evident, Foucault’s
analysis at this point reaffirms his initial intention of producing a theorization of discourse which
dispenses with human agency: ‘Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation
of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the
subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.’ (60).
Once the nature of the statement is grasped, Foucault’s depiction of the discursive formation can be
outlined in a couple of sentences. Collectively, and in their inter-relationships, the statements of a
discourse sediment within it as an archive (142 ff). This, in turn forms a ‘positivity’ (141) which
constitutes an historical a priori and this, in turn, establishes the ‘conditions of reality for statements’
(143). And so on, round again.
Some Questions
of Human Agency
As sketched above, the schema of the discursive formation set out in Foucault’s Archeology would
appear to have fulfilled his promise to dispense with human agency. In his illustrations, on the other
hand, Foucault is too much the realist (in the ontological sense) to wish away the complications. Thus he
writes of thinkers who ‘obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the
masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea’
[143]. However flawed its awareness of its own circumstances, this is unmistakably an intrusion of the
self-aware human subject into the impersonal flux of discursive events. Foucault does not envisage this
possibility of human agency as a consequence of discourses in collision, a circumstance which might
undermine the authority of their respective archives, because he describes these controversies as
occurring within ‘a single discursive formation’ (143). If, on the other hand, the possibility is considered
to exist whilst discourses are in the process of formation that would have at least three interesting
consequences.
The first is that not all utterances count as discourse . This again underscores the fact that Foucault does
not use the word ‘discourse’ as would a linguist, for whom ‘discourse’ is simply language in use. It
implies that for Foucault discourses – more correctly discursive formations - are islands of system within
the circulation of human chatter.
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A second consequence is that the question of what shall be admitted into the archive of a discourse is
evidently subject to contestation in its formative stages, and if then, why not later?. Once this kind of
intra-discursive squabbling enters the picture – and when does it not? – it is hard to see how it could be
described with recourse to human agency.
A third consequence is that the functions assigned to the statement, the enunciative modalities and the
archive describe a discursive formation in its stable maturity which, in historical fact, may never happen.
The conclusion of all this is that the exclusion of human agency from Foucault’s exposition is achieved
only by, and in the setting of, an ideal typification of a discursive formation as a stable system of
autopoiesis.
There is a further sense in which the autonomous speaking subject haunts the tacit interstices of the
Archeology, for what Foucault describes is, at bottom, a system of formation rules for statements (42,
See also Howarth, 2000: 52 ff.). Since these rules are lodged within the archive of a discursive formation
they need somehow to be transported from thence to the enunciative function if they are to govern the
statements produced by the latter. If there is one indisputable lesson from actor-network theory (Law,
1986), it is that displacements of this kind involve human agency, even though the action-at-a-distance
in this case is in the dimension of discourse rather than physical space. Firstly the rules in question need
to be grasped and remembered; and secondly they need to be applied in the production of statements.
Concerning the second, the curse which lies upon the head of the legislator, and by extension on the
depersonalized authority of Foucault’s ‘positivities’, is that rules cannot contain the principles of their
own interpretation (Taylor, 1999). They depend on tacit understandings both of their meaning and of
the situations in which they apply. Practices – including discursive practices - which reflect these
intrusions of human agency may then come to redefine the meaning of the rules in question. And
Foucault’s concrete illustrations, as ever, provide many examples of just this kind of semantic drift (e.g.
116).
Of Positivism and Functionalism
The mention of positivism and functionalism in connection with the work of Foucault will no doubt be
dismissed as far-fetched by some of his admirers (but see Power, 2011: 36, 45). At the level of surface
appearances this reaction is understandable since Foucault’s elusive, aphoristic and sometimes lyrical
writing presents a very different appearance to the mechanistic plod of a Talcott Parsons. Yet, at the
taxonomic level there are similarities. Where Parsons (1951) depicts social action as conditioned by
normative controls deriving from system imperatives, Foucault describes discursive action (the
statement) as subject to formation rules which ensure its validity as defined by an archive. For both
theorists moreover, the system is a bounded region (of social action and discourse respectively) which
adapts to externalities and within which tensions are contained. Once these similarities are discerned,
moreover, they seem less surprising for the questions which Foucault asks of his discursive formations
closely parallel those which Parsons asks of his social system: how is it bounded, how does it hang
together, how does it perpetuate itself?
