statement (énoncé)
French historian Foucault, Michel’s term for the most elementary unit of discourse. It does not correlate to a sentence, word, or even a proposition. It does not have the same kind of existence as either language or an object, though in fact it can be constituted by both. Foucault’s most famous example of a statement is undoubtedly his claim that the keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement, but when it is reproduced in a typing manual it is. It is a statement about the construction of typewriter keyboards in a particular country. This is a statement because it refers to a set of laws of possibility or rules of existence---the shape and organization of the keyboard, the need to master it, and so on. Further Reading: M. Foucault L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), translated as The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972).