Part One: Introduction
In the Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault sets out to unsettle the familiar assumptions that have long governed the study of disciplines such as psychopathology, law, history, or economics. Traditionally, scholars have approached these fields as if they were bound together by a deep and underlying continuity, a coherent rationality, a revealing telos, or a developmental project that carries them from discrete beginnings toward more refined and perfected forms. Within this framework, the various methods, tools of analysis, and objects of study appear as successive refinements of an essence that was always already present, moving progressively toward self-realization. Such a disposition is not accidental but reflects the sovereignty historically accorded to consciousness and the subject: the historian, the scientist, or the philosopher was presumed to be the unifying center, the consciousness that ensures continuity amid the dispersal of events. In this traditional view, the historian’s task was to constitute the past anew out of scattered fragments such as dates, monuments, and documents, arranging them to reconstruct the underlying meaning that silently governed them.
Against the entrenched image of history as continuity, Foucault emphasizes the profound shift that has occurred in modern historical disciplines, where discontinuity, rupture, and transformation emerge not as obstacles but as organizing principles. Rather than conceiving the history of a concept as the gradual unfolding of its inner rationality, modern approaches stress its displacement, mutation, and reconfiguration across different contexts. The history of an idea is not the narrative of its progressive refinement but the mapping of its successive fields of constitution and its varying rules of use. In this perspective, the trajectory of a concept is marked less by linear development than by a series of interruptions, divergences, and reformulations, each embedded in the particular theoretical and institutional contexts that made it possible.
The methodological implications of this turn toward discontinuity are far-reaching. In earlier historical studies, discontinuities were treated as disturbances, mere gaps or irregularities to be smoothed over in the quest for unity. Now, however, discontinuity functions as a positive concept, a tool for analysis in its own right. History becomes less about the excavation of silent beginnings or the progressive realization of reason, and more about examining the rules, series, divisions, and specificity that give rise to particular formations of knowledge. Chronological breaks, shifts in concepts, and differences in level are no longer to be reduced to the backdrop of a deeper continuity but studied as phenomena governed by their own regularities. The question that follows, and which Foucault poses sharply, is what the nature of these rules and regularities might be: how do they operate, how are they constituted, and by what means do they allow objects, concepts, and disciplines to emerge and transform?
It is in this sense that Foucault’s project is not to formulate universal laws of transformation or to replace one totalizing philosophy of history with another. Nor is his goal to undermine the grand declarations of unity and progress that characterize traditional accounts. Instead, his archaeological method seeks to identify the localized and particular relations among discrete events, institutions, and statements, and to show how these relations function as conditions of emergence for specific discourses. In other words, Foucault is not concerned with uncovering a hidden essence beneath historical forms, but with analyzing the rules of formation that make it possible for certain statements to appear, to circulate, and to exert authority within particular domains of knowledge.
This project, as Foucault frames it, involves a methodological reorientation. On the one hand, it requires an effort to articulate the principles and procedures by which discontinuities can be studied, such as rules for describing the formation of series, the grouping of elements, and the constitution of discursive unities. On the other hand, it requires a refusal of the traditional humanistic ground that posited the subject as the foundation of historical intelligibility. Instead of seeing history as the progressive manifestation of human reason or the development of internal consistency, Foucault calls for an examination of the relations by which emergences, transformations, and combinations are made possible. In doing so, he situates himself within a lineage of thinkers, including Nietzsche, Marx, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, who have already displaced the subject as the self-transparent ground of history and have emphasized instead the roles of practices, institutions, and discontinuities.
Finally, the Introduction situates The Archaeology of Knowledge within the broader trajectory of Foucault’s intellectual work. His earlier studies, Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things, had already attempted to practice a form of historical analysis attentive to discontinuity. Yet they were often received with suspicion and met with charges of obscurity or misunderstanding. Many of the concepts and methods he deployed there demanded further clarification, and the Archaeology presents itself as both a methodological justification and a theoretical elaboration of the approach that had underpinned his earlier works.
Part Two: Discursive Regularities
1. The Unities of Discourse
In part two of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault challenges the very category of work and the traditional unities used to organize historical analysis, such as tradition, influence, development, and the author’s œuvre. He argues that these are not natural givens but constructed figures that impose a false coherence on the inherent dispersion of historical events. For instance, tradition and influence presuppose an original, identical idea that travels through time, while the concept of an œuvre is an interpretive act that selectively groups texts under an author’s name (e.g., excluding Mallarmé’s translations to privilege his experimental poetry).
