week 6

Foucault part3 Statement and Archive

In Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge, “statement” is an important concept to understand his idea of “discourse”. Concerning the concept of “statement”, Foucault did not give an explicit definition of it for the reason that “I wonder whether I have not changed direction on the way; whether I have not replaced my first quest with another; whether, while analyzing ‘objects’or ‘concepts’, let alone ‘strategies’, I was in fact still speaking of statements,; whether the four groups of rules by which I characterized a discursive formation really did define groups of statements. (p80)” However, one can still find fundamental connotation of“statement”through a series of comparison between statements, propositions, formulations and languages.


First of all, “statements” are not propositions (pp81), sentences (p82), or an act of formulation (p83). “statements”are not propositions, for a proposition can be expressed by several different statements, and these different statements are just using the different “propositional structure (p81)”to express the same proposition (For instance, “No one heard”or “It is true that no one heard”p 81 ). Also, the meaning of a statement is not settled. Like if Nietzsche say “God is dead”, the meaning of it is different from anyone else who also say “God is dead”. Or saying “God is dead”in 19th century has totally different meaning from saying it at present time. And “Statements” are not sentences, because it would not appear to be possible to define a statement by the grammatical characteristics of the sentence (for instance, a logical tree, a classificatory table of the botanical species, an accounts book, the calculations of a trade balance...p82 ). It is also farfetched to recognize“Statement ”as an act of formulation, since a statement can be formulated by various languages, and one formulation can be practiced by different grammar structure, and“more than a statement is often required to effect a speech act (p83) ”. It is like we use Chinese, French, or English to report the same piece of news, though we use different grammar structures and linguistic symbols, we are still reporting the same content or meaning.


Secondly, statements do not exist in the same sense in which a language exists. (p85) “if there were no statements, the language would not exist; but no statement is indispensable for a language to exist...the language exists only as a system for constructing possible statements...(p 85).” A statement could have different subjects. For instance, it could be Nietzsche saying “God is dead”, it could also be some else giving the same statement. In different time or space, the position of subject can be taken by any different subjects. However, it is not important that who this subject is, but it is important that what kind of circumstance/ time or space that this subject exists and how this circumstance make this subject state in this way.


Thirdly, the function “statements”lies in the changing relationship between sentences, propositions, or other statements. In other words, a statement is described by specific network where this statement exists, and this network in constantly changing.
Lastly, statements do not exist abstractly, but materially (p88), “this materiality that characterizes the enunciative function reveals the statement as a specific and paradoxical object, but also as one of those objects that men produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recomposes, and possibly destroy(p105)”, and it is such materiality that determines the controlling position of subjects to statements.