ABSTRACT
“Re-theorization” is the appropriate word because The Archaeology of Knowledge does not provide a full and accurate account of The Order of Things’ aims and achievements: it pushes them in a new direction. Michel Foucault inherits a conviction that certain currents of modernity have lost their charge from his involvement in the “theorization of writing.” The Archaeology of Knowledge moves away from both structuralism and the literary avant-garde. Knowledge consists simply of what is said and its internal divisions: though Foucault overlooks the ways in which the vernacular forms the background against which official knowledges emerge. The Archaeology of Knowledge seems to be about discursive events and their regularities. The difficulty with a project conceived of in these terms is that analysis at the level of signification can never be reduced to analysis at the level of event, and vice versa.
