I very much enjoy this article because it begins to clarify what Foucault is actually doing with his concept of discourse and how it is different to other similar notions. What has attracted me so much about Foucault's approach to society is that it is the same approach that I've been trying to convey about what happens in cults and what I saw in the fofcult in particular. I was not using the terms that Foucault uses but the mechanism of brainwashing that I exposed comprise the same mechanism that Foucault presents on Discourse and Power. This has only been part of my work and re-educating myself after the cult experience on what is going on outside is a necessity for the development of my own life. The "connectedness" is in itself healing.
The parallels between what Foucault and others seem to be finding in society and what I found in cults are crucial to understanding what I am trying to say about society and why we are in a critical situation. If the parallels are as closely related to the cult phenomenon as I seem to find, the tendency to self destruct is much advanced in Europe and the USA. Parallel to that tendency, "life" seems too "alive" to allow for anything so terrible to get too strong a grip of itself and social phenomenon like the internet which strengthen a democratic impulse should refreshen the status quo and lead out towards the actualization of greater freedom... hopefully!
Foucault & Discourse
Dr. Clayton Whisnant
Discourse is a term that many will dismiss quickly as useless intellectual
jargon, so it is worthwhile discussing why many scholars prefer this term
and not some other, more common-day language.
A. Other Possible Terms?
To begin with, discourse is just one term that scholars have developed to
analyze the systems of thoughts, ideas, images and other symbolic
practices that make up what we, following anthropology, generally call
culture. Other terms have their limitations though:
1) Ideas and Concepts. This is the term most frequently used
by intellectual historians. And, of course, there is no doubt
about it: when we are talking about culture, we are talking
about ideas. Furthermore, we need to recognize that
intellectual history did give us a model for outlining the flow
of thoughts from one person to another, with slow
transformations taking place as the ideas moved from person
to person, place to place, period to period. However, two
main problems exist with the terms. First, the tradition of
intellectual history tended to focus on the well-formed, clear
ideas of philosophers, writers, and other thinkers. The vague
thoughts and perceptions of the everyday person were often
excluded from study. Second, Foucault suggested in several
of his works that by focusing on a particular flow of ideas, and
thereby failing to connect that flow with other currents of
thought or even the wider cultural context, there was a danger
of missing broader fissures of thought happening culture-wide.
2
In other words, by focusing on the continuities of change,
there was a danger of missing the possibility of a massive
rupture, a tremendous discontinuity with what came before.1
2) Myth. This term has been frequently used, especially by
scholars working in the fields of anthropology, archeology,
and the study of religion. It has the advantage of not focusing
on the concepts of important thinkers, but on the
conceptions (or, perhaps, misconceptions) of the culture at
large. It also was a way to get at the larger attitudes and
values of society. Its frequency is part of the problem, though.
Outside of its everyday connotations (suggesting a common
story that has no basis in truth), myth has been used in many
different ways by different scholars. Encountering the term
today, one has to ask, is the scholar using it in the sense of the
structural philosopher Roland Barthes? Or the anthropologist
James Frazier? The sense of the Frankfurt-school critical
philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, or
1
Above all, see Michel Foucault s The Order of Things: An
Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
maybe the Jungian-based interpretation of Joseph Campbell?
Or even perhaps the more structuralist reading of Claude-Levi
Strauss? In short, it is difficult today to employ without
carefully restricting ones usage.
3) Mentalités. One school of French historians (the Annales
school) introduced the term mentalités, which might be
translated as collective attitudes or a mental outlook. The
French historians of mentalités were groundbreaking in
opening up the study of culture for historians, but it never
managed to create a coherent method of its own.2 Instead, the
school s best practioners (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Philippe Ariés, Carlo Ginzburg, and Natalie Zemon Davis, to
name a few) borrowed liberally from other traditions,
especially anthropology.
4) Cultural Patterns and Systems. Cultural anthropologists,
especially those following in the tradition of Clifford Geertzs
2
Robert Darnton, Intellectual and Cultural History, in The Past
Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed.
Michael Kammen (Ithica and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), p.
346.
3
Thick Description, have been very important in teaching
historians how to look for meanings woven into and around
cultural artifacts and social interactions; in the end, though,
their methods were useful for interpreting a given culture, but
less apt at explaining cultural transformation. In the words of
one anthropologist, The webs [of meaning], not the spinning;
the culture, not the history; the text, not the process of
textualizing was at the heart of much early cultural
anthropology.3 At the same time, the methods developed by
early cultural anthropology were not always helpful in
identifying the ways that power structures helped maintain one
set of meanings over another. Indeed, cultural anthropologists
often depended on reading a culture as a vast text that could
only be understood in terms of itself. The result was that
contradictions in meanings were played down and ambiguities
smoothed over, even though contradictions and ambiguities
3
Aletta Biersack, Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and
Beyond, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 80.
often are key to understanding larger social and political
conflict.
