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7/29/2019 Foucault n Post Structuralism
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/foucault-n-post-structuralism 1/3
Q) Position of discourse in Post Structuralism from your reading of Foucault.
Foucault was not a social theorist. He did not concern to create a social theory that would
"explain" or "interpret" the history of the West in terms of "power." He was not a historian of
ideas. He presented himself as an "archaeologist," who must be content with describing the
invisible cultural formations that, he believed, produced the visible social and literary evidence
he examined. He sought the conditions of possibility of discourse, the rules which governed the
putting together of statements, and the ruptures in formations where novelty could appear. He
wrote: "Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes,
preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves,
those discourses as practices obeying certain rules." (Horus Publications, 1998) The main
influences on Foucault's thought were German philosophers Frederick Nietzsche and Martin
Heidegger. Nietzsche maintained that human behavior is motivated by a will to power and that
traditional value had lost its power over society. The terms genealogy, discourse, essentialism,
power/knowledge, repressive, hypothesis, subject, discipline, panopticon have remarkable
significance in Foucault's terminology. However in most of his work a special emphasize will be
given to these two terms: Discourse and Power. "Discourse in Foucault's vocabulary is an
authoritative way of describing. Discourses are propagated by specific institutions and divide up
the world in specific ways. For example, we can talk of medical, legal, and psychological
discourses. Literary criticism is also a discourse, as is the terminology associated with grading."
Like the structuralism of de Saussure, Michel Foucault was concerned with, the
principles by which elements can be organized together to produce coherent and
meaningful patterns. However, whereas de Saussure would seek the value of such
patterns with respect to an idealized language system, Foucault always seeks to
describe concrete relationships that can be described between concrete items. Foucault
describes arrangements of this kind as “discursive formations”. Simply put, a discursiveformation refers to the ways in which a collection of texts are organized with respect to
each other. To draw on Foucault’s words, “whenever, between objects,types of
statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order. . .), we
will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation” .
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For Foucault discursive formations are entities to be seen, touched, and experienced
because they are composed of material objects, such as books. It follows, then, that
because discursive formations are material, they have material effects.
According to Foucault, we see that 'discourse' (a group of statements) is a way of
representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a particular historical moment.
Discourse constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It
also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of
others. So the meaning is constructed through discourse, nothing has any meaning
outside of discourse. The main point here is the way discourse, representation,
knowledge and 'truth' are historicized by Foucault, in contrast to the ahistorical tendency
in semiotics. That is, things meant something and were 'true' only within a specific
historical context . He thought that in each period, discourse produced forms of
knowledge, objects, subjects and practices of knowledge which differed from period to
period, with no necessary continuity between them. For instance, there may always
have been what we now call homosexual forms of behaviour. But 'the homosexual' as a
specific kind of social subject which was produced, and could only make its appearance
within the moral, legal, medical and psychiatric discourses, practices and institutional
apparatuses of the late nineteenth century, with their particular theories of sexual
perversity. Knowledge about and practices around all these subjects were historically
and culturally specific.
The question of the application and effectiveness of power/knowledge was more
important, Foucault thought, than the question of its 'truth'. He thought that knowledge
linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make
itself true . All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects , and in that
sense 'becomes true'. So there is no 'Truth' of knowledge in the absolute sense -- aTruth, whatever the period, setting, context, is a discursive formation sustaining a
regime of truth (not 'what is true' but 'what counts as true').
For Foucault, power does not function as a center but exercise through a net-like
organization. This suggests that we are all caught up in the circulation of power relation
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-- oppressors and oppressed. Power is also productive network which runs through the
whole social body because it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces
discourse. For Foucault, the concept of power knowledge is thus a pragmatic
conceptualization. Foucault's approach to representation is that he concerned with the
production of knowledge and meaning through discourse. For him, the production of
knowledge is always crossed with questions of power and the body, and this expands
the scope of what is involved in representation. For him, it is discourse, not the subject
which produces knowledge. Discourse is enmeshed with power, but it is not necessary
to find a 'subject' like the king, the ruling class, the state -- for power/knowledge to
operate. Of course Foucault was deeply critical of the traditional conception of the
subject (an individual, the core of the self, and the independent, authentic source of
action and meaning). His most radical propositions is that the 'subject' is produced
within discourse . That is, the subject cannot be outside discourse because it must be
subjected to discourse and also exists within the knowledge (which is produced by
discourse), the discursive formation of a particular period and culture. So the subject
can become the object through which power is relayed, and should be located in the
position from which the discourse can make sense of it. Anyhow, individuals may differ
as to their social class, gendered, racial characteristics, they will not be able to take
meaning until they have identified with those positions which are constructed by the
discourse, subjected themselves to its rules, and hence become the subjects of its
power/knowledge . Foucault suggests that there are epistemic breaks, that is, at certain
moments in a culture, there are discontinuous developments in discursive structures.