Michel Foucault Discourse Theory

12 Key excerpts on "Michel Foucault Discourse Theory"

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  Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values

  Truth, Language, and Desire

  • Teodros Kiros(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The Analysis of Power 17 (e) it makes possible our understanding of what is involved in speaking a human language or engaging in a discourse. A discourse, for Foucault, has a technical meaning: "We shall call discourse a group of statements insofar as they belong to the same discursive formation; it does not form a rhetorical or formal unity, endlessly repeatable, whose ap- pearance or use in history might be indicated (and, if necessary, explained); it is made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge ... it is from beginning to end, historical." 51 With these bold words, Foucault seeks to understand language not as a speech act, not even an ideal speech act, but simply a historicized discourse. This con- ception of language is really the area where Foucault and Habermas are seem- ingly irreconcilable; it is also the area that I will attempt to mediate through a constructive synthesis of two extreme positions of the promise and limitations of language, before I proceed to formulate my own reconstructive theory that distinguishes power from domination as defined by Habermas and Foucault. I asked earlier: Who determines what is and is not to be accepted as language? I am now in a position to directly answer the question based on the ideas I detailed. Foucault is well known for his denial of one of the Marxist dogmat- ics—the existence of an empirically identifiable "ruling class" that determines the contents of the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the modern human sub- ject. For him, the ruling class, a highly self-disciplined class itself, is much too diffusely spread to be in a position of determining how the individuals who are structurally outside of its circle ought to think, feel, and intend.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics

  • Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone, Paul E Kerswill, Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone, Paul E Kerswill(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Among the most influential approaches on the intimate relationship between power and dis-course that have been seized in sociolinguistic works on power are, without doubt, the writings of Habermas (1981) and Foucault (1981). Their critical thinking has highlighted the linkage between discourse, power and exclusion, albeit from very different angles. The writings of these two authors also reflect the different levels of analysis that an investigation of power in discourse follows: structures of meaning (Foucault) or com-municative interaction (Habermas). Foucault’s (1981) perspectives on power continue to influ-ence discourse analysis to this day – he sees dis-course production as guided by large discursive formations which define what can and what cannot be uttered in a given society at a given historical point in time. Discursive formations are determined by historical formations, and such overarching determinism is of course in principle beyond the individual’s conscious will, weakening subjects’ possibilities of transforming society. Over time, certain ways of speaking about reality and seeing the world materialize, and slowly generate institutionalized practices that directly affect the lives of individuals in a society. Certain claims and utterances remain ‘said’ and valid much longer than just for the instant in which they were uttered – their lasting influence on human thought, speech and action becomes manifest in the constant repetition of similar arguments. For Foucault, discourses understood as conglom-erates of larger systems of meaning are necessar-ily powerful in that they ‘govern’ the everyday lives of subjects (Foucault, 1970, 1984a, 1984b, 1992, 2003). Yet the question of power and discourse cannot be limited to discursive formations. Individuals potentially have the possibility to interrupt such societal arrangements, basically although not exclusively via discourse (Habermas, 1981).

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  The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse

  • David Grant, Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, Linda L Putnam, David Grant, Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, Linda L Putnam(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The discourse literature has been largely preoccupied with one aspect of this relationship: how particular dis-courses produce systems of power. The work of Foucault has been particularly influential in this regard, focusing attention on the role of discourse in determin-ing the relations of power that characterize a particular social context. However, the way in which the dynamics of power influence discourse has received less attention. Yet, it is clear that some actors will be better able to produce texts that affect discourse because of their access to various kinds of power. Accordingly, we re-examine the power literature from a discursive perspective to draw out the 13 Discourse and Power Cynthia Hardy and Nelson Phillips power dynamics that lead actors to produce texts that influence discourse and to understand why some actors are more successful in modifying discourse in ways that are useful to them. In the remainder of this chapter, we first consider how discourse shapes power, with particular reference to Foucault’s work and critical discourse analysis. We then examine how power can shape discourse, integrating both power and dis-course literatures to explore the ability of actors to produce texts that influence discourses over time. In exploring these relationships, we develop a model that embodies both in a mutually constitutive relationship and then draw implications for future research. THE REALM OF DISCOURSE In this section, we explore the realm of discourse – how discourse produces power relationships and, in so doing, constitutes the social context for action. We define discourses as structured collections of texts, and associated practices of textual production, transmission and consumption, located in a historical and social con-text (Fairclough, 1992, 1995; Parker, 1992).