5) Ideology. The Marxist-derived term ideology, on the other
hand, was ideal for analyzing these power struggles, but it
always retained some of its earliest associations with a system
of ideas that blinds one from the truth. Ideology was also built
on the assumption that all ideas and thoughts were a reflection
of social reality, and especially the economic interests of a
dominant group or class of people; historical change,
therefore, was primarily the product of social transformations.
Ideas could play at best a limited role themselves in bringing
about social transformation.
Because of the limitations of these various methods, many scholars of
literature and the social sciences began to turn in the 1980s to the concept of
discourse. It is a term that has a rather specific usage taken from the writing
of Foucault and several other French poststructuralists.4 It is well suited for
4
Actually, this is a bit of a simplification. Discourse has been used
slightly differently by thinkers like the French linguist Émile Benveniste or
the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. And then, you have the old-fashioned
meaning of an extended discussion of a topic, or simply an exposition of
4
analyzing struggles over meaning and other power conflicts, since Foucault
and the other poststructuralists always assumed that any given society
would be infused with many competing discourses. In some scholars
minds, it is even more flexible than ideology since it does not focus
specifically on power struggles between different classes and genders, or
between the state and its subject. Instead, it suggests that power is diffuse,
and power conflicts can happen at many different sites and levels.5
Discourse also has another major advantage over ideology. Discourse
assumes that ideas structure social spaces, and therefore ideas can play a
significant role in historical change.
B. Language: The Primary Object of Study
Because ideas can produce historical transformation, and not simply reflect
them, discourse theory teaches us to be very attentive to small shifts in how
ideas are expressed in language. Language, therefore, as well as other
some sort (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) as in René
Descartes famous Discourse on Method. Cultural historians, literary
critics, and other practicing cultural studies have been influenced by Michel
Foucault s and Jacques Derridas specific usage of the term.
5
For more on this, see Michel Foucault, Two Lectures,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed.
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 78-108.
forms of symbolic exchange, is the primary object studied by discourse
theory. Language, this theory suggests, can be broken into different
[bodies] or [corpuses] of statements and utterances governed by rules and
conventions of which the user is largely unconscious. 6 By this, we do not
mean simply German, Chinese, or other categories of language that we
are all familiar with; we are not even referring to different dialects of
language that we might identify as New York American English or
Southern American English. Instead, scholars interested in discourse
point to those small differences in language that allow us to tell the
difference between a scientist and a lawyer, or a journalist and pimp. As
one literary critic puts its, discourse is a social language created by
particular cultural conditions at a particular time and place, and it expresses
a particular way of understanding human experience. 7 Discourse refers to
very specific patterns of language that tell us something about the person
speaking the language, the culture that that person is part of, the network
6
David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (New York:
Penguin Books, 2000), p. 100.
7
Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (New
York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), p. 281.
5
of social institutions that the person caught up in, and even frequently the
most basic assumptions that the person holds.
C. Sets of Rules that Shape Our Lives
What are these patterns of language that discourse analysis looks for? Well,
above all, they are sets of rules that governs a specific style of language. As
Foucault put it, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts,
or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations,
positions and functionings, transformations), we will say that we are
dealing with a discursive formation. 8 Discourse cannot be isolated to
speech, but instead structures written language as well. These rules are so
important to how we think that they can spill over into other aspects of our
lives: the pictures we draw, the buildings we construct, the artwork that we
create and appreciate, and even the very social institutions that we live in.
Some of the best-known work of Foucault has suggested how
transformations in medical discourse produced effects on a whole network
8
Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 38
of medical institutions; likewise, changes in legal discourse, he argued, had
an impact on our court system and methods of criminal punishment.9
Because these discourses affect multiple areas of life, they cannot
be isolated to a specific type of text, or even a particular genre. Literary
novels often have bits of scientific or legal discourse embedded in them;
films could include elements of religious discourse. In fact, Foucault
imagined discourse as a field, perhaps comparable in a vague way to a
magnetic field. Just as a magnetic field is spatially spread out,
encompassing all the different lines of force grouped around a set of
magnetic poles, so is discourse spread out, gathering together the totality
of all effective statements (whether spoken or written) that follow certain
rules in their dispersion as events. 10
D. How Discourse Operates
For Foucault, discourse operates in four basic ways:
9
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical
Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1973);
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).. See also Foucault, The
Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 51.
10
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 27.
