Foucault's theory of language and discourse

November 21, 2017

Foucault's theory of language and discourse - overview

Foucault is interested in language and discourse and discourse’s relationship to knowledge and power

Foucault’s interest in language was in large measure a reflection of his interest in “the central problem of power.”
Power was not, for Foucault, a fixed and predictable element in social structures.
Nor was it principally something imposed from above through social structures and hierarchies.
Rather, power was a fluid concept closely connected to the strategies of discourse—with the ways we talk, and the systems of talk in which we participate.
Foucault was particularly concerned with the systems of talk within the limits of various disciplines such as medicine or law or business.
Such discourse systems, he maintained, control how we think and how we know.
Power, for Foucault, is a matter of how discourse constrains what we can know.

"episteme" in Foucault's theory

· Foucault believed that discursive texts, understanding the term very broadly, could be

treated as archaeological artifacts, and that what they revealed was what he termed an

archaeology of knowledge.

· Foucault's archaeological study was pursued in the search for the episteme of an age, that is, the totality of discursive practices of a society at a particular point in time.

· As Foucault moved through the various historical strata, he sought to reveal the conditions that allowed people at a particular time to manage the relationship between knowledge and discourse.

· Foucault sought the history of rational possibilities; he wished to understand the underlying potentialities that made certain thoughts possible at a given time in human history.

· An episteme is a way of organizing knowledge by regulating discourse, but it is more.

· It is an underlying and probably largely subconscious set of assumptions and operating hypothesis that make thought and social life possible.

· Foucault was interested in the discursive practices within a culture which provided the framework for knowledge, meaning, and power.

“archaeology of knowledge”

· Foucault described his work as exploring archives, which he defined as the rules which, at a particular time and in a given society “define the limits and forms of the sayable.”

· He understood this work as similar to that of the archaeologist digging through the strata revealing the physical or material life of earlier societies.

· Foucault sought the symbolic or linguistic lives of earlier societies.

More about Foucault:

Foucault's Concept of Heterotopia
Michel Foucault - "The Subject and Power"

Foucault - "Of Other Spaces" - summary
Michel Foucault: Panopticism - Summary
Foucault's Panopticism explained
Michel Foucault and Marxism
Foucault, Structuralism and post-structuralism