Domhnall

There are practical and concise explanations of discourse and discourse analysis, including good summaries of Foucault’s approach. This is not one of them. If asked to recommend a book by Foucault, I would suggest a different one which I reviewed earlier this year: I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother...: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century by Michel Foucault (Editor), Frank Jellinek, (Translator). It is more fun and more effective as a guide to start thinking in the way Foucault advocates. If asked for a good introduction to Discourse analysis, I suggest this lecture on YouTube: https://youtu.be/F5rEy1lbvlw

All the same, it is almost always a good practice to read major thinkers in their own words and not rely entirely on the accounts given by others and I do not want to drive you away from this book. I cannot say the book is badly written. It does follow a clear and coherent structure, with brief chapters each tackling its own, specific problem area, and collectively undertaking a systematic exploration of the topic. All that makes it manageable and accessible enough. But it suffers from prolixity: writing that is extended to great, unnecessary, or tedious length. Some people may like this, as some people like Proust, but the following really is only a short part of a much longer passage on the same lines:

As has already become clear, I am not trying to say here what I once tried to say in this or that concrete analysis, or to describe the project that I had in mind, the obstacles that I encountered, the attempts that I was forced to abandon, the more or less satisfactory results that I managed to obtain; I am not describing an affective trajectory in order to indicate what should have been and what will be from now on: I am trying to elucidate in itself - in order to measure it and determine its requirements - a possibility of description that I have used without being aware of its constraints and resources; rather than trying to discover what I said and what I might have said, I shall try to reveal, in its own regularity - a regularity that I have not yet succeeded in mastering - what made it possible to say what I did… [pp127, 128]

If you are not discouraged by this excerpt and this self indulgent style then the experience of reading this book will be better than tolerable and it frequently comes alive with insightful passages. The strength of the book is that it gives a definite sense of being enabled to follow Foucault’s line of thought as he works through a succession of issues and challenges, exploring his topic from many angles and seeking to pin down its real significance. It is evident that his conclusions, even at the end of the book, are very provisional and his theory is still incomplete. That need not detract from its value as an exposition of Foucault’s thinking process.

On the other hand this is no textbook. Arguably, it’s intended for well informed readers, to whom explicit references are not necessary, but in any case he pursues his own thinking without pausing to explain history, context or sources to the reader. I think the book can be read on its own terms without having much background in this academic field, but on the other hand I think it will be appreciated better among those with a background that prepares them for the book and enables them to read it critically and with an ability to make relevant comparisons. Anyone who jumps to the conclusion that Foucault came up with all this theory as a solitary genius without influences is simply not reading him properly and indeed also lacks a proper sense of irony.

Some Quotes: they are not brief because he is not brief.

Concerning these large groups of statements with which we are so familiar - and which we call medicine, economics, or grammar - I have asked myself on what their unity could be based. On a full, tightly packed, continuous, geographically well-defined field of objects? What appeared to me were rather series of gaps, intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations. On a definite, normative type of statement? I found formulations of levels that were much too different and functions that were much too heterogenous to be linked together and arranged in a single figure, and to stimulate, from one period to another, beyond individual oeuvres, a sort of great, uninterrupted text. On a well defined alphabet of notions? One is confronted with concepts that differ in structure and in the rules governing their use, which ignore or exclude one another, and which cannot enter the unity of a logical architecture. On the permanence of a thematic? What one finds are rather various strategic possibilities that permit the activation of incompatible themes, or again, the establishment of the same theme in different groups of statement. Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves, of discovering whether… one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, … instead of reconstituting chains of inference (as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy), instead of drawing up tables of differences (as the linguists do), it would describe systems of dispersion. [p41]

...not 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 (langage) and to speech. It is this more that we must reveal and describe. [p54]

By system of formation, then, I mean a complex group of relations that function as a rule: it lays down what must be related, in a particular discursive practice, for such and such an enunciation to be made, for such and such a concept to be used, for such and such a strategy to be organized. To define a system of formation in its specific individuality is therefore to characterize a discourse or a groups of statements by the regularity of a practice. [p82]

The discursive formations: “four groups of rules by which I characterized a discursive formation” [p90]: viz the formation of objects, the formation of enunciative modalities, the formation of concepts and the formation of strategies.