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  Feminist Poetics

  Performance, Histories

  • Terry Threadgold(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4

  Discourse, expressibility and things to do with Foucault

  ‘Discourse’ is a term with a complex and heterogeneous history within semiotics and cultural theory. It is currently used in a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines to serve a number of disparate functions. In linguistics, and elsewhere, at a very general level, it means ‘language in use’ (parole), but there remains a large gulf between poststructuralist and linguistic modes of discourse analysis. The analyses of the particular instance of a linguistic or semiotic kind, which might establish the limits and interrelations between the enunciative and the discursive, have not been occurring in the poststructuralist work. And the kind of radical rethinking that this work has been doing has not, as Fairclough (1992a) shows, been generally taken up in the linguistic forms of discourse analysis. A recent editorial by Teun van Dijk in the journal Discourse and Society (van Dijk 1995), suggesting that poststructuralist forms of discourse analysis have no place in the journal, and the heated responses to it in a later issue, offer some indication that the divisions between these knowledges are still closely guarded in some quarters.

  FOUCAULT AND DISCOURSE

  The term ‘discourse’ has come to carry a very different set of connotations and determinations since the work of Michel Foucault. That work, while it had a great deal to do with cultural and social formations, was in some senses specifically and intentionally not linguistic or semiotic. What Foucault’s work did was to insist on the controlling, positioning and productive capacities of signifying practices, denying in the process the primacy of signification itself and radically unsettling common theoretical assumptions about the ways in which signifying practices operated. His work also explicitly connected the discipline of the body, the production of knowledges and the making of subjectivity.

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  Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power

  • D. Hook(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis in any society there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consol- idated nor implemented without the production, accumula- tion, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. (Foucault, 1980a, p. 93) Discourse analysis and psychology There can be little doubt that discourse analysis has come to represent something of a growth industry in critical and qualitative forms of psychology. Together with a proliferation of various models for the analysis of discourse (Bannister, 1995; Fairclough, 1995; Parker, 1992; Potter and Wetherell, 1987), there has been a veritable explosion of discourse analytic work. This nearly unfettered expansion of discourse analytic work has led, one might suppose, almost inevitably to a variety of misapplications of the work of Michel Foucault, whose name is often attached, practically as a matter of course, to varieties of discourse analysis. It thus seems important to return to Foucault, to clearly define and qualify his understanding of the notion of discourse, and to do so as a means of offering a degree of preciseness to a term which often appears to be both overused and under-defined. I am not suggesting that all instances of discourse analysis misapply Foucault’s work; after all, certain such models of analysis base themselves on an entirely different set of conceptual resources (as in the example of Potter and Wetherell, 1987). 100 D. Hook, Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power © Derek Hook 2007

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  Critical Theory for Library and Information Science

  Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines

  • Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, John E. Buschman, Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, John E. Buschman(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Libraries Unlimited

    (Publisher)

  FoucaultÊs discourse analysis therefore focuses not on conversation between indi- viduals but rather on the specialised language developed by a particular community (whether cultural, professional, artistic or academic) at a particular point in space and time. Although discourse, in FoucaultÊs sense, has been broadly equated with the con- cept of a discipline (e.g., McHoul and Grace 1993), its application has not been solely confined to scholarly fields, nor do discourses necessarily confine themselves to the boundaries of disciplines as they have traditionally been defined. Some discourses span multiple academic and professional fields · Foucauldian discourse analysis is itself an example of this·and some disciplines may engage with multiple discourses; Frohmann (1994), for example, has suggested LIS is one such multi-discursive discipline. In FoucaultÊs conception of it, discourse is more than just a way of talking· rather it is seen as a complex network of relationships between individuals, texts, ideas, and institutions, with each „node‰ impacting, to varying degrees, on other nodes, and on the dynamics of the discourse as a whole. While discourse, like paradigm, can all too easily be conceptualised as an abstract, theoretical construction, Foucault emphasised that any discourse is inextricably tied to its particular sociohistorical context and can- not be studied or understood if divorced from this context: „ For Foucault there is . . . no universal understanding that is beyond history and society‰ ( Rabinow 1984, 4). 66 CRITICAL THEORY FOR LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE For Foucault, knowledge /truth is neither based on a perceived correspondence with an „objective‰ reality, as in the positivist /Aristotelean tradition that has dominated Western thinking since the Enlightenment, nor is it wholly subjective, as in existential- ist philosophy.

