Foucault On Discourse For Shakera Group

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Michel Foucault: Discourse

by Rachel Adams | 17 Nov 2017
Key Concept
The idea of discourse constitutes a central element of Michel
Foucault’s oeuvre, and one of the most readily appropriated
Foucaultian terms, such that ‘Foucaultian discourse analysis’
now constitutes an academic field in its own right. This post
therefore sets out to describe Foucault’s notion of discourse,
and to define in broad terms the task of Foucaultian discourse
analysis.
Foucault adopted the term ‘discourse’ to denote a historically
contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning.
He notes that discourse is distinctly material in effect,
producing what he calls ‘practices that systematically form the
objects of which they speak’.1 Discourse is, thus, a way of
organising knowledge that structures the constitution of social
(and progressively global) relations through the collective
understanding of the discursive logic and the acceptance of the
discourse as social fact.2 For Foucault, the logic produced by a
discourse is structurally related to the broader episteme
(structure of knowledge) of the historical period in which it
arises. However, discourses are produced by effects of power
within a social order, and this power prescribes particular rules
and categories which define the criteria for legitimating
knowledge and truth within the discursive order. These rules
and categories are considered a priori; that is,
coming before the discourse.3 It is in this way that discourse
masks its construction and capacity to produce knowledge and
meaning. It is also in this way that discourse claims an
irrefutable a‒historicity.4 Further, through its reiteration in
society, the rules of discourse fix the meaning of statements or
text to be conducive to the political rationality that underlies its
production.5 Yet at the same time, the discourse hides both its
capacity to fix meaning and its political intentions. It is as such
that a discourse can mask itself as a-historical, universal, and
scientific – that is, objective and stable. Accordingly, Stephen
Gill describes Foucault’s concept of discourse as ‘a set of ideas
and practices with particular conditions of existence, which are
more or less institutionalised, but which may only be partially
understood by those that they encompass.’6
As a discourse fixes text7 with a specific meaning, it disqualifies
other meanings and interpretations. Foucault speaks of this
discursive process as reducing the contingencies (the other
meanings) of text, in order to eliminate the differences which
could challenge or destabilise the meaning and power of the
discourse:
In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled,
selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of
procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to
gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous,
formidable materiality.8
One of the ways in which this is achieved is through the
commentaries of discourse: the statements or texts which
continually reaffirm the meanings enacted by the discourse,
without ever breaching the discursive paradigm. Foucault
explains thus:
Commentary averts the chance element of discourse by giving it
its due: it gives us the opportunity to say something other than the
text itself, but on condition that it is the text itself which is uttered
[re-iterated] and, in some ways, finalised. The open multiplicity,
the fortuitousness, is transferred, by the principle of commentary,
from what is liable to be said to the number, the form, the masks
and the circumstances of repetition. The novelty lies no longer in
what is said, but in its reappearance.9
Through this reiterative process discourse normalises and
homogenises, including upon the bodies and subjectivities of
those it dominates, as Foucault explores in Discipline and
Punish 91975), and in some of his later lecture series.10 By fixing
the meaning of text, and by pre-determining the categories of
reason by which statements are accepted as knowledge, a
discourse creates an epistemic reality and becomes a technique
of control and discipline.11 That which does not conform to the
enunciated truth of discourse is rendered deviant, that is,
outside of discourse, and outside of society, sociality or the
‘sociable’. With effect, Foucault demonstrated these discursive
practices of exclusion in the categories of reason and madness
in his first major work, Madness and Civilisation.12
However, it is in one of his last published works that we find a
compelling description of the function of discourse analysis as a
technique of critique and problematisation: The Will to
Knowledge: History of Sexuality Volume I.13 With respect to
sexuality and the discourse which produces its historical
meaning, Foucault writes:
Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been
said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what
was said? […] The central issue, then, is […] to account for the fact
that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the
positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions
which prompt people to speak about it and which store and
distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the
over‒all ‘discursive fact’, the way in which sex is ‘put into
discourse’.14
What Foucault sets out in broad terms is the task of discourse
analysis, for it must ‘account for the fact that [the discourse in
question] is spoken about’, and analyse the effects of power that
are produced by what is said. Moreover discourse analysis must
seek to unfix and destabilise the accepted meanings, and to
reveal the ways in which dominant discourses excludes,
marginalises and oppresses realities that constitute, at least,
equally valid claims to the question of how power could and
should be exercised.
============================================================================
What is Foucault's theory of discourse?

Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers to: ways of constituting knowledge,
together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations
which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are
more than ways of thinking and producing meaning.
Key Concepts:
Discourse
Foucault was interested in the phenomenon of discourse throughout his career, primarily in how discourses
define the reality of the social world and the people, ideas, and things that inhabit it. For Foucault, a discourse
is an institutionalized way of speaking or writing about reality that defines what can be intelligibly thought and
said about the world and what cannot. For example, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that a new
discourse of "sexuality" had fundamentally changed the way we think about desire, pleasure, and our
innermost selves. In Foucault’s argument, discourses about sexuality did not discover some pre-existing, core
truth about human identity, but rather created it through particular practices of power/knowledge (see next
entry).
Power/Knowledge
For Foucault, power and knowledge are not seen as independent entities but are inextricably related—
knowledge is always an exercise of power and power always a function of knowledge. Perhaps his most
famous example of a practice of power/knowledge is that of the confession, as outlined in History of Sexuality.
Once solely a practice of the Christian Church, Foucault argues that it became diffused into secular culture
(and especially psychology) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the confession (a form of
power) people were incited to “tell the truth” (produce knowledge) about their sexual desires, emotions, and
dispositions. Through these confessions, the idea of a sexual identity at the core of the self came into existence
(again, a form of knowledge), an identity that had to be monitored, cultivated, and often controlled (again, back
to power). It is important to note that Foucault understood power/knowledge as productive as well as
constraining. Power/knowledge not only limits what we can do, but also opens up new ways of acting and
thinking about ourselves.
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Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory © 1990 Berghahn Books
Link https://www.jstor.org/stable/41801502
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Foucault's Concept of Discourse Explained
The concept of discourse is central to Michel Foucault's philosophy and social thought. According
to Foucault discourse is defined by any type of activity of communication and representation (verbal
or otherwise) that is conditioned and constrained by a set of explicit and implicit rules that enable
any activity and at the same time limit it (it can be compared with Thomas Kuhn's notion of
paradigm in science). The system of discourse structures the manner in which we perceive reality, it
determines what constitutes right or wrong , defines the range of possible utterances in speech and
representation, underlies any capacity to understand or argue, allocates the right to speak and in
fact governs over everything that can and cannot be said or know. According to Foucault discourse
is a historical and social product that like language appears synchronically and evolves
diachronically (see article on de Saussure's thoughts on language).
Unlike ideology in the Marxist tradition, Foucault's concept of discourse does not originate from one
defined source of power or social strata, it does not have one specific goal or purpose and there isn't
one single function that rules over it. Discourse is not governed by the state (though totalitarian
regimes definitely aspired to such control). Like ideology (especially in Althusser's views on
ideology), discourse for Foucault have material existence in the shape of elaborate practices that are
governed by the discourse while at the same time generate it. For Foucault discourse can be both
positive and negative, repressive and liberating. Everyone of us is the subject of discourse and
therefore a part in its construction. In any case, for Foucault there is no social (or even human)
existence outside of discourse. Discourse shapes identities, thoughts, wants and needs, positions,
normality and abnormality and it manifests itself in every part of our daily life.

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Michel Foucault: Discourse

What is Foucault's theory of discourse?

Foucault's Concept of Discourse Explained

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