Adapted from a discussion on the Hegel by Hypertext Website at: http://hegel.marxists.org/discours.htm From: <ktlau127@netvigator.com>Alex Lau
Subject: Foucault & discourse
From: Michel Foucault by M Cousins and A Hussian
The central term which Foucault employs to analyse knowledge is the concept of 'discursive formations'. Before describing this concept in detail it is necessary to enter a caveat. It is important to distinguish Foucault's use of the category, a discourse, from contemporary uses of the term 'discourse'. For within the human sciences this term is becoming embarrassingly overloaded and more likely to induce confusion than any clarity it might originally have been set to produce.
Several distinct usages are in play in the social sciences, none of which can be reduced to any of the others. First, it is used within the analysis of speech and conversation to bring out the dynamics and rules governing particular social situations such as classrooms. This may be said to constitute branch of socio-linguistics. Secondly, it is used as an object of general speculation about the relations of language to the possible positions of the human subject in language. This is a general consideration of subjectivity from the point of view of language and is best represented in the work of Emile Benveniste and those researchers who have used his work. We may call this a linguistics of subjectivity. Thirdly and related to this but governed by Marxist theories of the social totality, the term discourse has been used to extend the theory of ideology, that part of the ideological instance in which subjects represent the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence in speech or in writing. Such a usage of discourse, as a particular level of social relations with its particular mechanisms and effects is the object of investigation in such works as Language, Semantics and Ideology by Michel Pecheux. In such works a distinction is drawn between the discursive and the non-discursive as a distinction between different sorts of social practices. A fourth and quite different major use of the term is more philosophical and has appeared in arguments against the possibility of theoretical reasoning being decisively resolved by the use of epistemological categories. This line of usage draws a distinction between the discursive and the non-discursive which is a theoretical distinction between objects of knowledge and the presumed status of the reference of those objects, classically between knowledge and reality. Such a distinction is advanced as part of a demonstration of the irresolvable character of epistemology by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst in Mode of Production and Social Formation.
Now not only are these contemporary usages quite different each from the other, they are also all different from the category of 'discursive formation' which is developed by Foucault. Foucault's concern is not to produce a general theory of discourse (whatever that might mean). His use of the term discourse may be taken to be tactical. It may be thought of as an attempt to avoid treating knowledge in terms of 'ideas'. The reason for avoiding the term 'ideas' is that it brings in its train a series of presuppositions which Foucault hopes to abandon. We will mention only three. The first is that an 'idea' is knowledge by virtue of being a proposition, a proposition being the logical form of an idea. Knowledge viewed in this logical sense may be thought of as a tissue of 'ideas'. Knowledge consists of ideas as they present themselves for validation. The second pre-supposition is that an idea' is a mental representation and is thus tied to the apparatus of production of thought by a human subject. Although these two presuppositions do not have to go together with any logical necessity, they frequently do so in historical investigations, especially in the sense of ideas being treated as propositions and at the same time having an 'author'. The third pre-supposition is that 'ideas' are expressed or have their existence in language. In this case the identity of an idea is its meaning and its basic units are sentences. As we shall see this trinity of proposition-subject-meaning which hovers over the idea is one from which Foucault tries to turn away in his analysis of knowledge. The use of the term `discursive' should be taken as no more (but no less) than an index of this attempt. It may be, in fact, that Foucault does not fully succeed in this. But that should not undermine the strength of his arguments for such a move (Brown and Cousins, 1980). His analysis of what makes up knowledge is not reducible to propositions which appear in meaningful sentences and which have been produced by subjects. This attempt to skirt the category of 'ideas' in the analysis of knowledge requires Foucault to question a whole battery of other terms which are at work within the history of ideas. The argument of The Archaeology of Knowledge opens with the negative work of discarding (or at least suspending) conventional categories. The common denominator of the categories against which he argues is that they all unify disparate elements too easily or too early. They avoid the specification of differences through a facile synthesis. The first of such categories is that of tradition. In the history of ideas it is all too easy to simplify the problem of successive phenomena through the levelling agency of tradition. Ideas are given a life-span by persisting, by being continuously accepted, a life which is summarised as a 'tradition'. Foucault proposes to suspend this category of tradition not because the problems of the transmission and communication of knowledge are not important. It is that they are too important to be reduced to the undifferentiated category of tradition. The conditions of appearance and reappearance of forms of knowledge must be identified by reference to specific means. By the same token any reference to a `spirit of the age' must be eschewed since such references establish links between phenomena through the dogmatic axiom that whatever is contemporaneous is necessarily related. Foucault rejects this axiom and insists that links which are made be established non-deductively. Lest it be thought that Foucault is engaging in an eccentric francophone purism it is worth noting that his argument exactly matches that of Gombrich in 'In Search of Cultural History' (in Ideals and Idols).
Nor is Foucault alone in rejecting easy syntheses of what we may call genres of ideas. The way in which we spontaneously distribute and name discourses as science, literature, philosophy or politics is a division of discourses of recent origin, and to apply them to medieval culture or antiquity is to risk the retrospective projection which is usually called anachronism. These suspensions of synthetic categories move in harmony with most contemporary work in the history of ideas. However Foucault pursues these suspensions with unusua1 rigour. In particular he argues for the suspension of the categories the oeuvre and the book. Neither, he argues, are unquestionable givers; they are themselves constructions in discourse. The category of an oeuvre serves to support the idea that it is the collected texts designated by a proper name, yet it does not contain everything written by the bearer of that proper name. The status of Nietzsche's laundry-lists has now spawned a considerable theoretical literature. For Foucault what is at stake in the category of the oeuvre is that it supports and protects the category of an author. If that category is accepted uncritically it introduces into the analysis of discourse the notion of an oeuvre as the expression of a human subject. In suspending the category of oeuvre and author, Foucault is not, as some critics allege, abolishing the categories but insisting that authorship is an historical and variable construction and thus cannot be uncritically used in analyses in its post-Romantic sense; likewise the term book. If we think of this as unproblematic we need only to consider medieval literate culture. There is no sense in which the medieval compendium corresponds to what we automatically consider as a book (What is an author, LGMP: 113-38). The argument of The Archaeology of Knowledge then opens with a series of suspensions of categories - ideas, tradition, period, oeuvre, author, book. Their suspension is undertaken in order to force analysis from the grip of the categories which work to unify the history of knowledge in terms of the human subject, consciousness and the march of reason.
