Explaining What Foucault Means by Discourse 

Discourse is a concept to which Foucault refers repeatedly; a concept that Foucault repeatedly discusses, investigates, and re-visits; a concept whose meaning and significance change, shift, and evolve.

If the thinking-historicizing of Foucault is to be divided into the “archeological period” of the 1960s, the “genealogical period” of the 1970s, and finally the “ethical period” of the 1980s, and if the concept of discourse is to be read through and over against these three periods, how the concept of discourse evolved and developed and how its meaning and significance shifted and changed become apparent.

Discourse in the “Archeological Period”

Foucault’s thinking-historicizing in the 1960s focused on studying and investigating the historical emergence and transformation of madness in History of Madness, medicine in The Birth of the Clinic, and biology, economics, and linguistics in The Order of Things. The Archeology of Knowledge is Foucault’s own endeavor to critique and correct his earlier studies. 

This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilization, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

The Archeology of Knowledge is also Foucault’s attempt at rendering systematic and understandable the methods from which his earlier studies emerge. That which lies at the heart of this systemizing and at the heart of this attempt at bringing into a system is the concept of discourse, that is, the concept of discursive formations. 

Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Discourse is a group of statements, connected to each other, associated with each other, among which specific regularities hold and dominate. Although discourse is a set of statements, it is not language, but rather a practice.

The totality of certain connected and correlated statements, in which specific regularities dwell, makes up a discourse. A discourse’s archive, Foucault says, is the sum of these connected and correlated statements. To this archive belongs a power allowing it to determine and decide both the possibility or the impossibility of any new statement in the discourse and those who can or cannot speak these new statements. 

A discourse is never invariable, stable, and fixed. A discourse is brought together by all the previous statements and rendered different and altered by every new statement welcomed in it and entering into it or emerging from out of it and toward it. Discourses are incomplete and fragmentary; they come about, undergo transformations from which they arise other, different, or altered, and pass from sight or come to an end by disappearing. 

Discourses— not the apparent and expected continuities of books, authors, or oeuvres—are the factors deciding, governing, and organizing the scientific and that which is considered to be a discipline. Once this is noticed and recognized, the relations linking the statements together can be observed, unsettling and displacing the books and oeuvres of the authors and the authors themselves. 

Discourse is constituted by a group of sequences of 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 a discursive formation, if I succeed in showing that this 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 the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Discourse, Foucault says, establishes a “network of statements”, which in turn “forms a complex web”. Statements first become powerful, meaningful, and effective through this network. 

The associated field that turns a sentence or a series of signs into a statement, and which provides them with a particular context, a specific representative content, forms a complex web. It is made up first of all by the series of other formulations within which the statement appears and  forms one element (the network of spoken formulations that make up a conversation, the architecture of a demonstration, bound on the one side by its premises and on the other by its conclusion, the series of affirmations that make up a narrative). The associated field is also made up of all the formulations to which the statement refers (implicitly or not), either by repeating them, modifying them, or adapting them, or by opposing them, or by commenting on them; there can be no statement that in one way or another does not reactualize others (ritual elements in a narrative; previously accepted propositions in a demonstration; conventional sentences in a conversation). The associated field is also made up of all the formulations whose subsequent possibility is determined by the statement, and which may follow the statement as its consequence, its natural successor, or its conversational retort (an order does not open up the same enunciative possibilities as the propositions of an axiomatic or the beginning of a narrative). Lastly, the associated field is made up of all the formulations whose status the statement in question shares, among which it takes its place without regard to linear order, with which it will fade away, or with which, on the contrary, it will be valued, preserved, sacralized, and offered, as a possible object, to a future discourse.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Discourse neither presupposes nor requires as a precondition of its truth, coherence, or possibility a self-contained cogito or a central and dominant subject. Discourse is itself what decides and determines who can carry out the speaking, how speaking is carried out, the possible and the impossible in the spoken, and the degree according to which what is being spoken either holds sway or is hollowed out. This is why discourse brings about an opening through which critiquing the philosophy of the subject becomes a possibility, and renders possible a turning away from the subject as that around which and from which meaning, truth, and significance revolve and arise. Discourses thus define, establish, decide, and delimit what forms knowledge; they decide and define what is to be seen as knowledge.  

Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain constituted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific status (the knowledge of psychiatry in the nineteenth century is not the sum of what was thought to be true, but the whole set of practices, singularities, and deviations of which one could speak in psychiatric discourse); knowledge is also the space in which the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse (in this sense, the knowledge of clinical medicine is the whole group of functions of observation, interrogation, decipherment. recording, and decision that may be exercised by the subject of medical discourse); knowledge is also the field of coordination and subordination of statements in which concepts appear, and are defined, applied and transformed (at this level, the knowledge of Natural History, in the eighteenth century, is not the sum of what was said, but the whole set of modes and sites in accordance with which one can integrate each new statement with the already said); lastly, knowledge is defined by the possibilities of use and appropriation offered by discourse (thus, the knowledge of political economy, in the Classical period, is not the thesis of the different theses sustained, but the totality of its points of articulation on other discourses or on other practices that are not discursive). There are bodies of knowledge that are independent of the sciences (which are neither their historical prototypes, nor their practical by-products), but there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by the knowledge that it forms.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Discourses are thus made up of intricate networks or nexuses of statements that render knowledge possible, that decide and determine the possibility and the impossibility of speaking, hearing, and understanding within a certain discourse, and that decide those who can carry out the authoritative speaking within that discourse, that is, the speaking that must be heard and understood. 

