In Part II of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault sets out to explore what characterizes a specific discourse. More specifically, he asks what constitutes the unity of the units – the play on words seems to be intended - with which his earlier archaeological studies were concerned, mentioning "medicine, grammar" and "political economy" (Foucault 1972:31) as examples of these units. Eventually, he will describe these units as discursive formations or simply as discourses. Looking back at his earlier studies, he notices that they focused on different aspects or elements of discourse. In particular Foucault distinguishes between: 1) objects, 2) enunciative modalities (although perhaps the alternative translation "modes of statements" would be more appropriate), 3) concepts and 4) themes (to which he also refers as theories or strategies).
Foucault typically refers to these four aspects as discursive elements. But I find this use of element which refers both to objects, modes of statement, concepts and themes as well as their examples, such as madness, indiscriminately as elements. Instead I suggest thinking of objects, modes of statement, concepts and themes not as elements, but as types of elements. Later I will argue that the term "element" is misleading for other reasons and I hence will suggest to regard Foucault's elements instead simply as aspects of discourse.
To determine what constitutes the unity of discursive formations like medicine and grammar, Foucault tests four hypotheses and finally rejects them: (1) that these units can be defined by a single object or a specific set of objects, (2) that these units can be defined by a single mode of statement or a set of such modes, (3) that these units can be defined by a single concept or a set of concepts or (4) that units can be defined by a single theme or sets of themes (Foucault 1972:34–43). Foucault discusses examples from his work on psychiatry (to which he also refers to as psychopathology). Madness is an object of the discourse of psychopathology, but madness is not unique to this discourse; it also plays a role in other circumstances, for example in the church. Similarly, a specific set of objects, say madness and its contemporary subspecies, is not unique to psychopathology. Also, the objects that were important in psychopathology did not remain constant over long periods of time, but changed.
Instead of grounding the unity of a specific discourse in any of these four elements(or aspects), Foucault argues that the discourse's unity is based on the specific distribution or dispersion of these elements:
Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these elements, […] one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations. (Foucault 1972:37)
I interpret Foucault's dispersion mainly as a set (or pattern) of objects, forms of statements, concepts and themes/strategies, although Foucault also includes the relation between the so-called elements as part of this dispersion. Also, he introduces a new idea here: that of a regularity as an active and productive principle behind the concrete set of elements. Foucault uses this concept of regularity to define discursive formation:
Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings [sic], transformations), we will say, […] that we are dealing with a discursive formation. (Foucault 1972:38)
This definition is vague, a fact which become perhaps most evident if one discusses practical questions. For example, it appears that an arbitrary selection of statements may also show patterns or regularities, which according to this definition would also be discursive formations.47 Foucault does not discuss this case, but either one accepts those seemingly arbitrary patterns as discursive formations or one refines the criteria for identifying proper discursive formations.
Likewise, Foucault's examples indicate that the identification of a single regularity would not be enough for a good identification of a discursive formation. Foucault seems to suggest that one needs to identify several regularities to determine a discursive formation, but he does not specify exactly which procedure should be followed (how many such regularities would be necessary etc.). I assume that it is possible to answer these practical questions, that one could come up with more concrete conditions for the quantity and quality of regularities which need to be met to identify a discourse in the real world. I emphasize the fact that Foucault does not answer these practical questions not to point to a lack of his approach, but to show that he is more concerned with the general aspects of his approach - the more theoretical aspects of his method, if you will - and not with the more minute practical aspects that one would expect from the textbook description of a method.
Next, I discuss Foucault's definitions of the four notions of object, forms of statement, concepts and themes. He describes these terms mostly through examples from his archaeological studies and he does not explain them fully in general terms. I try to fill in some conceptual gaps in a way that complies with his examples. I call these definitions preliminary since I am interpreting what Foucault might have had in mind and because my definitions are not based on a proper analysis of empirical data. These definitions are meant to serve a heuristic function and to facilitate the transfer of these terms to new research.
