Michel FoucaultA Discourse on LanguageThe Control of DiscourseSlide 4Slide 5Slide 6Internal SystemsInternal SystemsSlide 9DisciplinesConditions of DeploymentSlide 12Slide 13Philosophical ThemesSlide 15Slide 16Elucidation of DiscourseSlide 18Methodological DemandsSlide 20Michel FoucaultA Discourse on LanguageA Discourse on Language•Foucault's "Discourse on Language" was his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, where he was appointed in 1970, and it serves as a kind of introductory essay for the work he proposed to do, which appears later as The Archaeology of Knowledge. • Foucault's hypothesis:in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and re-distributed 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."The Control of Discourse•Rules of Exclusion (external delimitations)•Discourse operates by "rules of exclusion" concerning what is prohibited. •Specifically, discourse is controlled in terms of objects (what can be spoken of), ritual (where and how one may speak), and the privileged or exclusive right to speak of certain subjects (who may speak).The Control of Discourse•Prohibition•We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, when we like or where we like.•There are three types of prohibition:1. covering objects2. ritual with its surrounding circumstances3. the privileged or exclusive right to speak of a particular subject•These prohibitions interrelate, reinforce and complement each other, forming a complex web, continually subject to modification. •The areas most tightly woven today are politics & sexuality.The Control of Discourse•The prohibitions surrounding speech reveal its links with desire and power.•The opposition of reason and madness•This old division, which used to count mad speech either as wholly irrational, therefore devoid of truth, or revealing a hidden rationality, therefore almost preternaturally true, is still here, but proceeds along different lines--institutions, psychiatrists, etc. The psychiatrist listens to speech invested with desire, crediting itself--for its greater exaltation or its greater anguish--with terrible powers.The Control of Discourse•The opposition between true and false.•Mad speech is outside discourse-neither true nor false within any accepted discourse, but inhabiting a void. That helps to show the "rules of exclusion" that govern discourses and do not-cannot-recognize a whole range of thoughts or speech that do not conform in terms of object, ritual, or right to speak. So, "the opposition between true and false" is a kind of discursive exclusion.Internal Systems •for the control & delimitation of discourse •Here, discourse exercises its own control, rules regarding principles of classification, ordering and distribution. It is as though we were now involved in the mastery of another dimension of discourse: that of events and chance.•Commentary•Foucault discusses the myths and stories that color or shape our national discourses; at the same time, the discourse shapes the ways in which we understand the stories, the "commentary" on the seminal stories-like The Odyssey, for instance.Internal Systems•The author, as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements.•Foucault discusses the author function, again noting that, in the middle ages, "the author was the index of the work's truthfulness. •A proposition was held to derive its scientific value from its author." However, "since the 17thcentury this function has been steadily declining; it barely survives now, save to give a name to a theorem, an effect, an example or a syndrome.”This is the kind of discursive truth that pre-dominates even now, when we care less aboutInternal Systems•The author, as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements.•who authored a scientific study than whether it follows the rules for "true" science. •However, the opposite has been true in literature: where many medieval texts were anonymous, we demand an author for a contemporary work.•The principle does not deny the existence of individuals who write, however when they write, they put on the author-function, and texts are organized respectively around the function, not the individual.Disciplines•This control system is opposed to both the commentary-principle and the author-principle•It is opposed to the author because disciplines are defined by groups of objects, methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, the inter play of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools -- all anonymous systems open to all•It is opposed to commentary in that as opposed to commentary it does not suppose some meaning waiting to be discovered. It is not an identity to be reiterated, but is what is required for the con-struction of new statements. For a discipline to exist, there must be a possibility of formulating-- and of doing so ad infinitum--fresh propositions.Conditions of Deployment•Conditions under which discourse can be employed•Who is qualified to enter into the discourse on a specific subject? •Not all areas of discourse are equally open & penetrable. •Moreover, exchange and communication probably cannot operate independently of complex but restrictive systems.1. Ritual defines the qualifications and role of the speaker, lays down the gestures to be made, the behavior, circumstances and a whole range of signs, and the supposed or imposed significance of the words, their effect on those addressed, the limitation of their constraining validity. Foucault sees religious, juridical and therapeutic, and in some ways political discourses, as barely dissociable from the functioning of ritual.Conditions of Deployment2. Fellowship of discourse, whose function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession being dispossessed by this very distribution. It functions through various schema of exclusivity and disclosure.3. Doctrine (religious, political, philosophical, etc)–Doctrine is opposed to fellowship of discourse, which limits class of speakers; doctrine tends toward diffusion:–doctrinal adherence involves both speaker and spoken, the one through the otherConditions of Deployment3.