Communication in Foucault’s study of epistemes

Abstract

This article examines the concept of communication within Michel Foucault's archaeological framework. It seeks to understand how elements within Foucauldian archaeology can be identified to problematize communication in its relationship with the epistemes of Western knowledge. To this end, the corpus comprises the four foundational works of this phase: Madness and Civilization - A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Methodologically, the study adopts the Interested Reading approach, whose operational procedure involved the systematic survey, tabulation, and critical analysis of 106 excerpts containing the root communic- or thematic correlations, used as entry points for a qualitative analysis of the relationships between communication and archaeology. The findings indicate that, although communication is rarely defined explicitly, it is articulated with key concepts such as discursive positivity, the historical a priori, and the archive. The article concludes by identifying three communicational modes: communication through resemblance (Renaissance), communication through encounter (Classical Age), and communication through the space of the lived (Modernity).