I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistribute according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.
[...]
How could one reasonably compare the constraints of truth with those other divisions, arbitrary in origin if not developing out of historical contingency - not merely modifiable but in a state of continual flux, supported by a system of institutions imposing and manipulating them, acting not without constraint, not without an element, at least, of violence?
[...]
It is, undoubtedly, a historically constituted division. For, even with the sixth century Greek poets, true discourse - int he meaningful sense - inspiring respect and terror, to which all were obliged to submit, because it held sway over all and was pronounced by men who spoke as of right, according to ritual, meted out justice and attributed to each his rightful share; it prophesied the future, not merely announcing what was going to occur, but contributing to its factual event, carrying men along with it and thus weaving itself into the fabric of fate. And yet, a century later, the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was, nor in what it did: it lay in what was said. The day dawned when truth moved over from the ritualized act - potent and just - of enunciation to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form, its object and its relation to what it referred to. A division emerged between Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false; it was a new division for, henceforth, true discourse was no longer considered precious and desirable, since it had ceased to be discourse linked to the exrercise of power. And so the Sophists were routed.
[...]
But this will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, relies on institutional support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy - naturally - the booksystem, publishing, libraries, such as the learned societies in the past, and laboratories today. But it is probbly even more profoundly accompanied by the manner in which knowledge is employed in a society, the way in which it is exploited, divided and, in some ways, attributed. It is worth recalling at this point, if only symbolically, the old Greek adage, that arithmetic should be taught in democracies, for it teaches relations of equality, but that geometry alone should be reserved for oligarchies, as it demonstrates the proportios within inequality.
[...]
Of the three great systems of exclusion governing discourse - prohibited words, the division of madness and the will to truth - I have spokent at greatest length concerning the third. With good reason: for centuries, the former have continually tended toward the latter; because this last has, gradually, been attempting to assimilate the others in order both to modify them and to provide them with a firm foundation.
[...]
in what we generally refer to as commentary, the difference between primary text and secondary text plays two interdependent roles. On the one hand, it permits us to create new discourses ad infinitum: the top-heaviness of the original text, its permanence, its status as discourse ever capable of being brought up to date, the multiple or hidden meanings with which it is credited, the reticence and wealth it is believed to contain, all this creates an open possibility for discussion. On the other hand, whatever the techniques employed, commentary's only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down.
[...]
Can we see in this narrative [Shogun's story] the expression of one of the great myths of European culture? To the monopolistic, secret knowledge of oriental tyranny, Europe opposed the universal communication of knowledge and the infinitely free exchange of discourse.
[...]
Doctrinal adherence, however, involves both speaker and the spoken, the one through the other. The speaking subject is involved through, and as a result of, the spoken, as is demonstated by the rules of exclusion and the rejection mechanism brought into play when a speaker formulates one, or many, inassimilable utterences; questions of heresy and unorthodoxy in no way arise out of fantical exaggration of doctrinal mechanisms; they are afundamental part of them. But conversely, doctrine involves the utterences of spakers in the sense that doctrine is, permanently, the sign, the manifestation of the instrument of a prior adherence - adherence to a class, to a social or racial status, to a nationality or an interest, to a struggle, a revolt, resistance or acceptance. Doctrine links individuals to certain types of utterance while consequently barring them from all others. Doctrine effects a dual subjection, that of speaking subjects to discourse, and that of discourse to the group, at least virtually, of speakers.
Finally, on a much broader scale, we have to recognize the great cleavages in what one might call the social appropriation of discourse. Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a sociaty like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battlelines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.
[...]
Ever since the exclusion of the activity and the commerce of the sophists, ever since their paradoxes were muzled, more or less securely, it would seem that Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured that to discourse should merely as a certain interjection between speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs and rendered visible by words, or, conversely, that the structures of language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain effect of meaning.
[...] the task of the founding subject is to animate the empty forms of language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within them. Beyond time, he indicates the field of meanings - leaving history to make them explicit - in which propositions, sciences, and deductive ensembles ultimately find their foundation. In this relationship with meaning, the founding subject has sings, marks, tracks, letter at his disposal. But he does not need to demonstrate these passing through the singular instance of discourse.
[...]
Whether it is the philosophy of a founding subject, a philosophy of iriginating experience or a philosophy of univesal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange, this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier.
[...] I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thining rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to ablish the sovereignty of the signifier.
[...]
Beyond them [the instant and the subject], independent of them, we must conceive - between these discontinuous series of relations which are not in any order of succession (or simultaneity) within any (or several) consciousnesses - and we must elaborate - outside of philosophies of tiem and subject - a theory of dicontinuous systematization. Finally, if it is true that these discursive, discontinuous series have their regularity, within certain limits, it is clearly no longer possible to establish mechanically causal links or an ideal necessity among their contitutive elements. We must accept the introduction of chance as a category in the production of events. There again, we feel the absence of a theory enabling us to conceive the links between chance and thought.
[...]
I will take first of all the age of the Sophists and its beginning with Socrates, or at least with Platonic philosophy, and I shall try to see how effective, ritual discourse, charged with power and peril, gradually arranged itself into a disjunction between rue and false discourse. I shall next take the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the age which, above all in England, saw the emergence of an observational, affirmative science, a certain natural philosophy inseparable, too, from religious ideology - for this certainly constituted a new form of the will to knowledge. In the third place, I shall turn to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the great founding acts of modrn science, as well as the formation of industrial society and the accompanying positivist ideology. Three slices out of the morphology of our will to knowledge; three staging posts in our philistinism.
I would also lie to consider the same qestion from quite another angle. I would like to measure the effect of a discourse claiming to be scientific - medical, psychiatric or sociological - on the ensemble of practices and prescriptive discourse of which the penal code consists. The study of spychiatric skills and their role in the penal system will serve as a point of departure and as basic material for this analysis.
[...]
One could also conceive a study of discourse concerning heredity, such as it can be gleaned, dispersed as it was until the beigniing of the twentieth century, among a variety of disciplines, observations, techniques and formulae; we would be concerned to show the process whereby these series eventually became subsumed under the single system, now recognized as epistemologically coherent, known as genetics. This is the work Francois Jacob has just completed, with unequalled brilliance and scholarship.
[...]
At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation - certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier.
And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension fo theory call all this - if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them - structuralism.
///
From THE DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE by Michel Foucault, in
Social Science Information (10), trans. Rupert Swyer, used by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., London (c) 1971 International Social Science Council/Le Conseil Internaitonal des Sciences Sociales.
Labels: Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language