And on closer examination there are, after all, similarities in their styles of exposition in that both
writers tend to produce sentences of inordinate length. In an insightful analysis of Parsons’ writing,
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Gouldner (1970: 200 ff.) connected this tendency with the systemic nature of his thinking. Since for
Parsons everything within the social system connects with everything else, there is never a natural point
at which a sentence might stop. Something of the kind may contribute to the ‘difficulty’ of Foucault’s
writing.
Put more formally: the systemic nature of Foucault’s depiction of discourse, together with the frequency
with which he describes its elements in terms of the functions which they perform for each other,
invites the suspicion that his schema is a functionalist one. The evidence on the latter point (the
attribution of functions) is substantial. He writes of an enunciative function (119, 130) through which
statements are issued. The statement itself is a function which cuts across the categories of language
and speech (98). It is a function, moreover, which requires a referential etc. if it is to operate (129). The
authority which decides theoretical choices within a discourse is determined by the function which the
discourse must perform in the field of non-discursive practice (75). And so on.
Of course the mere presence of the word ‘function’ within the exposition of a theory does not in itself
mean that it is functionalist. Where functionality is conceived of as a motive, the theory is not
functionalist but one of social action. This line of defense, however, cannot apply to Foucault’s
Archeology because there are no actors and hence no motives. There remains a second line of defense:
for functionalism to be committed, it is necessary that functions themselves be credited with causal,
explanatory or, at a minimum, enabling powers. Against this Foucault can legitimately point to his
insistence that his project is one of pure description, that he is in no wise trying to explain the workings
of discourse. The idea that social phenomena can be described in terms unsullied by theory, however,
lays Foucault open to an alternative charge of positivism (in its epistemological sense), and positivism of
that kind also lurks within his later explication of the genealogical method (Foucault, 1984, p. 76-7).
Note here that this is positivism in an entirely different sense to his depiction of the ‘positivities’ of
discourse. This last is the Comptean positivism of ‘social facts’ and Foucault declares himself ‘happy’ to
confess to it (141).
Thus (epistemological) positivism and functionalism, which happily cohabit in most theoretical
formations, would appear to present the reader of Foucault’s Archeology with something of a choice.
Foucault might be acquitted of positivism on the grounds that no description can ever be entirely
innocent of theory. But if the theory lurking within his descriptions is surfaced in making this defense, it
will certainly turn out to be a functionalist one. To the extent that the Foucault of the Archeology is not
functionalist, he is a positivist. To he extend that he is not a positivist, he is a functionalist.
Of System and Change
The problem which killed off structural functionalism as a credible social theory was its inability to
account for endogenous system change. Foucault is clearly aware that his portrayal of the discursive
formation might arouse similar suspicions. His chapter on discursive change (4.5) begins with the
acknowledgment that, ‘Archeology, however, seems to treat history only to freeze it ..’ (183). That
particular chapter, however, offers little in the way of an answer. He observes that discursive systems
‘move to the rhythm, of events’ (185), an appeal to external perturbation which reproduces the defense
of the structural functionalists when challenged on the matter of change. His subsequent remarks in the
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chapter concern not the initiation of change but the direction which it might take once initiated. On this
he argues the rules of formation within a discourse may be hierarchical in the sense that they vary in
their generality. This has the consequence that some presuppose others, on which basis, ‘archeology
maps the temporal vectors of derivation’ (186, italics in original). The same hierarchical organization of
rules of formation, he argues, also makes it possible to distinguish change at different levels, up to and
including the supersession of one discursive formation by another (189). All this is no answer to the
problem of how change might initiate from within a system.
In fact Foucault has outlined his answer in an earlier chapter on contradictions (4.3). He begins by
distinguishing three levels of contradiction. At the lowest ‘Some contradictions are located only at the
level of propositions and assertions without in any way affecting the body of enunciative rules which
make them possible’ (170). At the highest level there are ‘extrinsic’ contradictions which reflect an
incompatibility between the rules of different discursive formations. It is contradiction at an
intermediate level, he argues, which possesses the potential to generate change within a system (170).