TOWARDS DEFINITIONS:OBJECTS
When Foucault speaks about objects, he refers to objects inside discourse, not to the material world, as his occasional discussion of things (choses, in opposition to objects or words) shows (Foucault 1972:7, 33 ,45). One can suspect that an object is anything that "is given to the speaking subject" (Foucault 1972:51), anything mentioned in discourse, or anything that is in the statement.
This range of objects is much smaller than anything about which a statement could be made, because in any given discourse at any given time what can be said is limited: "one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new" (Foucault 1972:49). In other words:
there are "historical conditions" (Foucault 1972:49) that limit the availability of objects and these conditions depend on "institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, [and] modes of characterization" (Foucault 1972:49).
47 However, I expect that not every arbitrary selection of statements shows common objects, modes of statement, concepts and themes.
Foucault lists here both discursive and non-discursive factors that determine the emergence of objects.
These limiting factors are not only negative, they are also productive in the sense that objects are not only unveiled, disclosed, discovered by discourse, but truly invented, pointing to a complex relationship between things and objects:
[T]he object does not await in limbo, the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light (Foucault 1972:49).
Before objects exist in discourse, they might already exist in "'prediscursive' experiences"
(Foucault 1972:52), but as such they are not at the center of the archaeology.
TOWARDS DEFINITIONS:MODALITE ENONCIATIVE
Foucault explains the second type of discursive element, the "modalité énonciative" (Foucault 1972:55), as "a certain style, a certain constant manner of statement" (Foucault 1972:37). The English translation by A.M. Sheridan Smith suggests "enunciative modality" (Foucault 1972:55) for the French "modalités énonciatives", a direct but perhaps unnecessarily clumsy translation;
instead I prefer "mode of statement" as a translation.
Foucault's examples for modes of statement come from his study of the history of medicine:
[F]rom the nineteenth century medical science was characterized […] by a certain style, a certain constant manner of statement. For the first time, medicine no longer consisted of a group of traditions, observations, and heterogeneous practices, but of a corpus of knowledge that presupposed the same way of looking at things, the same division of the perceptual field, the same analysis of the pathological fact in accordance with the visible space of the body, the same system of transcribing what one perceived in what one said (same vocabulary, same play of metaphor); in short, it seemed to me that medicine was organized as a series of descriptive statements. (Foucault 1972:33)
Basically his example for modes of statement concerns a way of looking at reality, something he had called "gaze" in The Birth of the Clinic: in the case of medicine he observed the choice to focus on the visible and to look at it in a specific descriptive mode. More concretely, Foucault mentions "[q]ualitative descriptions, biographical accounts, the location, interpretation, and cross-checking of signs, reasonings [sic] by analogy, deduction, statistical calculations, experimental verifications" (Foucault 1972:55) as text forms (and other forms of statements) that were characteristic for medicine at a certain time.
TOWARDS DEFINITIONS:CONCEPTS
To illustrate his understanding of concept, Foucault refers to examples from his study of grammar in The Order of Things:
[D]oes not the Classical analysis of language and grammatical facts (from Lancelot to the end of the eighteenth century) rest on a definite number of concepts whose content and usage had been established once and for all: the concept of judgement defined as the general, normative form of any sentence, the concepts of subject and predicate regrouped under the more general category of noun, the concept of verb used as the equivalent of that of logical copula, the concept of word defined as the sign of a representation etc.? (Foucault 1972:34)
These examples indicate that concepts are technical terms, which I take to be that subset of objects which have implicit or explicit definitions. Concepts are more than words: they come with some sort of definition, and I assume that concepts are typically much fewer in number than
objects. But like objects, concepts are ordered in relations that may be hierarchical. Foucault refers to ordered sets of concepts as a "conceptual architecture" (Foucault 1972:34), "deductive architecture" (Foucault 1972:62), or a "family of concepts" (Foucault 1972:62), although he repeatedly underlines that he is little interested in such architectures.
