Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, selections

We began, as per the usual custom of our little group, with questions:
 * Can Foucault escape the subject and subjectivity, as he seems to want?  Is this attempt at getting out from under the shadow of the subject (the transc. subject) compromised if we put archaeology into reflexive relation with itself?
 * What is a 'system of disperson' (p. 37)?  How does it differ from other conceptions, e.g., from 'difference'?
 * Why abandon the term 'archaeology'?  What is at stake in an 'archaeology of sexuality' (192)?
 * Why the need for an account of unity?
 * What is at stake in the conception of 'practice' in AK that we don't find in OT?  (see p. 49)
 * Four thresholds of positivity, epistemologization, scientization, and formalization.  Is this itself a formalization?  Are these useful?  What is the value or gain of a use of a 'scientific' language in the context of a critique of science?

Discussion then ensued...

How is archaeology able to account for itself?  What is archaeology trying to account for?  What is the status of archaeology as a critique?  What is archaeology's relationship to its object of critique?

How does archaeology express a principle of constraint/selection?  MF starts (in Ch. 2) with four hypotheses: object, style, concept, theme.  Explanation rather happens by way of "forms of division" and "systems of dispersion" (37)?  How do "forms of division" and "dispersions" at the level of savoir give rise to stability or unity of connaissance?  One key to the depth savoir is that it itself is not unified (as object, style, concept, theme).  Rather, "dispersion" (38) is c-o-p of "regularity".

Questions to track as we move forward:
 * Move from archaeology to knowledge.
 * Account of unity without appeal to transcendental subject without dialectical teleology

Foucault, The Order of Things, Preface + Selections

We began with Foucault's use of the term "historical a priori" in the Preface by asking how such a thing might be uncovered/unearthed (to use the language of "archaeology") and how Foucault sets himself to account for its genesis in a particular historical period (xxii). This raised the question of where Foucault is locating the forces or discursive practices associated with its constitution. Are we to imagine that this historical a priori hovers over the realm of concrete discursive practices in a particular historical moment but appears in them and shapes them as rules or norms? Or does it rather emerge piecemeal out of practices, some of them as yet inarticulate, and only achieves the status of a norm once it is articulated in scientific discourse in one of these moments quick and profound re-ordering which are the subject of this work? 

Further we wondered how, if it is Foucault's project in The Order of Things to construct the "middle region" between, as he says, the use of "the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself" is to be imagined as a space (on an analogy with other spaces) and whether such a space is to be identified with Foucault's own discourse. This raised the question of where the subject of this order is located within it as something articulated by the order, alongside it, within it, or in a relationship to these process which is as unstable and open to discontinuity as the order which articulates it. 

We found Foucault's use of the term "archeology" to characterize his own project curious given that archeology brings with it both the methods and historical baggage of the science it functions on an analogy with and furthermore wondered to what extent his own work at this stage (given its preoccupation with the "pure experience of order and of its modes of being"(xxi) ) might not operating within the very horizon of scientific inquiry he is trying (re)construct using a new (but not fundamentally different) concept of genesis.