Gutting (1989) Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (1)

Gutting, G. (1989) Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

1. Preface

Fοr those already familiar with Foucault, it offers a new perspective that places his thought in the context of recent French history and philosophy of science, particularly the work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. (It also prcvides an introduction to these two thinkers, who are not very well known in English-speaking countries.) This opens up a fresh and, Ι hope to show, fruitful way of understanding Foucault as a historian and philosopher of science, balancing and complementing the curret standard construal of him as a social critic and theorist.

Alan Sheridan's Foucault: The will to truth
Dreyfus and Rabinow's Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics.
John Rajchman's Michel Foucault and the freedom of philosophy.

These, like almost all more specialized work οn Foucault over the last few years, are primarily concerned with the theme of the interconnection of power and kπowledge that was Foucault's οwn primary emphasis during the 1970s. There are signs that the next wave of Foucault analysis will focus οn the ethical direction his work took in the 1980s. By contrast, this book turns back to the earlier, explicitly archaeological period of Foucault's writings. Ι have chosen this emphasis nοt only because these writings have been relatively neglected in recent discussions but also because they are both difficult and important enough to warrant much closer scrutiny than they have yet received.

Moreover, beyond their great intrinsic importance, they are crucial for an adequate understanding of Foucault's later development. As we shall see, some major elements of the later knowledge-power theme are implicit from the beginning of Foucault's work; and the archaeological approach to the history of thought remains a key element in the later genealogical method. Without downgrading the value and distinctiveness of the work after ΑΚ, Ι want to call attention to the importance of the precediπg archaeological period.

Ιn addition to numerous specific points of interpretation and evaluation, my analysis of Foucault's archaeology will support three more general conclusions. First, archaeology is nοt an isolated method reflecting Foucault's idiosyncratic approach to the history of thought. Rather, it is rooted in the French tradition of history and philosophy of science and is specifically developed in the context of Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science and through an extension and transformation οf Georges Canguilhem's history of science.

Second, Foucault's archaeology is essentially grounded in historical practice rather than philosophical theory. It is a method of historical analysis that was forged, pragmatically and piecemeal, to deal with specific problems posed by the history of thought. Foucault did not develop it as the corollary of fundamental philosophical views about language, meaning, and truth. This is not to deny that his historical work has a philosophical intent or that philosophical issues are frequently in the background of his discussions. But his archaeological method originates primarily from concrete struggles for historical understanding, not from prior philosophical commitments. This understanding of archae ology is closely linked to Foucault's radical reconception of the philosophical enterprise. He rejects the traditional goal of ultimate, fundamental Truth and instead construes philosophy as an instrument for realizing concrete and local objectives in the struggle for human liberation.

Third, Foucault's archaeology is not, as critics have often maintained, an engine of universal skepticism or relativism, undermining all pretensions to truth and objectivity. The project of archaeological analysis does not, in itself, question the objectivity or validity of a body of knowledge to which it is applied. There is no reason, for example, to think that an archaeology of modern physics or chemistry would have an epistemically subversive intent or effect. Moreoνer, as we shall see, even Foucault's analyses of the much more dubious medical and social scientific disciplines typically allow them a substantial core of objective truth. Properly understood, archaeology is a technique for revealing how a discipline has developed norms of validity and objectivity, not for questioning the very possibility of any such norms. Archaeology may, of course, find that some disciplines are far less scientific than their own self-understanding suggests. Βut we shall see that, even in such cases, it is designed as a careful scrutiny of the epistemic claims οf a discipline, not as an a priori instrument for rejecting these claims.

 

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in citing Foucault's writings.

ΑΚ:The archaeology of knowledge
BC: The birth of the clinic
DP: Discipline and punish
FD: Folie et deraison
HS: Hitory of sexuality
MC: Μadness and civίlization
MMP: Μaladie mentale et penonnalite
MMPsy: Mental Illness and Psychology
OT: The order of things
RE: "Introduction" to Binswanger's Reve et existence