IN THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, Michel Foucault identifies in the archive a “particular level” that “between tradition and oblivion, […] 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.” Because statements emerge as meaningful discourse at a given time, their appearance is accompanied by the possibility that they might not appear. They thereby point to the ways in which language is an event, the possibility of something being said or not said, a matter of whether enunciations even take place at all. This contingency of what gets said encourages us to inquire into the very conditions of language. Foucault's notion of the archive describes not merely those physical storage facilities commonly referred to as archives but a less tangible yet highly effective general system governing what can be said about a given culture. His concern is less with single specific archives than with a more pervasive discursive matrix that defines what is said, and how it is said, in order to generate meaning.

The archive in Foucault's sense is the corpus of what has been said, but it is also irreducible to the consciousness of individual subjects; instead, the speech of individual subjects is at best an effect of the rules governing propositional knowledge and meaningful speech acts. Foucault is quick to remark that the level of revelation formed and transformed by this archive presents an epistemological challenge, insofar as there is no Archimedean point from which to formulate statements about the archive. For the presence of the archive can neither be avoided nor described in its totality: “it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak” (AK 130). Foucault concludes that an archeology, a study of the rules by which the traces of a culture are organized to produce knowledge, is only possible with respect to points of discontinuity within and among the discursive practices of archives (AK 130–31).