Archaeology of Knowledge 1

Foucault's 'knowledge' is comprised of statements. Statement are enunciative events: they crop up in a system of discourses, between that which makes the statement possible (institutions, that time, that place, that subject or mode of subjectivity) and that which the statement makes possible. Thus, they are not entirely singular, like events, but also not entirely idealized (like natural laws or mathematical theorems). Discourse names the location (the field or system or network); archaeology names the process, the mode of analysis, by which statements are studied within discursive systems. The focus on discourse and archaeology is a move away from experience, away from transcendental laws or subjectivity, away from the solace of ouevres and authors and books as stable units of identity or experience or analysis; it identifies something that no one person could intend, nor experience as such, even though people experience elements of it. He wants to know how things got stabilized. Anything that is stabilized, like authorship, like the novel, like subjectivity, archaeology is the process of investigating the conditions under which that stabilization happened and under which it shifts and moves over time.

By knowledge, he means what it's possible to know at any one time, given the various interconnected discursive formations and discourses. He means what it's possible to think, and the conditions under which the possibilities for thought shift, slowly, in history, becoming history, laws, codes, theories, ideas.

He wants not to move away from the old comforts of history, the old pillars, but to look at how they got to be the way they got, among other things, incl: and all of the grain of history that lies between. Not micro-histories; more like macro-histories that have to be constructed from a foundation of micro-histories, the single statement, spidering out from a statement to what it implicates, what made it possible (sayable, writable), what it made possible.

So what does knowledge come to mean when referred to or through google? There's a way to make it sound Foucauldian: google and its index and its algorithm are the conditions of possibility for the searches for knowledge conducted by people through google. Like archaeology, google's knowledge base is not the product of a single subject or set of subjects and their intentions (the algorithm was constructed, but acts semi-autonomously, or at least does not remain the direct product of an engineer's intention). Nor is it something that can be experienced as such or as a whole. It's base unit seems to be the search query, including all of the resourcefulness that someone can muster in an extended search. People touch knowledge through their individual searches. They make contact with the database or index. The enunciative field might be something like all of the links and keywords that get a site the ranking it has in relation to any given query, along with all of the sites and sub-sites and links and ads that make up the tendrils of possibility once someone actually arrives at a url (the result of a search: a new location for oneself, for one's desires).

So, if I'm learning anything from Foucault's approach to studying knowledge, what am I learning? Foucauldian questions: What are the discursive formations of knowledge as it is configured by google? What had to happen for google to happen? What had to happen to the ways we understand and organize knowledge for google to be possible? Legible? For it to be considered useful? What are the discourses that prop up people's day to day use of it? What languages, idioms, conventions, laws, vernaculars does it bring into being?