‘Intrinsic contradictions’ as Foucault calls them ‘originating at one point in the system, reveal subsystems’ (171). The reference to ‘sub-systems’ indicates that Foucault’s exposition at this point relies on
the hierarchical organization of rules mentioned above. This has the consequence that contradiction can
symptomise an incompatibility between relatively low-level rules of formation which are nevertheless
alternative articulations of the fundamental rules which define a single formation. Since the appearance
of statements which reveal this incompatibility is a contingent matter, discursive formations which
contain such contradictions possess a standing potential for endogenous system change.
It could be argued that this recourse to contradiction does no more that push the problem one stage
further back: it does not answer the question of how contradictions come to exist in a self-referential
system in the first place. It is not the intention of this essay to write addenda to Foucault, but it is
arguable that this is a non-question; that all discursive formations contain contradictions of the
‘intrinsic’ kind, though these only become evident once they are superseded. To put the matter
otherwise; the contradictions within a given discursive formation (as revealed by hindsight) are
contained by enunciative rules which disbar the questions which might make them apparent. These
prohibitions range from custom or habit at the lowest level up to and including coercively enforced
taboos at the highest. It is the breach of these prohibitions which sets in motion the process of system
change. It might be observed - correctly - that this sneaks human agency back into the picture, if only in
the minimal form of a curiosity or an inability to refrain from playing with language, but it has been
argued earlier that Foucault’s intention of purging it altogether cannot be sustained in any case. It might
alternatively be argued that the recourse to human agency in a theory which aims to have no dealings
with it, returns the theory to the structural functionalists’ attribution of change to external
contingencies. All the more reason for ‘Bringing the Men (sic.) back in’ to quote the title of Homans’
(1964) critique of structural functionalism.
In summary: Foucault portrays the discursive formation as a self-generating system of statements which
are enunciated in accordance with rules of formation lodged in an archive of earlier statements. Since
these elements are connected and specified by the functions which they perform for each other, the
Archaeology, considered as a theory, is inevitably a functionalist one. Against this it could be argued that
12
Foucault’s references to ‘pure description’ suggest that this is to misunderstand the intent of the
Archaeology. ‘Pure description’, however, exposes Foucault to an alternative charge of epistemological
positivism.
4. How Should the Archaeology be Read? Doctrinal vs. Scientific Texts
Earlier, the exclusion of human agency from the Archaeology was discussed as if it had been a personal
decision on Foucault’s part. In fact it could be justified as contiguous with an entire philosophical
tradition of anti-humanist reaction to the philosophy of the subject (Foucault, 1993). How far would
such a justification absolve it from the charge of arbitrariness?
Notice first that an appeal to tradition of this kind would treat the Archaeology precisely in terms of its
own analysis. From the archeological point of view, existentialism and structuralism are part of a wider
discursive formation, an archive of ‘positivities’ which defines its own ‘conditions of reality for
statements’ (143). These conditions, being internal to the discourse itself, are to be distinguished from
the ‘conditions of validity for judgments’ (ibid) which, by implication, can be external and sometimes
empirical. Insofar as the appeal to tradition answers the charge of arbitrariness, therefore, it does so by
asking that the Archeology itself should be read as part of a discursive formation rather than as an
empirically applicable theory of discourse. In any case all it achieves is the replacement of an individual
arbitrary by what Bourdieu and Darbel (1992) called a ‘cultural arbitrary’ (in connection with the
connoisseurship of art). How far the cultural arbitrary of the decentered subject can itself be justified in
terms external to itself is a question beyond the scope of this essay.
So what kind of writing is the Archaeology? It would be wrong to read a difference of genre into
Foucault’s distinction between discourse as a set of connected propositions and the discursive
formation as a system of statements (120-1). As presented they are differences of analytic approach, not
differences in that to which it applies. In this respect the ambition of the Archaeology is to present a
particular approach but one which is applicable to the generality of discursive formations. The very fact
of that ambition, however, means that it places different types of text on the same footing. To see how
this occurs and its implications, it is useful to distinguish between doctrinal and scientific discourses.