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  The Cost of Free Speech

  Pornography, Hate Speech, and their Challenge to Liberalism

  • A. Levin(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  119 5 Foucault: Power, Discourse, and the State 5.1 Foucault and the nature of power Michel Foucault’s insights into the nature and mechanisms of power have been among the most persuasive and influential of the last century, though his account has been almost universally overlooked in debates about liberalism. Foucault’s exclusion from the discourse may be owed partly to the fact of his own hostility toward liberalism, and partly to the fact that analytic and continental philosophy have a long history of antagonism and thus a propensity to talk past each other. One of my chief aims in this book is to show how the insights into the relationship between power and speech of continental thinkers, such as Foucault, can inform current debates in analytic liberal philosophy, particularly those debates about the scope and limits of egalitarianism. The first three chapters of this book discussed those liberal debates, with particular emphasis on the North American debates over porno- graphy and hate speech. The discussion of speech act theory in the pre- vious chapter, Foucault in this one, and Judith Butler in the next, will finish laying the foundation of the continental positions, which I hope will inform the debates addressed in the first half of the book. Foucault’s theory of power is central to my account not only because its influence demands that it be addressed in any discussion of power and politics, but because he makes the crucial point that power is not a matter of obvious physical coercive force by the state, but is more subtly operative through language. The connection between power and language was made by Austin in the preceding chapter, but Foucault takes this point a pivotal step further in arguing that it is not through language per se, but rather through discourse – particular organized bodies of knowledge – that power operates. This point underlines my

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  Social Theory and Modernity

  Critique, Dissent, and Revolution

  • Timothy W. Luke(Author)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  9 Foucault and the Discourses of Power: Developing a Genealogy of the Political Culture Concept Michel Foucault is recognized widely for influencing many fields of inquiry, ranging from criminology to architecture to literary criticism. His impact on political science, however, has been fairly limited. On one level, Foucault's lack of acceptance is doubly strange given his interest in such themes as power, knowledge, and truth. Yet, on another level, his implication of the naturalistically grounded social sciences in the admin-istrative domination of modern society undoubtedly encourages many political scientists to dismiss his work almost entirely. While Foucault's project obviously works at cross-purposes with much of Marxian/Marxist thinking, in this chapter I aim at possibly broadening his appeal by con-tinuing the critique of modernization and development theory from Chap-ter 8. And, in contrast to Cabral's notions of political culture and revolu-tionary activity, I explore how the problematic concepts of political culture and individual subjectivity, as they emerged in the techniques of American empirical political analysis after 1945, might be understood more critically in light of Foucault's style of interpretative analysis. Foucault's Theoretical Project In terms of his own categories, Michel Foucault can be seen as a founder of discursivity in the social sciences. That is, his work provides 241 242 POWER, DISCOURSE, AND CULTURE a paradigmatic set of terms, images and concepts which organize think-ing and experience about the past, present, and future of society. His images and concepts can reveal much about the modern discourses of political culture and political socialization. Here, Foucault's work can be made more relevant to modern political science, and it also can show hidden tendencies in the conceptual workings of this human science as it has operated in the present generation.

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  Education, Assessment, and the Desire for Dissonance

  • Yusef Waghid, Nuraan Davids(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart. For Foucault (1981; 1998), states Powers (2007, p. 26), it follows that discourse cannot be analyzed only in the present, “because the power com- ponents and the historical components create such a tangled knot of shifting meanings, definitions and interested parties over periods of time.” As Powers (2007, p. 27) observes, several concepts organize Foucault’s perspective and are important to understand when considering discourse analysis. These key concepts are power—also called bio-power in order to emphasize the import- ant role of biology—resistance, the body, social science, social agents, and the medicalization and clinicalization of social control (Powers, 2007, p. 27). These concepts, continues Powers (2007, p. 27), exist at the societal level, according to Foucault, where they have come to function as cultural myths, ideologies or unacknowledged assumptions. Powers (2007, p. 27) explains that together, these concepts inform what Foucault calls a strategy that imparts direction to the micropractices of everyday life, as well as influencing larger foucault and discourse analysis 91 social goals. Foucault calls this strategy bio-power or disciplinary power, or power/knowledge. In this regard, then, power or bio-power constitutes the premise of a Foucauldian analysis of discourse. As has been highlighted throughout this book thus far, and as Powers (2007, p. 28) reminds us, power (or bio-power) is the most important notion in Foucault’s work because it forms the basis for the analysis of discourse. Following on this, Powers (2007, p. 28) explains that power must be under- stood as a network of interacting forces that are goal-driven, relational and self-organized. Power creates tensions between, within, and among individu- als or groups.