Discourses precede the statements, welcoming some new statements whilst refusing and rejecting others; they are the sphere through which the existence of any given statement is rendered either possible or impossible, yet they remain discontinuous, fleeting, and conditioned by a specific history. This conditionedness by history renders discourses alterable and opens them up to their own fading away and disappearance.

Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time; it is, from beginning to end, historical – a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the midst of the complicities of time.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Discourse After the “Archeological Period” 

The Archeology of Knowledge, according to Foucault, is an endeavor to “correct and criticize” the methods and attempts of his earlier studies. This endeavor to “correct and criticize” was itself later revisited, criticized, and corrected by Foucault. 

That is, The Archeology of Knowledge was not Foucault’s final word; it was not Foucault’s last attempt at rethinking the notion of discourse. Foucault’s rethinking of discourse took place by rendering discourse less central in his thinking-historicizing; that is, discourse undergoes a transformation in Foucault’s “genealogical” and “ethical” periods from which it arises not as that from which every analysis of history should emerge in its organizing and framing.

This turning away from the central role of discourse in analysis, organization, and framing can even be noticed in The Archeology of Knowledge itself. For instance, toward the end of The Archeology of Knowledge, the complex theme of repression appears, expecting and hinting at the first volume of The History of Sexuality, where Foucault argues that “the repressive hypothesis” mischaracterizes and misapprehends the sexual discourse.

Another topic, toward which Foucault’s later works will also be directed, that appears in the closing chapters of The Archeology of Knowledge is sexuality, about which Foucault says that “the archeological description of sexuality” offers itself as a possible way in which sexuality could be investigated. 

Such an archaeology would show, if it succeeded in its task, how the prohibitions, exclusions, limitations, values, freedoms, and transgressions of sexuality, all its manifestations, verbal or otherwise, are linked to a particular discursive practice. It would reveal, not of course as the ultimate truth of sexuality, but as one of the dimensions in accordance with which one can describe it, a certain ‘way of speaking’; and one would show how this way of speaking is invested not in scientific discourses, but in a system of prohibitions and values. An analysis that would be carried out not in the direction of the episteme, but in that of what we might call the ethical.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

The Archeology of Knowledge also contains problems, questions, and tensions that will oblige Foucault to revisit and think both the concept of discourse in the text and the text itself. One of these problems is how discourses and non-discursive reality are related to each other and how they come together so that the dominance of the dominant could become possible in the first place. 

That is, The Archeology of Knowledge is an attempt at saying what discourses are, leaving unsaid and unquestioned the significance of non-discursive reality and non-discursive objects. The appearance of power relations in Foucault’s later works is an attempt, distancing discourse from its central role in organizing, analyzing, and framing, at bringing non-discursive reality into any decision regarding the dominance of the dominant. The Archeology of Knowledge itself implies, hints at, and expects the appearance of power relations in Foucault’s later works. 

In this sense, discourse ceases to be what it is for the exegetic attitude: an inexhaustible treasure from which one can always draw new, and always unpredictable riches; a providence that has always spoken in advance, and which enables one to hear, when one knows how to listen, retrospective oracles: it appears as an asset – finite, limited, desirable, useful – that has its own rules of appearance, but also its own conditions of appropriation and operation; an asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only in its ‘practical applications’), poses the question of power; an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle.

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge

Hence, discourse itself, according to Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge, contains a site reserved for the appearance of power relations. knowledge itself as that toward which The Archeology of Knowledge is directed in its investigating and questioning will re-emerge in Foucault’s later works in its togetherness with power; that is, as power/knowledge.

Foucault’s later turning toward non-discursive reality, non-discursive elements, or non-discursive objects should not mean that there is a complete turning away from or a turning against discourse. Discourse remains a dominant path through which history and the historical could be reached and hence investigated, questioned, and understood. This turning toward non-discursive elements merely means that discourse has been rendered less central in analysis, questioning, and investigating. 

In his later works, Foucault refers to discourse merely as language, written or spoken, and hence as that through which analysis and investigation could possibly occur, but not as the most important path delivering into a clear understanding of the political or the social. The first volume of The History of Sexuality, which is itself an attempt at investigating and analyzing discourse or, more specifically, sexual discourse, is where this shift could be clearly noticed.

Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformations, things appear in a very different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion… At the level of discourses and their domains, however, practically the opposite phenomenon occurred. There was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex-specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward… But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1

As this passage makes clear, discourse undergoes a transformation rendering it one aspect in a field, in which discourses are placed over against institutions, brought together by the operation of power relations. Foucault says that sexuality itself “appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population”.

Sexual discourse is pervaded by power relations. An example rendering apparent and confirming this pervasion is how repression and resistance occur. According to Foucault in The History of Sexuality, the argument that repressed sexuality and the repressed in sexuality could only be freed by engaging in more discourses about sexuality is problematic because by engaging in more open discourses about sexuality, it becomes more controlled, defined, and governed. 

Engaging in more discourses about sexuality renders the already available, the already repressive, discourses double and multiple. This rendering double and multiple brings about more repression, control, and normalization. That is, to engage in more discourses is to re-affirm and re-introduce the normalization allowing repression to take place and hold sway in the first place, the normalization that should be resisted. Hence:

The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hypothesis are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century. Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge was formed as a result of this linkage? The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1

As this passage says, discourses are now sustained by regimes of power-knowledge. 

For more articles on Foucault’s philosophy, visit this webpage.