Reflections on Time and Politics

11. Regularities of Dispersion

11 Regularities of Dispersion the archaeology of knowledge aims to outline the discursive formations that enable the emergence of subjects and objects and that condition the production of knowledge domains. In other words, it seeks to analyze the structures and processes that establish a surface of sense. To achieve this end, Foucault says, ‘‘we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity’’ (Foucault 1989a, 21). Negative unities such as ‘‘tradition,’’ ‘‘author,’’ ‘‘oeuvre,’’ ‘‘book,’’ ‘‘science,’’ and ‘‘literature’’ not only impose themselves from the outside onto discourse but also erect bulky abstractions. Few specificities can be learned about a discourse from the fact that it is signed by one person (23– 24); the book always refers to other books, so that its ‘‘frontiers . . . are never clear-cut’’ (23); objects lack the consistency and continuity over time necessary for a science to be defined by its reference to these objects, and the same can be said of the style, concepts, and themes of any science (31– 37). It is not that these ‘‘ready-made syntheses . . . that we normally accept before any examination’’ (22) are worthless, but rather that their fuzziness and uncertainty refer them to a different level that constitutes their conditions of emergence: ‘‘My intention was not to deny all value to these unities or to try to forbid their use; it was to show that they required, in order to be defined exactly, a theoretical elaboration’’ (71). Upon dispensing with these abstract unities, the dispersion of discursive formations can appear. This dispersion is not a simple scattering of elements in an open or empty space; rather, the term here refers to other meanings, found in both English and French, that emphasize disposition and mixture: the dispersion of materials in a building, or, in chemistry, the dispersion or suspension of one substance in another, which constitutes an 116 Reflections on Time and Politics emulsion or aerosol.1 Such mixtures, like the Stoics’, are not homogeneous; rather, one substance is dispersed in the other while retaining its own properties . Dispersion thereby indicates a difference within the convergence of heterogeneous materials. It is a synthesis of differences but, unlike the commonly accepted syntheses, it does not collapse differences into unity but rather forms the intersection where unities can appear, or at least where the elements can appear that the unities of tradition, science, literature, etc., gather together and organize. It is a synthesis containing discontinuity. Thus, if we ask what makes a discourse this particular discourse, we may first of all say that it is through a not very well constructed union of elements that separates the discourse from what it is not. But if we ask what allows the elements united under the name of this discourse to appear in the first place, we find that they always arise where divergent discourses intersect. A discursive formation links together heterogeneous discursive zones, from which emerge subjects and objects that fit neither zone completely , these same subjects and objects arising at different intersections. The ‘‘surfaces of emergence’’ of the objects of nineteenth-century psychopathology , for example, are found within the family, workplace, and religious community, while the expert subjects of this new discipline find their legitimacy as ‘‘authorities of delimitation’’ through a convergence of medicine and law that maps the clinical distinction (the clinic itself being formed in the intersection of various medical, political, and other discourses [Foucault 1989a, 50–54]) of health/sickness onto the legal distinction of citizen/criminal , and then brings this to bear on the family, workplace, and religious environments (40–44).2 Needless to say, the relations between these heterogeneous domains are strife-ridden, and the status of the discipline of psychopathology that emerges from them remains uncertain. A discourse’s entities thus appear through what amount to badly tied knots between other discourses, which are themselves formed through badly tied knots—except 1. In physical chemistry, a dispersion is ‘‘a type of intimate mixture in which one substance is present in a large number of separate small regions distributed throughout another, continuous, substance; examples are emulsions (one liquid in another) and aerosols (a solid or a liquid in a gas); also, the state of being so distributed’’ (OED 1989, vol. 4). In French: ‘‘État d’une solution colloı̈dale, en suspension dans un mileu où elle est insoluble’’ (Robert 1993). 2. Ironically, as Foucault demonstrates with the asylum physician, the authority...