Foucault’s positive project is an analysis of “discursive events.” He argues to renounce two quests: first, for a secret, transcendental origin beyond the manifest discourse, and second, for a continuous, self-present meaning. Instead, discourse must be analyzed in its “sudden eruption” as an event subject to dispersion, repetition, and transformation. This entails identifying the operations through which certain statements are made possible while others are rendered unthinkable, forgotten, or silenced. The focus shifts from seeking a unifying essence to examining the practices of selection, organization, and regulation that sustain discursive cohesion.
The goal is to take preexisting unities (like Psychopathology, Political economy, etc.) not as givens but as problems. The analyst must break them apart to reveal the population of dispersed events and the rules that govern their formation. This archaeological method is distinct from both linguistics and the history of ideas. It does not ask by what rules a statement is made (linguistics), nor does it seek the silent intention of a speaking subject (history of ideas). Instead, it asks why this specific statement appeared and not another, analyzing its conditions of existence, its correlations with other statements, and what it excludes.
A key unit of analysis is the énoncé (statement), which is more than language or meaning. It is a unique event linked to a material act, yet it exists residually and is subject to repetition and transformation. It is defined by its relations to other statements and to non-discursive events (e.g., technological, economic).
Foucault concludes that the apparent continuity and unity of a discourse are not inherent but a constructed effect of rules and mechanisms that govern inclusion, exclusion, and relation. The analyst’s task is to lay bare these historically situated conditions of possibility that determine which statements can emerge and be connected.
This raises a final, reflexive question: from what position can Foucault himself describe these rules, if every statement (including his own) is subject to the discursive formations it analyzes? He must therefore situate his own archaeological inquiry within the very conditions it seeks to expose, acknowledging that his description is itself a discursive act governed by its own rules and exclusions.
2. Discursive Formations
In turning to the notion of discursive formations, Foucault shifts attention to the problem of unity; by posing four hypotheses for the unity (objects, statements, concepts, and themes) and which define them against his notion of discursive formation and rules of formation.
We turn to the first hypotheses, objects of discourse, which are constituted within specific fields of knowledge; for example, in a discipline such as psychopathology. One might assume that its object, madness or mental illness, exists before discourse, a pre-given reality that the discourse merely describes or analyses. Yet for Foucault, this assumption is misleading. The problem is not to uncover the hidden, repressed meaning of madness, nor to locate some essential reality behind the term. Rather, the task is to examine the multiplicity of statements that have been made about madness: the ways they have defined it, divided it, classified it, and, in doing so, given it form and meaning.
Madness, as an object of discourse, is not the passive reflection of an underlying reality but the product of a historically specific set of enunciation and rules that allow it to be named, conceptualized, and acted upon in particular ways.
This means that the same object can take on profoundly different forms depending on the discursive field within which it is situated. Within the medical discourse of psychiatry, madness might be articulated in terms of clinical symptoms, pathological causes, and therapeutic interventions. In the judicial discourse of criminal law, however, it might be framed in relation to responsibility, culpability, or legal incapacity.
Although both discourses may appear to speak of the same object, their rules of formation, criteria of relevance, and modes of articulation differ so significantly that they produce different “madness”, so to speak. The object is thus not a stable entity but a shifting construct, dependent on the interplay of the discursive practices that bring it into being.
The question, then, becomes: in what kind of space do such objects emerge, and how are they continually transformed? This space is not simply the physical or institutional location of discourse but the structured field of relations in which objects are constituted. It is a space marked by the interplay of statements, the imposition of distinctions, and the operation of classification systems that render some aspects of reality visible while obscuring or excluding others. Objects arise within this space as effects of these relations; they are made possible by the specific configurations of rules, concepts, and institutions operative in a given historical moment.
Foucault then examines whether the unity of a discourse can be found in the second hypothesis: the form of the statement itself, specifically a common descriptive style that governs how statements are related. He uses the example of modern medicine, which abandoned traditional and heterogeneous practices to form a coherent body of knowledge. This new discipline was unified by a shared method of perception, a common way of looking, a standardized division of the perceptual field, and a consistent analysis of pathology based on the visible space of the body. Therefore, its unity is derived not from common objects or concepts, but from this underlying descriptive system. This system does not merely observe and report on independent realities; instead, it actively produces knowledge through practices that delimit, classify, and legitimize what counts as “real” medicine.
