Word: foucaults
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...FOUCAULT'S ARCHAEOLOGY has its source in a fundamental change in the nature of history which he sees beginning with Marx. One aspect of this change involves the historian's attitude toward the document, the record and container of discourses. Once, the historian attempted to reconstruct the past through the document by interpretation and amplification. Now, it is the document itself which has become the historian's object...
...Foucault finds the objects usually studied by intellectual history, the single work or the oeuvre, insufficient categories for archaeology. He prefers to investigate concepts, themes, and paradigms at all levels of discourse--the "discursive regularities." Changes in the regularities of discourse are continually occurring, but the most important among these changes is the infrequent succession of what Foucault calls epistemes, the ideas which a period holds about the fundamental nature of knowledge that lay down the field of relations and possibilities in which all discourses arise. For instance, Foucault sees a change in epistemes occurring roughly between the years...
Such changes mark the boundaries between periods of intellectual history. Yet Foucault insists that the episteme is not merely the latest effort to keep alive the notion of the Zeitgeist, "the spirit of the time" Foucault claims only that "the relations that I have described are valid in order to define a particular configuration: they are not signs to describe the face of a culture in its totality." A change in epistemes occurs at different times for different thinkers and disciplians, and is partially independent of the shifts in social and political history which have often been used to mark...
...VERY notions of the episteme, and all the smaller variations occuring in the forms of discourse, lies Foucault's suspicion--at which he only hints--that he is bringing to history the outlines of a change which has been gradually infecting Western culture since Kant. Looking back over his work in the conclusion, Foucault observes that"...the essential task was to free the history of thought from its subjection to transcendance...
...this elusive quest, Foucault would substitute a history of discontinuities which admits chance, which recognizes a limit to our understanding, which rather than finding the "deeper" unity within differences, makes differences its basic materials and creates its unity out of them. Archaeology traces patterns among differences...