The Discourse on Language
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Print.
SummaryFoucault begins his lecture by illustrating the way in which discourse on language is capable of producing him as author--discourse is a medium for power that produces "speaking subjects." The first half of his lecture is where he raises questions about our presumptions regarding the singular “author” as a source for meaning.
Discourse, he says, operates by "rules of exclusion" concerning what is prohibited. Specifically, discourse is controlled in terms of objects (what can be spoken of), ritual (where and how one ay speak), and the privileged or exclusive right to speak of certain subjects (who may speak). Foucault argues that all of humanity is structured by power. His example of mad speech illustrates the "rules of exclusion" that govern discourses. All discourses exist to express certain truths, he says. He believes the ability to move around in truths is a good thing, and that the experience of navigating through different perceived truths is where learning happens--where knowledge is formed. ResponseInterestingly, and perhaps unfortunately, after we learn how to think and speak in the terms and truths, we forget that truth is constructed through discourse.
Once a "scientific" view is widely accepted, it seems that it becomes difficult to think outside of that model (219)--as within the scientific discourse, and perhaps a universal discourse in some ways--that we deem anything with the label science as true rather than a theory. I take "originating experience" to mean a significant, moving experience that originates a new realization or thought--perhaps comparable to Oprah's "Aha!" moments (see below video)--when one has an new and insightful experience. Connections/QuestionsTo go further with Foucault's notion of originating experience, perhaps we can compare it to what
Langer calls, “a stream of tensions and resolutions,” a realm where the symbolic power of music “creates a pattern of tensions and resolutions” (372). The moving, emotional example from class we listened to was “A Day on the Beach by Barrington Pheloung. Further, Dr. Murray's example of Cassirer's "inner tension" from the movie Contact expresses those moments that leave us almost speechless, where we grasp to try to interpret the experience. Perhaps these comparison to these three concepts is a stretch, but I see them as somewhat related--woven together with a common thread of beauty, shock, and awe. Heidegger says that language is not something that we control, but rather the forms and meanings of language are already present. Foucault argues that power is embedded within language, which seems to mean that if we identify it, we have some chance of controlling some part of our language. Discourse shapes the ways in which we understand the stories and myths. It involves social interaction, which is a key element to grappling with langage and meaning (just as the other theorists we've read believe). The theory, the will of truth, reminds me of Peirce's firstness and secondness concepts from his modes of being, as truths vary based on discourse; firstness relates to the possibility of truth, while secondness is truth. |
Key Quotes
"In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality" (216).
True discourse "is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it" (219).
Disciplines are "opposed to . . . the author, because disciplines are defined by groups of objects, methods, . . . the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system . . . without there being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them" (222).
"A discipline is not the sum total of all the truths that may be uttered concerning something; it is not even the total of all that may be accepted by virtue of some principle of coherence and sytematisation, concerning some given fact or proposition." Rather, "disciplines consist of errors as well as truths, errors that are in no way residuals, or foreign bodies, but having their own positive functions and their own valid history" (223).
Outside the discipline of science are "immediate experience" and "imaginary themes" which are neither true nor false but, in a sense, nonexistent (223).
Disciplines "constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits" (224).
"Doctrine, on the other hand, tends to diffusion: in the holding in common of a single ensemble of discourse that individuals, as many as you wish, could define their reciprocal allegiance" (226). Thus "[d]octrine links individuals to certain types of utterance while consequently barring them from all others. Doctrine effects a dual subjection, [the subjections] of speaking subjects to discourse, and [the subjection] of discourse to the group . . . of speakers" (226).
"Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every education system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it" (227).
The founder of a system of thought "animates the empty forms of language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within them. Beyond time, he indicates the field of meanings-leaving history to make them explicit-in which propositions, sciences, and deductive ensembles ultimately find their foundation" (227-228).
"Even before it could be grasped in the form of a cogito, prior significations, in some ways already spoken, were circulating in the world, scattering it all about us, and from the outset made possible a sort of primitive recognition." (228).
True discourse "is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it" (219).
Disciplines are "opposed to . . . the author, because disciplines are defined by groups of objects, methods, . . . the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system . . . without there being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them" (222).
"A discipline is not the sum total of all the truths that may be uttered concerning something; it is not even the total of all that may be accepted by virtue of some principle of coherence and sytematisation, concerning some given fact or proposition." Rather, "disciplines consist of errors as well as truths, errors that are in no way residuals, or foreign bodies, but having their own positive functions and their own valid history" (223).
Outside the discipline of science are "immediate experience" and "imaginary themes" which are neither true nor false but, in a sense, nonexistent (223).
Disciplines "constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits" (224).
"Doctrine, on the other hand, tends to diffusion: in the holding in common of a single ensemble of discourse that individuals, as many as you wish, could define their reciprocal allegiance" (226). Thus "[d]octrine links individuals to certain types of utterance while consequently barring them from all others. Doctrine effects a dual subjection, [the subjections] of speaking subjects to discourse, and [the subjection] of discourse to the group . . . of speakers" (226).
"Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every education system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it" (227).
The founder of a system of thought "animates the empty forms of language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within them. Beyond time, he indicates the field of meanings-leaving history to make them explicit-in which propositions, sciences, and deductive ensembles ultimately find their foundation" (227-228).
"Even before it could be grasped in the form of a cogito, prior significations, in some ways already spoken, were circulating in the world, scattering it all about us, and from the outset made possible a sort of primitive recognition." (228).