Michel Foucault |
L'Ordre du discours |
| Paris: Gallimard, 1971. |
The challenge: read this text, intertextually with Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture... Read it for its own conditions in the discipline it trusts its readers to accept to stay with the text. See below for the full commentary in terms of my own work.
| je suppose que dans toute société la production du discours est à la fois contrôlée, sélectionnée, organisée et redistributée par un certain nombre de procédures qui ont pour rôle d'en conjurer les pouvoirs et les dangers, d'en maitriser l'évènement aléatoire. (p. 11) | I postulate that, in all societies, the production of discourse is controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a number of procedures the role of which is to conjure the powers and the dangers, so as to master the impredictable event (p. 11) one would not write, perhaps, that the production of discourse is controlled by an "assemblage" of institutions and procedures |
| c'est peut-être quelque chose comme un système d'exclusion (système historique, modifiable, institutionellement contraignant) (p. 16) | it is something like a system of exclusion (historical, changeable, institutionally constraining) (p. 16)
the parenthetical specification is close to my own way of summarizing what "culture" is all about |
| Or cette volonté de vérité, comme les autres systèmes d'exclusion, s'appuie sur un support institutionnel: elle est à la fois renforcée et reconduite par toute une épaisseur de pratiques comme le système des livres, de l'édition, des bibliothèques, comme les sociétés savantes autrefois, les laboratoires aujourd'hui. (p. 19) | This will to truth, like all system of exclusion, relies on an institutional support that is reinforced and re[produced] by a deep range of practices such as the system of books, publishing houses, libraries, as well as professional societies (earlier) and today laboratories (p. 19) |
| Une proposition doit remplir de complexes et lourdes exigences pour pouvoir appartenir à l'ensemble d'une discipline; avant de pourvoir dite vraie ou fausse, elle doit être ... "dans le vrai." (p.36) | A proposal must fulfill complex and heavy requirements to belong to the ensemble of a discipline. Before it can be said to be true or false it must be ... "in the truth" (p. 36) "Being 'in the truth'" could be said to refer to what the ethnomethodologists call "accountability" |
| ... il est probable qu'on ne peut pas rendre compte du rôle positif et multiplicateur (des disciplines), si on ne prend pas en considération leur fonction restrictive et contraignante. (p. 38) | ... it is probable that one cannot account for the positive and multiplying role (of the disciplines) is one does not take into consideration their restricting and constraining functions (p. 38) |
A case for the specifity of an institution/discourse
| L'éducation a beau être, de droit, l'instrument grâce auquel tout individu, dans une société comme la nôtre, peut avoir accès à n'importe quel discours, on sait bien qu'elle suit dans sa distribution, dans ce qu'elle permet et dans ce qu'elle empêche, les lignes qui sont marquées par les distances, les oppositions et les luttes sociales. Tout sytème d'éducation est une manière politique de maintenir ou de modifier l'appropriation des discours, avec les savoirs et les pouvoirs qui'ils emportent avec eux. (p. 46) | Education may be, by right, the instrument through which any individual, in a society like ours, can have access to any discourse, one knows well that it follows
in its distribution, in what it allows and what it prevents, lines marked by the distances, the oppositions, and the social struggles. All systems of education are a political manner to maintain or modified discourses, along with the kinds of knowledge and power that they bring with them. (p. 46)
I would say, of course, that Foucault is talking about schooling, not about education that is implied when he mentions opposition and struggle. To understand this, one needs Bakhtin, de Certeau, etc. |
but no techniques
exigences de méthode:
Quatre notions doivent donc servir de principe régulateur à l'analyse: celle d'événement, celle de série, celle de régularité, celle de condition de possibilité. (p. 55-56)
... l'ensemble "critique" ... met en oeuvre le principe de renversement: essayer de cerner les formes de l'exclusion, de la limitation, de l'appropriation...; montrer comment ils se sont formés, pour répondre à quels besoins, comment ils se sont modifiés et déplacés, quelle contrainte ils ont effectivement exercée, dans quelle mesure ils ont été tournés. (p. 62)
