Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.3

Web-based
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault links the formation of knowledge to the formation of personhood, prefiguring a link that search engines historically and technologically re-mediate. Foucault’s suggestion is that the historical procedures which require that individual books and oeuvres be conceived of as diachronically and synchronically stable units of knowledge provide shelter for the human subject conceived as sovereign: self-contained, and stable, able to make decisions whose outcomes determine the horizon of the subject’s continuance and transformation. With this link in place between the ways knowledge is organized, visualized and manifest, Foucault then begins to vary the units of knowledge as part of a project—still nascent in 1972 when Archaeology was published in English, but pursued into the eighties and Foucault’s last writings—of varying our conception of the human subject. If a book is a “node within a network” (23), then human sovereignty might be similarly distributed. If knowledge is therefore re-conceived as a “dispersion,” a “series of series” (7, 54-5), then personhood might similarly be something to be found, laboriously traced, dispersed among the various site where people appear for others, where they act in the world, where they encounter themselves and one another. To have an encounter with the world, with a person or thing in it, is to map the contours and distributions of subjectivity, not to manifest personhood across a series of sites. “Horse sucker molds.”
But Foucault does not abandon all familiar units, all representations of knowledge. An archaeology instead shifts the focus to a form of knowledge—his concept “discursive formation” points explicitly to the centrality of form (33)—a form that is more mobile, and therefore more trackable across distributed networks of knowledge, between books, oeuvres, disciplines, sciences. The archaeologist’s faith in statements rewards a curiosity about where they might lead, the paths they might trace. Beacon presents search engines as statement machines, but where statements assume a historically particular form: the search query. And Beacon is the archaeologist of search engines. You are what you eat.
In the 1970s, the mobility of statements drove a poststructuralist re-conceptualization of history. In the 2000s, the mobility of statements substantiates the business plan for search engines. A search engine works because it can mobilize a search query, efficaciously and quickly, within a vast indexed database of websites, calling up the sites that that particular search engines calls the most “relevant.” A search engine works because it can simultaneously mobilize a search query within a network of advertisers, each of whom wants their ads to appear next to and within certain search results, and not only generate a real-time price for an ad in the time it takes to return search results (a market economy in .25 seconds), but serve up a small series of ads as the marginalia of what Google calls its “objective results.” Free catchy phrases. The archaeology of knowledge, as materialized by Beacon, thus connects historical analysis to market analysis, showing them to be conjoined and historically contiguous.