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  Knowledge, Ideology & Discourse (Routledge Revivals)

  A Sociological Perspective

  • Tim Dant(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  7  Discourse, knowledge and critique

  In this chapter I will explore the work of two writers who continued with the structuralist project of directing attention not to the world described by language but to the world constructed within language itself. Structuralism undermines the taken-for-granted fit between signifiers and signifieds necessary for using language in everyday life. For Lévi-Strauss and the early Barthes structural linguistics seemed to promise a technical solution to the problems of interpretation; once the structural relations could be revealed then the code of meaning could be unravelled. But for Foucault and Derrida, any interest in structuralism was not with the promise of a technical solution. They both began analysis of the object clarified by the structuralists, discourse, using whatever techniques disturbed a taken-for granted reading of its meaning. Their aim was not interpretation in the sense of laying bare the truth behind the utterances in language. Their analyses attempted to reveal the contingent nature of discourse, contingent not on a real, stable, natural world represented in discourse but on an historical and social world, fluid and changing. Contingent also on the process and human practice of discourse; the need to make sense, to show cause and demonstrate rationality.

  I will first look at some features of Foucault’s writing that seem especially relevant to the programme of the sociology of knowledge and then mention some of the techniques employed by Derrida to highlight the perspectival quality of accounts.

  Foucault and History

  Foucault does not write as a sociologist of knowledge and yet his topic is the social process of knowledge. He writes about how knowledge is construed through discourse, the exchange of speech and writing between members of society, and has effects on the lives of people. In later reflective work he recognizes that what concerned him from the beginning was the conjunction between knowledge and power (Foucault 1980: 109).

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  The End of Development?

  Modernity, Post-Modernity and Development

  • Trevor Parfitt(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  It can be seen how Levinasian care for the other might have more relevance to development issues than Foucaultian care for the self, and we shall be examining Levinas’ ethics in the next chapter. Foucaultian discourse analysis is clearly a powerful tool, and certainly one that strongly influenced many post-development analysts. As we have seen, the application of concepts like normali-sation can tell us much about the operation and effects of hierarchies in development projects for example. However, discourse theory carries with it severe problems pertaining to its relativistic nature. Whilst one might accept that there is an inevitable entwinement of knowledge and power, the complete identification of knowledge with power in Foucault’s discourse theory means that one has no basis for critique. Certainly, existing discourses are expressions of power, but so is any conceivable critique. And if all discourses are equally effects of power, there is no reason to prefer one to another. This line of thinking leads to a political quietism that cannot be afforded by anybody who cares about those whose living standards (whose lives!) are being endangered in the South. Foucault himself recognised this inherent danger of relativism and tried to overcome it in his own work. His failure to do so, a failure by one of the most eminent of modern thinkers, should make us cautious of the nostrums of post-modernism. In view of this we shall move on to a brief analysis of the theories of Jurgen Habermas, also an eminent philosopher, but an uncompromising critic of post-modernism. 3.3 DISCOURSE ETHICS AND THE PROBLEMS OF APPLICATION Habermas is concerned with many of the problems that concern post-modernism, notably the tendency for foundationalism and the over-determined subject to result in exclusions. However, Habermas tried to solve such problems by taking a radically different path from that of the post-modernists who usually ended up embracing relativism in one form or another.

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  Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy

  A New Reading of Six Thinkers

  • Henry Somers-Hall(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  For example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century masses and populations become visible, and emerge into the light of day at the same time as medical statements manage to articulate new objects (tissular lesions and the anatomophysiological correlations)’ (Deleuze 1988b: 32). 19 Foucault 2002e: 115. 198 Foucault, Power, and the Juridico-Discursive engagement with this concept in the work we have considered so far. 20 Nonetheless, in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault explicitly thematises the role of power in the development of discourse. I want to focus here on The History of Sexuality, as here Foucault presents in detail his analytic of power. The focus on sexuality is important because Foucault makes several claims about the significance of sexuality as a discourse. First, Foucault claims that sex is the ‘master key’ (Foucault 1978: 78) to our self-interpretation. Beginning with the Christian confes- sional, but continuing through Freud and then sexual liberation, the West has managed ‘to bring us almost entirely – our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history – under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire’ (Foucault 1978: 78). Thus, sexuality is not an arbitrary choice of discourse for Foucault. In particular, the fact that it draws together ana- tomical aspects of our existence together with an analysis of our nature as a member of a species (through the development of statistical approaches to population in the nineteenth century) means that sexuality provides an account of the whole range of our nature. For Merleau-Ponty, the body, as the centre of synthesis, is the locus of sense. Foucault’s account operates prior to this constituted field of sense, looking at levels of organisation above and below the body in terms of population dynamics and the specific anatomy that constitutes the body.

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