However, as Foucault postulates, the unity of a discourse might be found in its use of a certain descriptive style, which supposedly neutral and records facts, is mistaken. Which means that discourse is not a pure, objective description of pre-existing reality, but every description is entangled with non-descriptive elements of hypotheses about death and life, ethical choices, decisions, regulations, and teaching models. One cannot strip away the “value-neutral” description from these elements.
Within the discursive formation of clinical medicine, a simple descriptive statement is never neutral but is instead the product of a complex set of underlying rules of formation. Several interconnected rules govern it: it relies on fundamental biological hypotheses concerning life and death that define what constitutes a pathological fact; it is imbued with ethical choices that categorize patients and prioritize care; it is directed toward therapeutic decisions that justify specific interventions; institutional regulations shape it; and teaching models perpetuate it. Thus, the descriptive statement was only one of the formulations present in medical discourse.
Foucault follows this up by stipulating how the medical description has been changed in four ways:
First, the displacement of scales shifted the object of analysis from macroscopic tissues to cells, revealing the historicity of medical “truth.” Second, the displacement of the information system redefined evidence itself, moving from the trained perception of the physician (visual inspection, auscultation, and palpation) to the use of the microscope and biological tests that augment or bypass human senses. Third, the displacement of the lexicon of signs, from a simple anatomoclinical correspondence (where a sign pointed to a lesion) to a complex physio-pathological the lexicon of signs and their interpretation has been entirely reconstituted. Finally, the displacement of the observing subject dethroned the sovereign clinician, replacing him with a functional node within a vast technological and bureaucratic network. Which means, the modern doctor is no longer the central, authoritative gaze but a synthesizer of information mediated by instruments, specialists, and diagnostic systems.
The third hypothesis that Foucault problematizes is the concept. For example, in classical grammar, one might define its unity through concepts like subject-predicate, verb as a link copula between subject-predicate, and a word as a sign. But in the 18th century, new and incompatible concepts emerged. Beauzee introduced the concept of complement, which does not fit the subject, verb, predicate schema; and verb also became a name for an action. For a concept cannot constitute discourse, what we should look for then is the system of rules that governs the appearance of these very concepts, even the incompatible ones.
The fourth and last hypothesis is the theme. It is hoped that the theme will be the unifying kernel of discourse. Let’s take, for example, the theme of evolution in biology. In the 18th century, it was understood as a preexisting continuum of species, where all species are linked, due to the pre-ordained order. While in the 19th century, it assumed discontinuous grouping (distinct species) interacting with the environment, focusing on adaptation, natural selection, and survival. Foucault’s point, here, is that both use the theme of evolution; what is different is the type of discourse. In the 18th century, operations occur on a grid of continuity, and in the 19th century, operations occur in a grid of discontinuity and environmental interaction.
All these points refer to Foucault’s concept of a discursive formation, which argues that a discourse is not unified by its content, objects, or descriptions, but by an underlying system of rules. This system defines the “field of strategic possibilities,” the set of all legitimate moves, choices, and statements that can be made within that discourse. It is these rules that allow for the coexistence of dispersed and heterogeneous statements (like perceptual descriptions and statistical calculations in medicine) and even enable antagonistic strategies to emerge from the same formation. The task of analysis is therefore to characterize this system of dispersion: to map how these diverse statements coexist, interlock, depend on one another, and transform according to a shared regularity.
In conclusion, in rejecting the search for a single source of unity, Foucault proposes instead to analyze the “system of dispersion,” the underlying rules that govern how disparate elements form a coherent discourse. He defines this as a “discursive formation,” a term he chooses for its neutrality to avoid the preconceptions of words like “science” or “ideology.” The unity of a discourse is found not in a common object or theory, but in the regularity of its internal relationships and differences. These patterns are generated by impersonal “rules of formation,” which are the historical conditions that determine what statements are possible, what can be said, and by whom, within a specific field of knowledge.
3. The Formation of Objects
In this section, Foucault, in rejecting the unity of discourse as laying preexisting objects, aims to see objects in their dispersion, constituted by discourses. The primary question, therefore, is not “What is this object?” but “Under what conditions and through what rules does something become a legitimate, analyzable object within a specific field of knowledge?” Foucault’s goal is to excavate the non-random, underlying conditions that govern the emergence of specific objects, their juxtaposition, and transformation into a coherent field of knowledge, as well as their sustained existence as legitimate subjects of scientific discourse. And to approach the question of coherence, dependence, and historical specificity of an object of discourse, Foucault enumerates three interdependent rules of formation: the Surface of Emergence, the Authorities of Delimitation, and the Grids of Specification. It is the convergence of these three rules that forms an object of discourse, rather than simply discovering it.
