Эпоха «остранения». Русский формализм и современное гуманитарное знание

Foucault’s project of the Archeology focused on the description of discursive formations – in conjunction with a partial opposition to the Genealogy of Power – is widely known. There is also a large amount of various discussions[84] and comments related to it. In what may lie practical usefulness of the project in the sense of analyzing something what was part of the discussions in the first place of the origin of Czech Structuralism as well as the originality of its approach to the basic questions of language and art. As a central strategy of the whole project can be seen Foucault’s effort to describe the phenomena as they really are; It sounds rather trivial, but the foundation of this effort includes, we believe, the main attraction that still brings back many researchers to this project. It is because of a specific method, which gives up the idea of “assuming anything else” [Veyne, 2010: 401]. These assumptions can include diverse material causes, objectives, functions or objects that often appear in the context of such considerations. According to Foucault, there is just a practice and its objectification, any effort to explain things as the functions of a purpose is a myth of the traditional history.[85] It is no coincidence that some parallels to such consideration can also be found in the context of Jan Mukařovský’s thinking, especially in relation to his reflections on the poetical, later even anthropologically based, rhythm. Initially, the rhythm was a basic form [Mukařovský, 1986: 118–120], that is the organizing principle of the individual components of a work of art (along with composition), later – under the influence of Phenomenology – one of the fundamental relationships of the human body to the world. The matter, originally given (as the principle revealed in a work of art), thus became a founding relationship, that is something – expressed in Husserl’s style – what is not fully out of the consciousness, but is also not purely psychological content of the consciousness. “Things” (phenomena) exist only in the relation to something that is just as related to a specific historical context[86]. The Archeology, as a specific method of analysis, which aims to uncover and identify primarily a set of conditions under which it is possible to determine certain mental concepts of development of theoretical thought, is not a substitute for the history of selected schools of thought or a theory. The Archeology is not a causal description of the development and its historical context, but it is primarily focused on the levels that can be meaningfully analyze, therefore demonstrate the dependence of specific conceptions to a set of certain assumptions, which have their own characteristic and logical structure. In its basic form it contains two complementary requirements: (i) If an object of the Archeologic description is a system of rules that allows the creation of objects in the space-time frame, then the object is associated with the central question of the legitimacy of rules governing the form of individual objectification in the process of their sharing/non-sharing, therefore the possibility of their existence/non-existence;[87] (ii) The system of sharing is essentially a system of norms operating in the context of specific social groups. The Archeology itself then becomes a historical-comparative method in which the priority is given to descriptions of the individual objectifications. It is not primarily the work of interpretation, which is though hidden in the base of each realized description. The task of the Archeology is to analyze selected structures of thinking and determine their rules.

On the basis of what has been said so far, we can determine three basic meanings of the Archeology as the method: (1) The Archeology is a description and analysis of a historical area within which ideas or knowledge are generated. (2) The Archeology is a method of analysis, which favors the description before the causality on the level of events or knowledge and uncovers the historical preconditions for certain configurations of knowledge than the knowledge itself. (3) The Archeology is specific method of analysis, which aims to uncover and identify a set of conditions under which it is possible to determine certain mental concepts of development of theoretical thinking, thus it is not a substitute for the history of a selected tradition of thoughts or a theory.

2. Basic Typology of Polemics in the Thirties