Foucault and Discourse

Another problem it seems to me is that in recognising the need to identify the linguistic realisations of intertextuality in verbal texts, we have been less brave in making the next step and learning how to link the traces we thus identify with orders of discourse which are not specifically verbal. Foucault's work on discourse insisted that orders of discourse, assemblages or mechanisms, are what Deleuze would later describe as 'mushy mixtures of the visible and the articulable' (Deleuze 1986: 38). In Discipline and Punish, as Deleuze points out(1986:33) Foucault raises the two problems that could not be raised while the statement remained tied to knowledge and to discourse (see Threadgold 2000) as it did in The Archaeology of Knowledge and tends to do in CDA and Cultural Studies. Between penal law as a formation of statements, a form of expression, which articulates criminality, and the prison, a new way of acting on bodies, a form of content which has its own statements and regulations, but is concerned with whatever is visible, a visual assemblage, both defined by 'Panopticism', there is a mutual presupposition, but 'how do the assemblages, adjustments and interpenetrations of the two forms come about?' (Deleuze 1986: 33). Foucault calls the immanent cause of this coming together a diagram or a cartography, an abstract machine that makes no distinction between 'content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation' (Deleuze 1986: 34). The example of a diagram is 'modern disciplinary societies where power controls the whole field' (Deleuze 1986: 34), the diagram is 'like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations' (Deleuze 1986: 37). In the case of the prison and the penal law it is panopticism which diagrams the assemblage and is produced as relations of force within the very assemblages which it maps.

It is not a relationship of form and content, expression and meaning: the prison is not the visible and silent content, meaning, of the audible form/expression that is the penal law. The language and the context, if you like, are not isomorphic as they were, for example, in Halliday's theory of social semiotic. Rather, as Deleuze has explained, drawing on Hjelmslev's more complex understanding of the content and expression planes of language (1986: 47), both the form and the content have a form and a substance: the prison as content has a form, the prison architecture, and a substance, the prisoners, while the penal law as expression has a discursive form which produces the substance delinquency. The relations between the two lie in their heterogeneous realisations of optical and panoptical procedures, the relations of power which diagram, map their functions and institutional force. The 'encounters' between what linguistics might have called a form and a content, the fact that they may appear to co-adapt, are a function of the multiple 'dependencies' that may exist within a discursive field, not the result of a semantics.

There is a good deal of excellent work which has taken these more complex understandings of Foucault as its framework. There is no attempt to be exhaustive in the few examples that follow. Carmen Luke's remarkable book Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood (1989) is one example which takes into account and explores the complexities in Foucault's own work. Hunter's (1988) Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education and his essay 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies' (1992) emerge from close engagement with the early and late Foucault respectively. None of these uses any form of critical discourse analysis to do its work. Dorothy Smith in her Texts, Facts and Femininity (1990) is another who understands Foucault, although her understandings are certainly not limited to his work: 'Analysis focuses on ... how the reader operates the text to enter the objectified modes of knowing characteristic of the relations of ruling. ... The focus of enquiry is the textually vested versions of the word that are constituents of the relations of ruling.' (1989: 5f.). Smith's work is informed by ethnomethodology, Marx, conversational analysis and poststructuralist forms of discourse analysis. It attempts to rewrite sociology from the perspective of the embodied subject, with an insider's knowledge 'of the social organisation of the actual practices that bring actualities of society into being' (1989: 10). Here is a feminist sociologist who understands what Foucault had to offer and makes her own located use of that work. She does not use a recognisable methodology as such but an eclectic and very efficient method which has connections with much good work in CDA of a similarly eclectic kind.

In CDA itself, the attempt to think and theorise relations between semiotic systems, or to theorise 'multi-modal' discourse becomes more common but is still regularly more dependent on semiotics and on understandings of language as social semiotic than it is on Foucault's work or on theories of the body. This is not a criticism but it does mean that Foucault's particular take on these things has not yet been fully explored in CDA. The work of Kress/van Leeuwen (1996), of van Leeuwen (1999): and Kress/van Leeuwen (2001) is the most significant in the CDA field itself. My own work on performance (1997: 118-133; 2002) is shaped rather differently because of my focus on the body and the making of the embodied performance text in rehearsal. Fairclough (1995b: chs. 4 and 5) in exploring media texts presents a case for discourse as realised in many different semiotic forms, for analysing texts/orders of discourse, and for analysing discourse practice, the practices of production and consumption, in this case, of media texts. There are parallels here with my own account above of my uses of intertextuality, but the languages are very different. However this account does reflect some of Foucault's complexity. This is again a very different kind of analysis to Threadgold (1997: chs. 7 and 8) which attempted to track a discourse of race across a hundred years of Australian history in the transformations and transpositions of a single narrative in everyday talk, media representations, legal practice, literature, literacy classrooms, tourism and film. In one sense what I was then trying to do was to show how 'race', and the relations of power inherent in that, diagrammed this complex assemblage of practices and texts, how it mapped their functions and institutional force, how hugely stable the assemblage was and how resistant to the attempts to rewrite it in non-racist ways. This still forces me to ask whether 'making visible' and 'rewriting the story' can be a sufficient politics for either CDA or for poststructuralist discourse analysis. And much as they share a politics, it seems to me they also share this problem, of still not engaging sufficiently with the materiality of bodies and worlds. This returns us to Wodak's question about what mediates text/context relations and how much context to include and how in CDA? I will return here to the terms citation, iterability and performativity as currently used in cultural studies and many other places including Barker/Galasinski (2001) at the beginning of this paper to explain what I mean.

Performativity

The term performativity has recently come to be used in a wide range of contexts to refer to what might earlier have been referred to as the performance of the self. In its current uses however the term refers specifically to a gendered, and sometimes a raced, classed or ethnic performance of the self, and it connotes feminist work on the body and embodied subjectivity as well as carrying the implication that such a self is socially constructed and might therefore be constructed differently. As it is currently understood, performativity is derived most directly from the work of feminist scholar Judith Butler, where one of the central concerns was to understand the relationship between speech and act, act and identity, and specifically to understand how the connections between certain acts and certain forms of speech, habitually enacted together, come to constitute a compulsory performance (an embodiment) of heterosexuality. The relationship between performativity and performance, somewhat blurred in the formulations above, is also in need of clarification. Performativity in Butler's work derives from the work of J.L Austin (1976) and is a philosophical/linguistic concept. Performance is primarily a theatrical (Parker/Sedgewick 1995) term but one which has been used and useful in sociology and anthropology to describe the 'performance' of everyday life as well as the enactment of ritual, ceremony and so on (Schechner 1985; Turner 1987). Clarification of the relations between these terms requires some history and some investigation which goes back a long way before Judith Butler's work made the term performativity so popular in cultural studies.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 887