Doctrinal discourses, as they will be defined here, consist of the exposition, exploration and application
of a non-negotiable body of belief. As such, they correspond closely to Foucault’s model of the
discursive formation. The core of belief corresponds to Foucault’s archive of ‘positivities’. The reality to
which ‘application’ refers is one created by statements, the conditions of validity for which are internal
to the doctrine.
Whilst superficially similar, scientific discourses differ in the crucial respect that the rules for the
formation of statements derived from the core science also demand that these statements extend to a
prediction of the consequences of empirical application (such as experimentation). In Kuhn’s (1962)
account, it is this tension between received science and experiment which sets in motion the process of
scientific ‘revolution’. As a first line of defense the adherents of established science will prefer to
attribute anomalous results to flawed experimentation. When this fails, they will attempt to ‘save’ the
base theory by the addition of exception clauses. And as anomalies pile up, they will go on doing so until
13
a rival theory which accounts for these in a more ‘economical’ and ‘elegant’ fashion attracts sufficient
adherents to overcome the rearguard action. Contrary to the brittle view of scientific theory proposed
by Popperian falsificationalism (1969), the Kuhnian sociology of science holds that the only thing which
can destroy a theory is another theory, and only that in the hands of committed adherents.
As an explicit social action perspective, this Kuhnian approach to the dynamics of science is disbarred by
the formation rules of Foucault’s Archaeology. This leaves Foucault without a means of accommodating
the empirical dimension of scientific discourses. Instead his chapter Science and Knowledge (4.6) views
scientific knowledges as regions of ‘epistemologization’ within broader discursive formations
(knowledges) which are the true subject matter of his Archaeology (203, 210, 215). Thus from Foucault’s
perspective, the empirical sciences lose their distinctive features as they are subsumed within a
treatment of the discursive formations of which they are a part. In effect, Foucault treats scientific texts
as if they were doctrinal.
The question of how the Archaeology is to be read can now be posed thus. Does it consist of empirically
consequential propositions as to how discourse ‘really’ works - ‘a body of speculations’ as Hacking puts
it (1979: 42, quoted in Power, 2011: 46). Alternatively, does it consist of ‘statements’ which depict the
workings of the discursive formation in a manner consistent with an archive which lays down the
conditions of reality for those statements?
In the conversation with a critical alter ego with which the Archaeology concludes (Part 5). Foucault
addresses this issue, albeit on his own terms. Characteristically he refuses any sharp distinction between
scientific and doctrinal discourses. On the one hand he defines his approach in terms of a nonnegotiable philosophical project (an ‘essential task’ as he puts it): ‘To free the history of thought from its
subjection to transcendence’ (223). Considered as a discursive formation, this means that the
conceptual apparatus of his Archaeology is designed in accordance with formation rules which forbid
any reference to a speaking subject. On the other hand Foucault proposes to achieve his philosophical
aim by means of a description of discursive events – which at a minimum should mean that his terms
are capable of empirical reference. In view of these cross-cutting requirements, it is not surprising that
he describes his concepts in terms which oscillate between the realist and the constructivist. Against the
self-accusation of positivism he replies that the task of archeology ‘is to make differences: to constitute
them as objects, to analyze them and to define their concept.’ (226, italics in original). On the other
hand he declares that its ‘enterprise is related to the sciences’ in respect of, ‘trying to reveal the rules of
formation of concepts . . ‘ (228, italics added). That there must be such rules and that they must exclude
human agency is then required by his philosophical a priori. If there are not, the project of the
archeology collapses. Possibly in recognition of this, Foucault continually stresses the hazardous nature
of his undertaking, suggesting that his archeology may itself turn out to be one of the aspirant semisciences doomed to disappear with its ambitions unfulfilled’ (227, 229).
