How to connect different histories in your story, such as the history of medicine and the history of philosophy? But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole interplay of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. Then, he has found ways of looking at the rules that dictate what is said and where and when, which explains diversity rather than unity in the discourse. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. For above all, Foucault is saying that individuals don’t have that sort of power to shape discourse. For Foucault, a “cogito” is a thinking subject. It was “inert material through which [the historian] tries to reconstitute what men have done or said.” Now, Foucault argues, it is instead necessary to understand the documents themselves and how the documents came to be. I was about 40 when I got a glimmer of the wonders archaeology can offer, and I want kids to be able to have that for their whole lives, not just in middle-age. Thus, the first chapter of this Part, “The Unities of Discourse,” is an attack on all the previous ways in which the mass of … Absences are as much produced as presences, and just as important to study. All over the world, we're finding out that, you know, whether it's Egypt or Syria or Central America, what satellites are showing is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of previously unknown settlements all over the world, and what archaeology does, it helps us to understand this common humanity that we have. Et quel status donner aux lettres, aux notes, aux conversations rapportées, aux propos transcrits par les auditeurs, bref à cet immense fourmillement de traces verbales qu’un individu laisse autour de lui au moment de mourir, et qui parlent dans un entrecroisement indéfini tant de langages différents ? This event caused that event, which led to this outcome. We are fortunate that the spatial and spectral resolutions of the imagery available to us are so broadly useful for archaeology. Rather than tell the story of kings or geniuses, Marx told the story of classes of people and successions of “modes of production,” or the ways in which a society’s economy was organized. En tout cas le nom « Mallarmé » ne se réfère pas de la même façon aux thèmes anglais, aux trauctions d’Edgar Poe, aux poèmes, ou aux réponses à des enquêtes ; de même, ce n’est pas le même rapport qui existe entre le nom de Nietzsche d’une part et d’autre par les autobiographies de jeunesse, les dissertations scolaires, les articles philologiques, Zarathoustra, Ecce Homo, les lettres, les dernières cartes postales signées par « Dionysos » ou « Kaiser Nietzsche », les innombrables carnets où s’enchevêtrent les notes de blanchisserie et les projets d’aphorismes. Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules.