6 - The archaeology of knowledge

Summary

It would be too much to claim that the histories of thought Foucault wrote before the methodological reflections of AK were, from the beginning, part of a single coherent project. He himself remarks that it was only after finishing OT that he saw the possibility of construing the earlier works as part of a unified enterprise. But, as our discussions of the methods at work in the three books has confirmed, there is an important sense in which this series of studies gradually develops a distinctive approach to the history of thought. AK was Foucault's effort to articulate this approach in an explicit methodology.

The leitmotiv of AK is its connection of the archaeological method developed in Foucault's three historical studies to the primary substantive thesis of OT: the death of man. The book's main effort is to define archaeology as an approach to the history of thought that eliminates the fundamental role of the human subject. Archaeology would thus operate as the historical counterpart of the structuralist counter sciences (psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics) in the postmodern move away from a conception of man as the object that constitutes the world of objects.

This explains both the close link of Foucault's work with structuralism and his insistence that he is not a structuralist. The link derives from the fact that, like structuralist work on language, culture, and the unconscious, archaeology displaces man from his privileged position.