6
Discourse creates a world. By shaping our perceptions of the
world, pulling together chains of associations that produce a
meaningful understanding, and then organizing the way we behave
towards objects in the world and towards other people, one might
say that discourse generates the world of our everyday life. After
all, even though science teaches us that the real world is the
material world made up of atoms and energy, in a real way the
world for most of us is a world of colors, emotions, ideas, and life.
It is a kind of virtual world generated by our minds, but not by us
alone we construct this world socially through a complex
interaction between experience, upbringing, and education.
Discourses, as chains of language that bind us social beings
together, play a key role in the social construction of reality.
Discourse generates knowledge and truth. Discourse
constitutes not only the world that we live in, but also all forms of
knowledge and truth. Knowledge for Foucault (as for most other
structuralists and poststructuralists) was not something that existed
independently of language. In other words, knowledge is not
simply communicated through language; all knowledge is
organized through the structures, interconnections, and
associations that are built into language. Foucault would even go
so far as to say that discourse generates truth or what some have
called truth-effects. Certain discourses in certain contexts have the
power to convince people to accept statements as true. This power
can have no relation to any objective correctness of the statement.
The medical practice of leeching was accepted in the eighteenth
century as helpful despite the harmful affects that we recognize
today because it was embedded in a network of ancient medical
discourses that many accepted as true. Likewise, many medical
practices commonly accepted today might have seemed like
madness or even barbaric because they had no discursive support.
Discourse says something about the people who speak it.
Discourse communicates knowledge not only about the intended
meaning of the language, but also about the person speaking the
discourse. By analyzing the discourse a speaker uses, one can
often tell things about the speakers gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
class position, and even more specifically the speakers implied
relationship to the other people around him. Medical discourse, for
7
example, gives doctors the authority to speak, thereby placing
them in a position of power over their patients. Foucault was
particularly interested in looking at modes of discourse that not
everyone had a right to use, or that require specific locations to
gain authority.11 A sermon that would be right at home behind a
church lectern might produce only an awkward silence if given at a
party. And a certified lawyer acquires a certain right to speak legal
discourse in a courtroom setting through a complex system of
education, a series of exams, and network of state controls.
Discourse and Power. This brings us to the fourth way that
discourse operates, namely by being intimately involved with
socially embedded networks of power. Because certain types of
discourse enable specific types of individuals to speak the truth,
or at the very least to be believed when speaking on specific
subjects, discourses also give these individuals degrees of social,
cultural, and even possibly political power. Doctors are generally
believed when they talk about physical or mental illnesses, and this
gives them an authority to recommend courses of action or patterns
11
Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 50.
of behavior. In many societies, and for long stretches of Western
history, religious authorities wielded tremendous social and
political power because they had the power to speak about the
divine. This power was caught up with their specific position, but
was also based on the fact that religious discourse suffused all of
life, shaping social organization and influencing how people
interpreted the world.
E. Discourses are always Multiple.
The only final point to be made is that discourses are multiple in three
specific ways.
Cultures are constructed out of numerous, competing
discourses. Some discourses may dominate the culture by helping
to shape political and social institutions and by infiltrating into
different levels of life (as Foucault believed scientific discourse
had done in the modern era). But he taught us also to look for
other discourses as well that competed for power and influence.
Discourses change over time. Discourses are multiple also in the
sense that they undergo transformations. Science is not static, of
course, and so even though scientific discourse is based on certain
assumptions and rules that allow it to be defined against other
forms of discourses (religion, for example), it will take on different
forms at different times. Once transformations in a given discourse
happen, the new rules can spread, infiltrating their way into new
areas of life and even transforming older discourses or forcing
them out of practice. You could make a comparison here between
discourse and computer viruses, at least if you could remove the
negative connotations of the latter term. Discourses too are
modules of rules that are designed to spread from mind to mind
and take over key operations.12
Discourses can generally be subdivided. Discourses are
complex, and often can be subdivided into subcategories that are
too divided by the rules that govern them. Depending on how you
12
Such a comparison is made by the philosopher Daniel Dennet in his
book Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books, 1992), pp. 187-226.
Dennett is himself not a philosopher of discourse, and the scientific basis of
his theory would no doubt give some problems for many scholars who
practice discourse theory. However his discussion of memes and
narratives share some resemblances with discourse, and his comparison
between the computer and the brain can, I think, help many today accept
some of the basic propositions of discourse theory.
look at it, one can speak of scientific discourse as a whole, or
one could talk about psychiatric discourse as a subcategory of
this larger whole. And then one can isolate specific strains of
scientific discourse that perhaps stretch across several fields:
racist-biological discourse, for example, which had an influence on
many different scientific fields around the turn of the century, and
also influenced Western culture and politics at large.
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