DISCOURSE | MICHEL FOUCAULT

Discourse refers to ways of producing/constituting knowledge, together with the social

practices, different forms of subjectivity and power relations which deeply influence the
production of knowledge systems and shape the relations between the different systems.
Discourses are not just ways of thinking and producing meaning from something; discourse
constitutes our unconscious and conscious mind and the lives of the subjects that the same
discourse seeks to govern. Discourse is “... a form of power that circulates in the social field
and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance”.
We need to note that discourse is not the same as idea: (i) an idea is often times seen as a unit
of knowledge, a knowledge based on certain propositions – propositional knowledge; (ii) idea
is a mental representation, and so is tied to the apparatus of production of thought by a human
subject; so ideas are assumed to have ‘authors’ who these ideas belong to; (iii) ideas are
expressed or have their existence through/in language; Foucault does not subscribe to these
definitions when he tries to understand how knowledge is produced; so, discourse, which
Foucault uses, is not the same as idea.
Foucault’s work has been in the tradition of history but he has redefined the way historical
work used to conducted; he gave birth to the terms ‘archaeology’/‘genealogy’ of knowledge
production: that is, he was interested in looking at and studying the continuities and
discontinuities between different knowledge systems; these continuities and discontinuities
fundamentally shape ‘Thought’ during certain periods of history and care called ‘epistemes’.
A different episteme would dominate each age – the epistemological age; Foucault studies
the social context in which certain knowledges and practices emerged as desirable and
permissible, or not permissible and thus deserving change; In Foucault’s view, knowledge is
inextricably connected to power, such that they are often written as power/knowledge.
Foucault’s tries to understand how some discourses have shaped and created meaning
systems that have gained the status and currency of ‘truth’, and have come to dominate how
we define and organize both ourselves and our social world, whilst other alternative
discourses get marginalised and subjugated, even while offering other sites where hegemonic
practices are contested, challenged and resisted. He has looked specifically at the social
construction of madness (The History of Madness), punishment (The Birth of the Prison),
modern medicine (The Birth of the Clinic) and sexuality (The History of Sexuality).
In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979), he maps the shift in how
the West, as a society, and at a discursive level, moved from ‘sovereign power’ to
‘disciplinary power’; he tracks the transition from a top-down form of social control in the
form of physical coercion meted out by the sovereign/monarch to a more diffuse and
insidious form of social surveillance and process of ‘normalisation’. The process of
‘normalisation’, argues Foucault, is encapsulated by Bentham's idea of the Panopticon: it is a
19th century prison system in which prison cells were arranged around a central watchtower
from which the supervisor could watch inmates, yet the inmates could never be certain when
they were being watched, therefore, over time, they began to police their own behaviour. The
Panopticon has become a fundamental metaphor for the processes whereby ‘disciplinary
technologies’ police both the mind and body of the modern individual.
In the Foucauldian view, there is no fixed and definitive structuring of either social (or
personal) identity or practices, as there is in a socially determined view in which the subject
is completely socialized. In fact, both the formation of identities and of practices are related
to, or are a function of, historically specific discourses. An understanding of how these and
other discursive constructions are formed may open the way for change and contestation. The
concept of the ‘discursive field’ helps understand the relationship between language, social
institutions, subjectivity and power. Discursive fields, such as the law or the family, contain a
number of competing and contradictory discourses with varying degrees of power to give
meaning to and organize social institutions and processes. There are both discourses that
constrain the production of knowledge, dissent and difference and some that enable new
knowledges and difference(s) to be produced. The questions that arise within this framework,
are to do with how some discourses maintain their authority, how some voices get heard
whilst others are silenced, who benefits and how – that is, questions addressing issues of
power/empowerment/disempowerment.
In his work The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault starts by discarding – or at least
suspending – conventional categories of defining life around us; 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, but because 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.
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. Foucault 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. 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 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.

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References:
 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/discours.htm
 http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/theory/foucault.htm