Perhaps the nearest we will ever get to a definitive position on this matter is stated in Foucault’s own
‘Afterword’ to a collection of his writings, 'I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than
fictions. For all that, I would not want to say that they were outside the truth. It seems plausible to me
to make fictions work within truth, to introduce truth-effects within a fictional discourse, and in some
14
way to make discourse arouse, 'fabricate' something which does not yet exist, thus to fiction something.'
(Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 204). Taken at face value (admittedly a risky move with Foucault’s
comments on his own work, but how else is one to proceed?), this would appear to mean that
applications of the Archaeology in critical accounting consist of writing accounting systems into a
fictional account of the discursive formation. If that is sufficient to satisfy the scholars concerned, then
so be it.
Conclusions
As a source text of the concept of discursive constitution in critical accounting, Michel Foucault’s
Archaeology of Knowledge seems to have become simultaneously influential and misunderstood.
Firstly, the subject matter of the Archaeology is not the generality of discourse as a linguist would use
the term. It is the discursive formation, understood as an island of systemic organization within the
general flow of language. As far as the Archaeology is concerned, this means that the constitutive effects
of discourse hold good only within a particular discursive formation. Since many discursive formations
co-exist, individuals, events and objects are variously constituted at any given time and location.
Secondly, it is not clear from Foucault’s writing whether the Archaeology is intended as a theory of the
discursive formation or as a ‘pure description of discursive events’ (29). Either way, it is a theory (or
description) constructed according to an ab initio stipulation that there will be no recourse to a ‘cogito’
(138) or concept of human agency. This means that there is no justification in the Archaeology for
statements that discourse constitutes ‘subjectivities’ or ‘self-identity’. The subjects which are
constituted in the Archaeology are subject positions defined by the enunciative function which they
perform within a discursive formation. This also means that there is no evidential support in the
Archaeology for the concept of a decentered subject. It is simply an a priori in accordance with which
Foucault constructs his account of discourse.
As a consequence of his programmatic exclusion of the human agent, Foucault is driven to account for
the structure and workings of the discursive formation solely in terms of discursive events. If the result is
to be considered as a theory, it is one of a discursive system in which the elements (principally, the
statement, the archive and the enunciative function) are seen as mutually conditioned by their
functional inter-relationships. As social theory, therefore, it is explicitly functionalist. If, in response to
this charge, it argued that the Archaeology should be understood as description rather than theory, that
lays it open to a alternative charge of positivism (in its epistemological sense). This means that
Foucaultian scholars are on shaky ground in claiming to provide an alternative to positivist and
functionalist approaches.
The bulk of Foucault’s text is taken up with illustrations from the ‘human sciences’ of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. From the sociological point of view, these are institutionalized bodies of
knowledge, some of them in the early stages of professionalization. Despite Foucault’s insistence that
this feature of his illustrations has no significance for his depiction of the discursive formation, it gives
rise to the suspicion that the phenomena which Foucault accounts for in terms of in terms of empirically
elusive intra-discursive processes could more economically be explained by theories of
15
institutionalization. The rules of engagement within which Foucault constructs his Archaeology exclude
this alternative.
The generality of Foucault’s approach to discourse has the effect of erasing the distinction between
doctrinal and scientific texts. Whereas a scientific texts are (ultimately) exposed to the vagaries of
empirical application, doctrinal texts are subject only to validity criteria internal to the discourse of
which they are an expression. In restricting his analysis of the discursive formation to its internal
dynamics, Foucault effectively reduces scientific to doctrinal texts.
This raises the question of how the Archaeology itself should be understood and applied. Does it claim
to say something about how the discursive formation ‘really’ is? Or is it simply an exercise in which it is
portrayed in a manner consistent with an anti-humanist ontology which is announced at the outset?
Foucault’s own description of his work as producing ‘truth-effects within a fictional discourse’ (Dreyfus
and Rabinow, 1982: 204) suggests that the Archaeology is most appropriately approached not as
consisting of empirically applicable propositions but as a collection of statements which constitute
truths which do not necessarily hold beyond the discursive formation of which they are a part.
Something of this attitude towards the application of Foucault may account for McKinley’s observation
that the ‘London governmentalists’ ‘refuse to enter debate in anything but their own terms’ (McKinley,
forthcoming: 18).
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