Name Naeem Akram

Roll no 19011517-026

Course code TRAN-313

Course Name Critical Discourse Analysis

Assignment Topic The Archive

Submitted to Ms Kanwal Zahra

Department CeLTS
The Archive
The problems of discontinuities during discourse analysis were rife/unpleasant. A number of
theoretical issues arise with regard to how such discontinuities can be identified and analyzed.
According to Foucault, first is to unthank existing continuities in the history of ideas and reduce
a history to its raw material for pure description of discursive events.
We have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with
their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field
of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call
archive.
What follows next is a long series of elements of a definition of the archive (a well-known
stylistic feature for those familiar with Foucault’s work). I shall give the full list, for all of them
matter. One should keep in mind that Foucault is trying to establish a historical object here, not a
linguistic one. Historical analysis has hitherto focused either on ‘meaning’ (i.e. what a text says)
or on people (i.e. who said something). Foucault suggests that the reason for discursive events
and the occurrence of particular discursive ‘things’ (we would say, text-artefacts) resides in
(historical)
In the system of discursivity, the enunciative (utterances/pronounce) possibilities and
impossibilities lays down. The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that
governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which
determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous(proper) mass,
nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance
external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in
accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities
. . . It is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines
at the outset the system of its enunciability.... [I]t is that which defines the mode of occurrence of
the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning. ... [I]t is that which differentiates
discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.
Foucault addresses the issue of macro-sociological forces and formations that define and
determine what can be said, expressed, heard, and understood in particular societies, particular
milieux, and particular historical periods. These largely invisible contexts of discourse operate
both at the level of discursive events -- communicative behavior -- and at the level of the
discursive product -- the text-artefact, the document. And the effect of their operation is to create
and impose boundaries of what can be meaningfully (functionally) expressed within the scope of
the archive. Whenever we speak, we speak from within a particular regime of language. The
effect of this is hardly a matter of individual awareness.
The general idea of macro discursive systems is connected to concepts such as intertextuality,
indexicality, entaxualisation and voice to provide better historical grounding for these concepts.