On The Implementation,origin And Concept Of Foucault's Archaeology

This article aims to study the archaeological methods in Foucault's thoughts.As the most original thinker in the 20 th century,Foucault's research involved many different fields: psychiatry,clinical medicine,the humanities such as linguistics,biology,economics,politics,and the science of law.The methodology is the “Ariadne Line” that runs through all these studies.Therefore,the discussion of methodology cannot be limited to a certain work or a field,nor can it only rely on the examination and analysis of concepts.In this article,the author will focus on analyzing several important works related to archaeology,and then outline the specific implementation process of this method,the entire theoretical background in which it is located,and the core concepts it contains,in an effort to restore the overall look of archaeology in a comprehensive manner.First,the author will start with three of Foucault's earliest publicly published works.These three works are unanimously regarded as representatives of Foucault's research using archaeology,and the author will gradually reveal the topics that they are involved in or the questions they respond to and the overall structural arrangement of Foucault at the time of writing.In History of Madness,Foucault discovered the same structure of two independent levels of institution and theory.This structure,called basic experience,constitutes the conditions under which psychiatric science can become possible.In The Birth of the Clinic,Foucault also focused on the two levels of medical institutional structure and scientific structure,and discovered the conditions that make these two levels fit together and make clinical medicine possible,which are the anatomical methods.In The Order of Things,Foucault gave up the analysis of the institution level and instead considered several different theoretical areas.He found that these theoretical fields had experienced complete ruptures together in different historical periods on the one hand and had inherent coherence in the same historical period on the other hand.Secondly,the author will analyze the theoretical background of the archaeology embodied in these three works.The analysis in this part mainly focuses on Foucault's early interpretation of Kant's anthropological thinking and the exposition of the humanities as a whole at the end of The Order of Things.Among them,Foucault showed his investigation of the history of thought and implied the position of his own thinking.With the help of the metaphor of space,the author reveals that the archaeology is in the space of modern thinking opened by Kant and the philosophicallinguistic space opened by Nietzsche and many other writers.And it has multiple relevance to the trend of structuralism coexisting in the space of modern thinking.Finally,the author will analyze The Archaeology of Knowledge and related writings in the same period so as to point out the core concepts and the analytical frameworks that the archaeology depends on in the specific implementation.All of them play important roles in Foucault's thought.Through the research of the above three parts,the author attempts to present the overall appearance of Foucault's archaeology: For Foucault,archaeology is a response to Kant 's proposal of thinking about the question of condition of possibility by analyzing the existence of language itself and the way of its existence.This approach is both in the space of modern thinking created by Kant and in the philosophicallinguistic space created by Nietzsche and many other writers.Therefore,on the one hand,archaeology can inherit the question of the condition of possibility,on the other hand,it can use language to replace the subject,and thus dispel the image of the limited human who supports the space of modern thinking.In the specific analysis of language and its existence,archaeology regards discourses as a series of events that have already occurred.These events are deprived of the grammar,meaning,structure,reference and the subject who is involved,while they are only viewed as a kind of pure materiality.By strictly describing the emergence,change,and disappearance of this material existence,archaeology can establish many rules governing them.While researching the relationship between different discoursive events,it also emphasizes the relationship between discoursive events and non-discoursive events.These two levels together constitute the basic framework of archaeology.Foucault's emphasis on this is different in different periods and works.In the so-called genealogical period of the 1970 s,Foucault still inherited this framework and further deepened it.