File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1994/F-1, message 37


Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 01:12:27 -0600 (MDT)
From: steven meinking <steven.meinking-AT-m.cc.utah.edu>
To: Foucault List <foucault-AT-world.std.com>
Subject: RE: Discourse



The following is from Foucault's _The Archaeology Of Knowledge_:

"Discursive relations are not, as we can see, internal to discourse:  
they do not connect concepts or words with one another; they do not 
establish a deductive or rhetorical structure between propositions or 
sentences.  Yet they are not relations exterior to discourse, relations 
that might limit it, or impose certain forms upon it, or force it, in 
certain circumstances, to state certain things.  They are, in a sense, at 
the limit of discourse: they offer it objects of which it can speak, or 
rather (for this image of offering presupooses that objects are formed 
independently of discourse), they determine the group of relations that 
discourse must establish in order to speak of this or that object, in 
order to deal with them, name them, analyse them, classify them, explain 
them, etc.  These relations characterize not the language (_langue_) used 
by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but 
discourse itself as a practice." (p. 46)

And:

"This sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from the kind of 
analysis that I have undertaken, _words_ are as deliberately absent as 
_things_ themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any 
reference to the living plenitude of experience.  We shall not return to 
the state anterior to discourse - in which nothing has yet been said, and 
in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light; 
and we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms 
that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to 
remain, at the level of discourse itself.  Since it is sometimes 
necessary to dot the `i's of even the most obvious absences, I will say 
that in all these searches, in which I have still progressed so little, I 
would like to show that `discourses', in the form in which they can be 
heard or read, are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of 
things and words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, 
coloured chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a 
slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a 
language (_langue_), the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I 
would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses 
themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, 
of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to 
discursive practice.  These rules define not the dumb existence of a 
reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of 
objects.  `Words and things' is the entirely serious title of a problem; 
it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces 
its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different 
task.  A task that consists of not - of no longer - treating discourses 
as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or 
representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of 
which they speak.  Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what 
they do is more than use these signs to designate things.  It is this 
_more_ that renders them irreducible to the language (_langue_) and to 
speech.  It is this `more' that we must reveal and describe." (p. 48-49)

Does that help?

Yours in discourse,

Steven Meinking
The University Of Utah
steven.meinking-AT-m.cc.utah.edu

   

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