Link: http://literarytheory.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/michel-foucault-from-the-order-of-discourse/
Michel
Foucault, from “The Order of Discourse”
R. Young, ed. Untying the Text (1971),
pp. 52-64
In a refreshing change in
structure from that of many other theorists, Foucault actually begins this
excerpt with a thesis that he proceeds to explain and explore in the remainder
of the piece: “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled,
selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose
role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance
events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality” (210).
From there, Foucault goes on to
detail what he calls the “procedures of exclusion” (210). He notes that the
prohibition of discussing certain topics (namely sexuality and politics) “very
soon reveal [discourse's] link with desire and with power” (211); that is,
“discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of
domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle,
discourse is the power which is to be seized” (211).
Next, Foucault discusses the
exclusive procedure inherent in the reason / madness binary, noting that the
terms are, to a certain extent, defined (or perhaps delineated) arbitrarily and
that how and where that distinction is made determines the manner in which one
accepts the discourse coming from either side of the binary. In a bold move, he
then asks if one could not, in a similar manner, “consider the opposition
between true and false as a third system of exclusion” (212). To make this
move, one must not think “on the level of a proposition, on the inside of a
discourse” but instead “on a different scale [by asking] what this will to
truth has been and constantly is, across our discourses, this will to truth
which has crossed so many centuries of our history” (212). Just as standards of
reason and madness can vary from one society or era to another, Foucault
argues, standards of how truth and falsehood are measured can change. To be
more specific, a given society’s value system can directly affect what is and
is not considered true; to demonstrate this phenomenon, Foucault notes that “a
day came [in the course of Western history] when truth was displaced from the
ritualised, efficacious and just act of enunciations, towards the utterance
itself, its meaning, its form, its object, its relation to its reference” (212).
The will to truth, which Foucault
calls “that prodigious machinery designed to exclude” (214), is institutionally
supported and reinforced (by libraries, laboratories, etc.). Furthermore, while
the will to truth “exerts a sort of pressure and something like a power of
constraint… on other discourses” (213), it is also the procedure least noticed,
for “‘true’ discourse, freed from desire and power by the necessity of its
form, cannot recognise the will to truth which pervades it” (214).
Having thus discussed “procedures
for controlling and delimiting discourse [which] operate in a sense from the
exterior,” Foucault moves on to discuss “internal procedures… which function
rather as principles of classification, of ordering, of distribution, as if
this time another dimension of discourse had to be mastered: that of events and
chance” (214). These internal procedures include commentary (“a kind of
gradation among discourses” (215)), the author (“a principle of grouping of
discourses, conceived as the unity and origin of their meanings, as the focus
of their coherence” (216)), and disciplines (a principle of organization
“defined by a domain of objects, a set of methods, a corpus of propositions
considered to be true, which Foucault asserts “is itself relative and mobile;
which permits construction, but within narrow confines” (217)). The most
significant of these three is the procedure of disciplines, because it allows
Foucault to make the following observation: “Within its own limits, each
discipline recognises true and false propositions: but it pushes back a whole
teratology of knowledge beyond its margins… In short, a proposition must fulfil
complex and heavy requirements to be able to belong to the grouping of a
discipline: before it can be called true or false, it must be ‘in the true,’ as
Canguilhelm would say” (218). Clearly, this notion of being “within the true”
limits truly radical progress within disciplines; if an idea is so strange as
to be outside of the true, it, no matter how much validity or usefulness it
caries, will nevertheless be viewed as false.
Finally, Foucault discusses “a
third group of procedures which permit the control of discourses [which
operates by] determining the condition of [discourses'] application, of
imposing a certain number of rules on the individuals who hold them, and thus
of not permitting everyone to have access to them” (219). These final
procedures are rituals, societies of discourse, doctrines, and social
appropriation of discourses. “Ritual defines the qualification which must be
possessed by individuals who speak” (220). “‘[S]ocieties of discourse’ ….
function to preserve or produce discourses, but in order to make them circulate
in a closed space [distribute] them only according to strict rules, and without
the holders being dispossessed by this distribution” (220). “Doctrine… tends to
be diffused, and it is by the holding in common of one and the same discursive
ensemble that individuals (as many as one cares to imagine) define their
reciprocal allegiance” (221). The social appropriation of discourses refers to
the fact that “[a]ny system of education is a political way of maintaining or
modifying the appropriation of discourses [that is, the transference of
discourse(s) from one person / social group to another], along with knowledges
and powers which they carry” (222).
Foucault, then, could possibly be
called a superdeconstructionist, that is, one who deconstructs the social
superstructures in which language (the structure on which deconstruction
focuses and which a pure deconstructionist would see as inclusive of all of
reality) operates. Foucault’s work is more (for lack of a better word)
practical than the seemingly abstract work of most deconstructionist; rather
than a concern for any theoretical underlying linguistic foundation, a careful
eye for observable but often unobserved phenomena controls Foucault’s work, and
it is through this more material grounding that Foucault may have found friends
where Derrida was met with skepticism or frustration.
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