Central to this analysis is the concept of the surface of emergence, which refers to the specific social, institutional, and relational contexts where a behavior or phenomenon first appears as a problem requiring attention and explanation. This surface is the field, such as the family, the social group, the religious community, or the workplace, in which certain behaviors are noticed, designated, and categorized as signs of deviation, thus acquiring visibility. These surfaces are never neutral; they are structured by norms, thresholds of tolerance, and systems of exclusion that define the boundary between the acceptable and the pathological. For instance, the family unit, with its norms of obedience, became a primary surface for identifying madness, just as the industrial workplace pathologized an inability to conform to its discipline. The 19th century witnessed the expansion of these surfaces to include art and sexuality, where artistic production and “deviant” sexuality became new sites for medical classification. Foucault, thus, argues that the surface of emergence reveals the intimate link between power and knowledge, insisting that we must map the history of the spaces and institutions that made it possible to call something “disease” rather than searching for its “true” history.
Once an object or a behavior emerges into social view, its official delimitation depends on what Foucault calls the authorities of delimitation. These are legal, medical authorities, etc., with their practitioner, bodies of knowledge, and the recognition they receive from other authoritative bodies. For instance, in the 19th century, discourse on madness, the medical profession backed by the state and public opinion, functioned as the primary delimiting authority; a behavior was not officially considered madness until medicine designated it as such. However, other authorities constantly negotiated the boundaries of this medical power. The legal system created categories like innocent by reason of insanity and shared power by calling a psychiatrist as an expert witness, though the judge often had the final say. Religious authority remained a competing voice, distinguishing divine vision from pathology; in the case of the latter, it refers to secular or medical authority. Furthermore, in the cultural sphere, literary and artistic criticism emerged as an interpretive authority analyzing art as symptoms of the artist’s mind. This diffuse network demonstrates that there is no single basis for defining normality, and state power exists in a wave of relationships between medicine, law, religion, and culture, marking the birth of the modern expert. Specialized knowledge guaranteed the power to define fundamental human truths.
After the authorities of delimitation categorize and delimit an object, there comes what Foucault calls grids of specification, A conceptual network of classificatory schemes, descriptive vocabularies, and diagnostic categories that allows an object to be differentiated, segmented, and analyzed within a discourse. This grid ensures an object can be discussed in precise, repeatable, institutionally sanctioned ways, but it is not uniform across fields; for instance, the judicial discourses of madness differ from the medical world, though they may intersect in borrowing from one another. Foucault identifies four primary grids in the 19th-century discourse of psychiatry in relation to its object. The first grid was the soul, which viewed mental illness as an imbalance in hierarchical faculties like reason or will. The second was the grid of the body, which located disorder in somatic causes, like the brain or nervous system. The third was the grid of life history, which sought the key to illness in personal biography and heredity, for example, degeneration theory. The fourth grid concerned neuro-psychological correlations, focusing on the complex feedback loop between mind and body. The crucial conclusion from this is that the object itself is not a stable condition; hysteria was merely a temporary intersection of these grids. Change the grid, and you change the very object you are studying.
In summary, underlying the mechanisms of discourse are groups of relations that determine the conditions necessary for an object’s appearance, forming a heterogeneous network that links institutions, economic processes, behavioral patterns, and systems of norms. Discursive relations are not simple causal chains, but they exist at the very edge of discourse where they meet non-discursive domains and transform social packs into objects that can be named and analyzed. It is critical to avoid the mistake of thinking that surfaces and authorities simply identify pre-formed objects; instead, an object is a product of specific convergence, connectivity, and interaction of rules rather than being their pre-existing cause. For instance, the “criminally delinquent” emerged not through its positivity but through the convergence of systems, including legal concepts of responsibility and the collaboration between judicial and medical authority. This leads to Foucault’s broader methodological point: He rejects the traditional history of ideas that assumes disciplines progress towards truth by studying pre-existing objects. Instead, he proposes that the unity lies in a system of formation, a set of implicit rules governing discourse. His project is not a “history of the referent” that seeks to determine what madness really was. Rather, the aim is to “dispense with ‘things'” to show how discourse itself actively constructs the very object it claims to describe. Thus, for Foucault, discourse is a productive practice, wielding real power to form our fundamental categories of knowledge.