A series of signs will become a statement on condition that it possesses ‘something else’. [p100]

A sentence cannot be non-significant; it refers to something, by virtue of the fact that it is a statement. [p102]

In a novel we know that the author of the formulation is that real individual whose name appears on the title page of the book (we are still faced with the problem of the dialogue, and sentences purporting to express the thoughts of a character; we are still faced with the problem of texts published under a pseudonym; and we know all the difficulties that these duplications raise for practitioners of interpretative analysis when they wish to relate these formulations, en bloc, to the author of the text, to what he wanted to say, to what he thought, in short, to that great silent, hidden, uniform discourse on which they build that whole pyramid of different levels) : but, even apart from those authorities of formulation that are not identical with the individual author, the statements of the novel do not have the same subject when they provide, as if from the outside, the historical and spatial setting of the story, when they describe things as they would be seen by an anonymous, invisible, neutral individual who moves magically among the characters of the novel, or when they provide, as if by an immediate, internal decipherment, the verbal version of what is silently experienced by a character. Although the author is the same in each case, although he attributes them to noone other than himself, although he does not invent a supplementary link between what he is himself and the text that one is reading, these statements do not presuppose the same characteristics for the enunciating subject; they do not imply the same relation between the subject and what is being stated. [p105]

So the subject of a statement should not be regarded as identical with the author of the formulation - either in substance or in function. … It is a particular, vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals… If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be called ‘statement’, it is not therefore because, one day, someone happened to speak them or put them in some concrete form of writing; it is because the position of subject can be assigned. To describe a formulation qua statement does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to); but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it. [p107]

We can now understand the reason for the equivocal meaning of the term discourse, which I have used and abused in many different senses: in the most general and vaguest way, it denoted a group of verbal performances, and by discourse, then, I meant that which was produced (perhaps all that was produced) by the groups of signs. But I also meant a group of acts of formulation, a series of sentences or propositions. Lastly - and it is this meaning that was finally used (together with the first, which served in a provisional capacity) - discourse is constituted by a group of sequences or signs, in so far as they are statements, that is, in so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence. And if I succeed in showing, as I shall try to do shortly, that the law of such a series is precisely what I have so far called discursive formation, if I succeed in showing that the discursive formation really is the principle of dispersion and redistribution, not of formulations, not of sentences, not of propositions, but of statements (in the sense in which I have used this word), the term discourse can be defined as a group of statements that belong to a system of formation; thus I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse. [pp120, 121]

There are verbal performances that are identical from the point of view of grammar (vocabulary, syntax, and the language (langage) in general), that are also identical from the point of view of logic (from the point of view of propositional structure, or of the deductive system in which it is placed) but which are enunciatively different…. ..We must distinguish, then, between linguistic analogy (or translatability), logical identity ( or equivalence) and enunciative homogeneity. It is with homogeneities and those alone that archaeology is concerned. [p162]

Archaeology, and this is one of its principal themes, may thus constitute the tree of derivation of a discourse; that of Natural History for example. It will place at the root, as governing statements, those that concern the definition of observable structures and the field of possible objects, those that describe the forms of description and the perceptual codes it can use, those that reveal the most general possibilities of characteristization and thus opens up a whole domain of concepts to be constructed and, lastly, those that, while constituting a strategic choice, leave room for the greatest number of subsequent options. [p164]

Nothing would be more false than to see in the analysis of discursive formations an attempt at totalitarian periodization, whereby from a certain moment and for a certain time, everyone would think in the same way, in spite of surface differences. say the same thing through a polymorphous vocabulary and produce a sort of great discourse that one could travel over in any direction. On the contrary, archaeology describes a level of enunciative homogeneity that has its own temporal articulations, and which does not carry with it all the other forms of identity and difference that are to be found in language and at this level, it establishes an order, hierarchies, a whole burgeoning that excludes a massive, amorphous synchrony, given totally once and for all. In those confused unities that we call ‘periods’, it reveals, with all their specificity, ‘enunciative periods’ that are articulated, but without being confused with them, upon the time of concepts, on theoretical phases, on stages of formalization and of linguistic development. [p165]

This book was written simply in order to overcome certain preliminary difficulties. … I know how irritating it can be to treat to treat discourses in terms not of the gentle, silent, intimate consciousness that is expressed in them, but of an obscure set of anonymous rules. How unpleasant it is to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice where one is used to seeing, in all its transparency, the expressions of genius and freedom. How unbearable it is, in view of how much of himself everyone wishes to put, thinks he is putting of ‘himself’ into his own discourse, when he speaks. How unbearable it is to cut up, analyse, combine, rearrange all those texts that have now returned from silence, without ever the transfigured face of the author appearing. ‘What! All those words piled up one after another, all those marks made on all that paper and presented to innumerable pairs of eyes, all that concern to make them survive beyond the gesture that articulated them, so much piety expended in preserving them and inscribing them in men’s memories - all that and nothing remaining of the poor hand that traced them, of the anxiety that sought appeasement in them, of that completed life that has nothing but them to survive in? …. Must I suppose that in my discourse I have no survival? And that in speaking I am not banishing my death, but actually establishing it; or rather that I am abolishing all interiority in that exterior that is so indifferent to my life, and so neutral, that it makes no distinction between my life and my death? [pp231,232]