DEFINING THE STATEMENT

The chapter begins with Foucault making sure that the reader is still on board, and that the risks of so being have been accepted. Again, he recalls that his aim is to redescribe the traditional unities of historical analysis that have been treated as somehow necessary or self-evident, and to stop looking for the ground of discourse either in a priori knowledge or in experience. Discourse, then, is not the signification of what is, and its rules of formation do not follow the outline of some deeper ontological truth. Yet neither is it grounded in the speaking subject. All aspects of discourse will instead be regarded as constructions, the rules of which are the outcome of a complex historical process that is not just found in discourse, but is the very condition of discourse itself. In preparing this approach, Foucault has used the statement as the point of reference, but now he wonders aloud whether he has ‘not replaced his first quest with another’ (AK 90, 106), and whether the groups of rules that he outlined in Part II really do define statements. Although not made explicit, this appears to be a reference to the way the rules are themselves the outcome of the processes whose regularities they describe. In this sense, it is statements that define groups of statements and the rules that determine their relations to one another; not directly, but through their distribution, which either consolidates or disrupts existing regularities, and which may contribute to the emergence of new ones.