4. The Formation of Enunciative Modalities
In this section, Foucault turns to the question of the conditions under which statements are made, and more precisely, to the modalities that govern the act of enunciation. Foucault’s analysis of the 19th-century medical discourses addresses central puzzles: what unites its disparate statements, from biographical narratives to statistical calculations? He argues that this coherence is found not in a shared theory, ideology, or the intentions of speakers, but in a hidden system of rules he terms the “enunciative modality.” Acting as a deep, pre-conscious, precondition that defines the very possibility of a statement by systematically determining who is authorized to speak, from which institutional site, like clinical observation or statistical analysis, derives not from an abstract logic, but from the enunciative positions they authorize and the institutional structures that validate them. A discourse is sustained not merely by its content, but by the authority of its speakers, an authority that is itself produced and conditioned by the underlying institutional order.
Consequently, Foucault is not interested in the individual doctor but in the socially and institutionally constructed position of “the doctor” that confers authority upon medical statements. The power of a diagnosis derives not from the words themselves but from the sanctioned status of the speaker, a status built upon state-sanctioned education, institutional knowledge production, a legal license to practice, and defined relationships with other authorities, and a specific social role. Crucially, this status radically transformed at the end of the 18th century when, with the rise of industrial capitalism, the health of the population became an economic imperative. This transformed the doctor into a key agent of state power, amplifying their “right to speak.” Thus, a hospital physician or a judge possesses the legitimacy to speak on specific matters not as private individuals, but by virtue of the position they occupy within a network of institutional and social relations.
This authority is generated within a specific institutional site, each node of power-knowledge that structures and legitimizes discourse. The hospital became a primary site for homogeneous observation, transforming illness into a quantifiable field for statistical analysis and focusing on disease as an “average process.” Private practice, while offering deeper contextual and longitudinal insights into the patient’s life, ultimately reinforced the doctor’s authority to define health within social contexts (e.g., determining fitness for work). The laboratory provided an autonomous space for producing universal, objective truths through experimental methods, grounding medical power in seemingly neutral scientific facts. Finally, the documentary field, comprising published data, case histories, and statistics from various public bodies, elevated the authority of documents over tradition, enabling population-level analysis.
Foucault further analyzes the position of the knowing subject, arguing that the doctor’s perception is not free or sovereign but is constructed by the discursive system. The doctor is a function defined by a structured system of interrogation, listening, and observation. Foucault delineates several constructed positions: the questioning subject, who follows a standardized programme of clinically significant information; the seeing subject, who matches observation against a pre-learned table of signs; and the observing subject, who conducts prolonged, systematic scrutiny. This perception is mediated by instrumental intermediaries (e.g., stethoscope, microscope) that modify scale, shift the subject of gaze to the invisible, and ensure a movement in depth from surface symptom to internal lesion. The doctor thus operates as a node within a vast network, both emitting and receiving information, with their authority validated by connection to a wider archive of records and science.
The shift to this modern clinical medicine was a historical invention, not the product of a single discovery of a great man. Before the 19th century, medicine observed disease as a “vegetal truth” on a flat, superficial field using the senses and patient narrative. Afterwards, the perceptual field was arranged in depth; truth was hidden and required technological and technical unveiling through instruments, autopsies, and new systems of notation that objectified the patient into data. The patient as a person receded, replaced by the body as an object and the localized lesional site. This revolution was the establishment of a new system of relations between pre-existing elements: the same doctor could now correlate symptoms observed at the bedside with lesions found in the autopsy, creating a powerful feedback loop that fundamentally changed knowledge.
In conclusion, Foucault’s project rejects the idea that discourse originates from a unified subject, whether a transcendental or empirical one. Instead, he posits that the subject is decentered and dispersed, a function of discursive practice rather than its origin. Discourse itself is an anonymous, historical system of rules, a “space of exteriority” that constitutes the subject as its effect. Therefore, analyzing enunciative modalities involves tracing the historical rules that allocate authority and define subject positions, revealing how knowledge is constrained and enabled by specific conditions of legitimacy, not just truth.
