First things first when writing about Foucault’s theories: get a hold of the concepts first. This is the part that hurts the head and taxes the brain, but it is the most necessary way to come to terms with Foucault’s works. Now, I am not claiming to be a scholar of all things Foucault, but I have spent the last 14 months pouring over and digging through, around, and under his Archaeology of Knowledge and genealogy. I’ve learned a few things in this endeavour that will help those of you who are looking to get into using Foucault’s works, but I suspect it will also help with other forms of philosophy too.

Have a digital and paper copy of the work in question
This may seem like a trivial thing, but not only am I a believer in embracing new technologies, I find having both print and eBook versions of a philosophy text very helpful for different reasons.

A print copy of the work you are studying is a valuable asset. It’s a tangible thing to carry around and track your progress through. There have been several studies on preference and cognition between digital v print reading (Mangen 2013, Lauterman and Ackerman 2014, Waters et.al, 2014, Stoop, et.al 2014), with findings not wholly supporting one way of reading over the other. Studies such as Mangen’s highlighted the special recognition the brain has with print books as opposed to screen reading, while Stoop, et.al. suggest that readers who read on screen perform better in tests than those who read in print. There is something, as Mangen suggests, satisfying and grounding about knowing ‘how far in’ you are to a heavy text, so as to know how far you to get out again.

Read the original theory first, don’t read around it

The benefit of using a tablet version of The Archaeology of Knowledge is that it allows you to highlight and annotate on screen, in a searchable fashion. You can pull up all the places in the book that you highlighted or wrote notes on in a neatly organised list. It also means that if you are searching for all the instances of a certain word, which you may find yourself doing, you can easily do so. This is invaluable when working out the more detailed aspects of how the archaeological concepts work with your study. For instance, in writing about Foucault’s strategies in the archaeology, I wanted to link them to power within the archaeology as Foucault does in a later work on “The Subject and Power” in 1982. In order to do this, I used keyword searches for ‘strategies’ and ‘power strategies’ within the Archaeology of Knowledge to put it in the context that as useful to my particular study.

Close reading with notes
Read the original theory first, don’t read around it. Yes, go ahead and read it on your iPad or tablet, highlight to your heart’s content. But, then sit down and re-read it, either in print or on screen, and really read it; sentence by sentence. Keep a notebook for the theory. Make notes. If something comes to mind, underline it, write about it, consider where it might fit in your study.

In the really dense parts of the theory, write it out in your own words, page by page. Make summaries. Though it is tedious and time consuming, make a summary of each paragraph, especially in a work as dense and filled with convoluted lists and tangents on what something is not. At the end of each chapter, make a summary of the chapter. Use bullet points, condense it so that you can read your notes and get the full gist to know if that is the place in the theory you want to delve deeper.

If you have the advantage of having studied poetry in a previous life, then this will come in handy. Consider reading Foucault like poetry. Line by line, even word by word, the meaning of one sentence, line, word, placement, etc. can subtly alter the whole. Keep this in mind as you build a sense of the statement, discourse, archive, and archaeology.

Once you have read and re-read the original work, then go ahead and read all around it. The more you read for and against Foucault, his works, and theories, the better.

Draw diagrams
I’ll be the first to admit that this might not work for all forms of theory, but it is particularly useful for creating an understanding of the Archaeology with its different levels, fields, systems and strategies.

As awkward as it is, think of the archive as a giant zorb ball (Archive) filled with basketballs (discursive formations), which are filled with loads of Petri dishes (levels) which are made up of massive numbers of fields, strategies, objects, etc. Got it? Keep in mind that sometimes these things bump into each other and overlap too.

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Now, here’s the fun part: tracing the statement. The statement goes diagonally through the discourse, and it is formed/altered in a field, level, etc, according to the rules that govern that particular section. And, (if the previous weren’t enough) the statement can alter depending on where/when you choose to study it, from what angles you approach it, and what you choose to take from it.

For instance, the study of a book looks very different if I choose to look at it from 1989 – 1998, and only at hardback books, and only those printed in Asia, in English meant for the US market than it would if I were looking at books from 1989-1998 in English, regardless of where it was printed, etc.

If you are a savvy CAD designer or able to manipulate Blender to make 3d diagrams of the archive, then you will have an advantage in that you can design the discourse you are interested in and twist it, flip it and look at it from all sides. After all, writing about Foucault’s Archaeology is all about taking his concepts and using them as a toolbox to work for you.

Think big to little
In other words, don’t do what I did. Do not follow the structure of The Archaeology of Knowledge and go from statement to object, to discourse, to archive. Turn it upside down, going from the archive back. What we are interested in are the statements that influence your study. Trace the archive, discourse, objects, and strategies that get you there.

If you are more visual, think of it as an upside down pyramid: For me, this was the archive of the book, the discourse of the book within the archive, the time period I am studying, the objects and strategies that give me the statements of the book that are directly related to my particular study.

Consider what you are and are not taking from the concepts presented
My adviser, a Foucault scholar herself, pointed out that the beauty of the Archaeology is that you can pick and choose which statements you want to use. So do that. Decide what you are looking for and what you are not looking for. Write it down and use Foucault’s methods to explore the things you do want without being drawn left and right in a massive field of potential statements. Remember, you don’t have to use everything, you can’t use all the tools at once anyway.

Write your chapter/essay
Simple, right? Not really, but getting the words on page is a great way to start. I began by spending a solid week locked away with nothing but Foucault and lots of books punctuated by evenings with friends and wine. When writing about Foucault and using his methods, I suggest wine.

Re-write your chapter/essay without quoting Foucault at all
Be sure to get your voice in, write about Foucault, not like Foucault.
Now that you have something down on paper, I suggest you give it a week or so to just sit away from you so that you can gain some perspective when you return to it. And when you do, edit it as normal and then take the advice of my adviser: write the chapter again with no quotations. This will force you to use the methods and concepts and re-develop them in your own words, making you really explain what you mean without being overly reliant on the mouthful of terms that Foucault throws out there.

And God forbid you write like Foucault himself. Not that academic writing is bad, but let’s face it, we could edit the Archaeology down at least 30% by removing all the unnecessary waffling about what the key aspects of the archaeology are not. Don’t write like Foucault, write like you, who is using the best bits of Foucault.

Edit, edit, re-write and edit
No surprise here. I’m on my 4th or 5th edit of my theory chapter; flipping it, rearranging it, re-writing it entirely with a focus on what it means in terms of my particular study. All this may be horrifying when you are first starting out, but its good, actually. It allows you to hone your work, weed out the writing that sounds too academically smug to fit in with your overall tone, and it makes you think about the way that your use of the archaeology benefits your study as a whole.

After all, it’s a method, a tool box, for you to apply to your own work and the only way to do it is to get there and whittle away until you’ve gone through the density of Foucault and brought out the salient pieces.