Chapter 8 is dedicated to analyze the conceptual foundations of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. This provides an insight into the preconceptual constitution of the “ground of depositivities” on which theories hold. Then, it discusses the criticism to it and Foucault’s answer to his critics. This led him to elaborate on the difference between “structures” and “discursive formations” and develop the different strategies needed for the reconstruction of the latter. As this chapter shows, Foucault’s perspective combines the two opposite currents, structuralism and phenomenology, to elaborate a particularly fruitful approach to intellectual history. Finally, it addresses the crucial point of how to account for epistemic mutations and what he calls its événementiel character.

This chapter on definitions, concepts, and the context of Krautrock exercises different modes of theorising the music. First, the chapter analyses the origins of the term and considers different semantic connotations. Second, the chapter traces the reception of its sounds during and after its heyday (1968 to 1974) and both inside and outside of Germany. Third, the chapter attempts to define musicological characteristics of Krautrock in relation to other musical forms. In the last section, the chapter illustrates how national and transnational identity as well as spatiality can serve as concepts that connect Krautrock’s history, identity formation, and overall politics.

Linguistics as a modern science has invested its attention in describing structural rules and “trustworthy” parameters, which involve ideologies of objectivity, stability and invariance. These references conceived of language as an autonomous structured entity that created a kind of fixed ontology, relegating historical phenomena to a subaltern position. One can thus say that linguistics and history have been traditionally kept apart in the field of mainstream language studies. Considering the self-enclosure of linguistics, in this chapter, we begin by discussing how historicity and language are associated by different twentieth-century philosophers whose insights into historicity speak well to contemporary views of language as discourse. We then move into exploring how history is brought into textuality in present-day discourse studies by focusing on the macro–micro theoretical constructs of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. We conclude by drawing upon the relevance of such a theoretical apparatus to account for discourse circulation in fluid and superdiverse contexts. A specific question orients our line of reasoning and the pathway we construct: How can we, as discourse analysts, deal with the temporal–spatial horizon of history in view of the accelerated and ephemeral time-space references we experience nowadays? This question reflects our concern with the challenges that contemporary chronotopes pose to discourse analysis.