5. The Formation of Concepts
Michel Foucault’s analysis of the formation of concepts marks a radical departure from traditional intellectual history. He rejects the standard approach, which seeks to organize past knowledge into neat, logical, and progressive systems. Instead, Foucault proposes an archaeology of expertise that shifts the focus from the internal logic of ideas to the underlying “rules” or “conditions” that make it possible for certain concepts to emerge, coexist, and transform within a specific historical context. This method moves beyond the portrayal of concepts as deductively leading from one to another, creating a seemingly timeless structure of thought.
Foucault observes that concepts appear, disappear, and transform in ways that do not follow a clean, progressive logic; the history of knowledge is not a continuous, rational construction. Traditional historians, faced with this “dispersion,” typically try to restore continuity by attributing change to external factors like the influence between thinkers or the permanence of fundamental problems. Foucault rejects these approaches because they assume history is fundamentally continuous and that systems are internally coherent. He instead asks new, archaeological questions: Why did these specific concepts emerge here and now? What made them possible? His method involves searching for a “system of occurrence,” a set of impersonal, historical rules governing how statements can be combined.
This requires abandoning the attempt to build a “deductive edifice” and instead “describing the organization of the field of statements.” This discursive space of a particular epoch possesses its own unconscious rules. Consequently, a change in knowledge is not merely a change in vocabulary but a transformation in the permissible ways of linking statements together. Foucault identifies the mechanisms governing this organization through three key axes: forms of succession, forms of coexistence, and procedures of intervention.
Forms of succession refer to the rules for ordering statements in a series, their dependencies, and their rhetorical schemata. Concepts take shape not because new terms are coined, but because existing statements are arranged differently. To understand a concept archaeologically is to ask by what rule statements were placed in relation to one another, and how this ordering transformed their meaning.
Forms of coexistence define how statements relate to others both inside and outside their immediate boundaries. Foucault identifies three dimensions: the field of presence (the set of past or present statements a discourse engages directly through affirmation or debate); the field of concomitance (the borrowing of models and analogies from other disciplines); and the field of memory (the discourse’s relationship to its own outdated statements, which it historicizes as predecessors). A concept’s life thus is not linear but relational, existing within a shifting constellation of other concepts.
Procedures of intervention are the legitimate techniques applied to statements to produce new knowledge. Foucault catalogues several, including: the rewriting of information (e.g., from a narrative into a taxonomic table); transcription (creating a formal code to replace ambiguous language); and the transfer of statements (applying a successful model from one area to another). Other procedures involve the approximation and refinement of observations, the delimitation of domains of validity (defining what counts as good evidence), and the systematization of isolated facts into a new theoretical whole.
To illustrate this framework, Foucault contrasts 16th-century natural history with its classical (17th-18th century) counterpart. The significant change was not just in concepts like ‘genus’ or ‘species,’ but in the entire rule-set for producing a valid description. The classical period instituted a new perceptual process where observation was recreated through a specific sequence of statements; a new hierarchy that subordinated description to classification; a new epistemic grid that fixed the relationship between particular observations and general taxonomy; and a new system of validation. For Foucault, a discipline is thus redefined as a “set of rules for arranging statements.” To be a natural historian in the 18th century was to obey this obligatory set of schemata for how to write, observe, and argue. The shift between eras was a change in the very rules that constitute a discursive formation.
In conclusion, for Foucault, understanding a historical period’s knowledge requires analyzing this impersonal, underlying system of rules, which he terms the preconceptual level. He illustrates this with his study of General Grammar, where four “theoretical schemata” (attribution, articulation, designation, derivation) are not themselves concepts but the underlying rules that defined what counted as a valid move in classical grammatical discourse. These schemata function by ordering knowledge and dictating the structure of topics, setting the discourse’s boundaries, connecting it to other fields like Natural history, and creating a space for debate and variation within a common framework. Crucially, Foucault insists the preconceptual is neither a timeless ideal horizon (as in a Hegelian spirit) nor a psychological genesis of ideas in individual minds. In taking this approach, Foucault also distances himself from the philosophical tradition that continues to appeal to the notion of an ultimate origin or an exhaustive horizon of meaning. Like that of Heidegger, who appeals to a primordial, withdrawing origin that provides a hidden horizon for thought. Against this, Foucault insists on examining the surface level of discourse itself. The preconceptual is not a meta-historical truth but a describable set of rules operating anonymously and impersonally at the level of discourse, which constrains and enables all participants. Thus, concepts arise from this field of discursive regularities, not from the genius or errors of individual thinkers, and their history is one of dispersion and recomposition governed by these rules.