TOWARDS DEFINITIONS:THEMES
Foucault refers to the fourth element (or element type) as themes. Later he also introduces an alternative expression: "strategies," (Foucault 1972:64).48 His examples for themes primarily come from economics and biology, which he studied in The Order of Things.49 Evolution is one of his prime examples:
Could one not, for example, constitute as a unity everything that has constituted the evolutions theme from Buffon to Darwin? A theme that in the first instance was more philosophical, closer to cosmology than to biology, a theme that directed research from afar rather than named, regrouped, and explained results; a theme that always presupposed more than one was aware of, but which, on the basis of this fundamental choice, forcibly transformed into discursive knowledge what had been outlined as a hypothesis or as a necessity. (Foucault 1972:34)
Foucault suggests here that the French naturalist Buffon (1707-1788) already wrote about evolution without actually using this word and certainly without giving it the exact same definition as Darwin would do roughly a hundred years later.
A theme here is different from object and a concept in that it is not tightly bound to specific words, but rather points to a conceptual similarity, almost as an abstract idea, or several ideas, that governs discourse without necessarily being cast into a single term. In fact, Foucault seems to avoid the introduction of another term like idea in this case. Instead he describes themes a specific configuration of objects, forms of statements, and concepts.
[Some] discourses […] give rise to certain organizations of concepts, certain regroupings of objects, certain types of enunciation, which form according to their degree of coherence, rigor and stability, themes or theories. (Foucault 1972:64)
Thus, themes share with discourses (and discursive formations) that they are made of specific sets of objects, forms of statement and concepts: Evolution as a theme could be explained in an abstract way as the gradual change of natural things (such as geological formations, animals and perhaps people, societies, countries) over long time spans. While the more concrete aspects of these processes have been debated for hundreds of years, one could argue, as Foucault does, that the general topic was present in academic discourses for at least a hundred years before Darwin.
Interestingly enough, Foucault appears to associate themes especially with academic discourses that are contested and political:
In 'sciences' like economics or biology, which are so controversial in character, so open to philosophical or ethical options, so exposed in certain cases to political manipulation, it is legitimate in the first instance to suppose that a certain thematic is capable of linking, and animating a group of discourses (Foucault 1972:34).
This may relate to the fact that when two or more approaches disagree about one aspect, they typically agree on a more general concept. While Lamarck and Darwin disagreed about many
48 I use "theme" or "strategy" depending on which seems more appropriate in the specific context.
49 For additional examples of themes, theories and strategies, see (Foucault 1972:64–65).
concrete aspects of evolution among natural species, they did agree on the general topic of gradual change and both opposed biblical explanations that omitted any form of change.
CONCLUDING CONCERNS
Discourse and discursive formations are not exactly the same, but they denote the same units: both are composed of statements that can make up an academic discipline, such as those Foucault looked at in his own archaeological investigations. As discussed above, "discourse" points towards a philosophical concept of statement that Foucault does not derive from his earlier studies, while "discursive formation" is explicitly construed with respect to those earlier studies.
For my practical purposes I will ignore this difference between the two terms and assume that a discursive formation and a discourse are the same thing.
Although Foucault does not present formal definitions for his notions of object, form of statement, concept and themes, his application of these terms is sufficiently clear. Earlier in this section, I have tried to show how definitions of these terms could look.
Element is traditionally a fairly strict concept. The elements in the periodic table of elements, for examples, are basic building blocks, from which all things are made. This implies mutually exclusivity between elements: Something cannot be iron and lead at the same time.
Unlike, say a pictorial representation of a house, elements are not dependent on perspective. But these criteria do not apply to Foucault's elements. In his archaeology, the same word can represent an object and a concept, occasionally the same word may also represent a theme. Also, Foucault explicitly attempts to describe a way of looking, the modalité énonciative, as an element. It seems that what Foucault describes are not strictly elements, but rather aspects, features or attributes of discourses.