Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the German Settlement of Lake Llanquihue
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Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Chapter 1:  Writing the Colony
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In other words, Foucault’s archive is an analytical method that questions the modes of formation of the very coherences that facilitate the notion of a unified collection of texts in the first place:

Between the language (langue) that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated…it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements. (130)

Whereas Foucault’s archive is the recognition and formulation of discursive patterns, the scrutiny of the individual practices that allow those patterns to emerge is archaeology (131): the analysis of the specific discourses that operate within the archive. The scope of the archive is thus the wide field of discursive formation, which remains quantitatively nonfinite:

Different œuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation—and so many authors who know or do not know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea. (127)

Approaching hosts of writings as archives in Foucault’s sense questions them as to the cultural conditions of their cohesion, that is, the systematics that produces and prioritizes their conjunction amidst and in spite of their discursive incoherences, discontinuities, and incongruities and allows them to deploy their mutualities. The method formulates the homogeneity of discursive formations as those rules that govern the construction of homogeneity: the rules of what can be articulated and the rules by which unifying notions (object, theme, style, concept) can be formed.