... l'ensemble "généalogique" ... met en oeuvre les trois autres principes: comment se sont formées, au travers, en dépit ou avec l'appui des ces systèmes de contraintes, des séries de discours; quelle a été la norme spécifique de chacune, et quelles ont été leurs conditions d'apparition, de croissance, de variation. (p. 62-63)
la part généalogique de l'analyze ... essaie de saisir [le discours] dans son pouvoir d'affirmation... le pouvoir de constituer des domaines d'objets, à propos desquels on pourra affirmer ou nier des propositions vraies ou fausses. (p. 71)
Foucault uses the term analogically to capture his argument that there is something specific and constraining about the Western European search for truth through science. This search distinguishes among all possible ways of talking about the world, a particular way around which various boundaries are set and maintained. This "will to truth" is "like a system of exclusion." The parenthesis that follows the phrase fascinated me when I read it for the first time in 2002 for I have been using very similar language for a few years when trying to define my take on "culture" when I do not have the space to elaborate. For Foucault, a "system of exclusion" is (a historical, changeable, institutionally constraining system). The issue here is, of course, the multiply reconstituted need, within the pursuit of social scientific truth (I am precisely not being ironic in this context), to face that one cannot understand humanity without taking into account history, change, constraints--in other words cultural facts. In my writing "culture" occupies much of the semantic space occupied by "discourse" in Foucault.
My continuing to use the word "culture," when much of American anthropology is pushing against it, is a deliberate (and somewhat confrontational) choice--particularly to the extent given that I push for a factual, rather than psychological, understanding that goes against most common sense uses. Foucault, however, more or less wittingly (he does use the word 'culture' once in this text), makes the opposite choice and thus never faces the theoretical problems all theories of historical, changing, constraints face: what are we to mean by system, pattern, culture? Foucault accepts the label "structuraliste" and it may be that one is thereby referred implicitly to Lévi-Strauss and Saussure. But Foucault does not mention them: he mentions Dumézil in whose work structuralism may be practiced but is specifically not built into a theory. To get a sense of what Foucault means by discourse one can turn to, besides various parentheses, to his pages on method (p 55ff, 71-72) where he outlines principles and steps. Particularly when he talks about series and discontinuities it is easy to refer to the whole corpus of work on culture, from the "configurations" of Benedict to Dumont aphorism about structures () to Lévi-Strauss on "systeme de tranformations."
But Foucault is more interested in continuing the twentieth century intellectual discursive critique of 19th century European intellectual discourse than in exploring either the theoretical foundations of his own discourse (or the conditions that not only make it possible but make it hegemonic on the day when he is enthroned at the core of French Schooling). He is concerned with the consequences of [culture] for institutional life (and perhaps even policy...). He wants to affirm the reality (consequentiality I would say) or what he writes about (asylums, prisons, sexualities) and what it can do to humanity by focusing on exclusion and constraints that limit what can be said or by whom. Given the genteel pessimism that surrounds this kind of discourse, he only mentions in passing that [culture] can also opens new forms of inclusion (e.g. p. 38). But Foucault does not investigate the "it" that arises historically to close and open possibilities. Thus, perhaps, no "culture"--but "discourse."
By ignoring "culture"--or perhaps more broadly all American contributions to all this, Foucault may have freed himself to develop a different flavor to what is known in America as "cultural relativism." It also prevents him from noting the continuities and discontinuities (and leaves the task open to future writers). Arguably, Foucault (along with Dumont and Lévi-Strauss) rediscovers for France what R. Benedict (and Kroeber, etc.) had discovered for America: the specificity of configurations of borrowed traits, the arbitrariness of institutionalized forms, the key role of language in all this--and the inability of anyone to escape [it] when and where it is active. (p. 55-6)
The continuities are striking. The discontuinuities also. When Ruth Benedict writes Patterns of Culture she emphasizes above all the consequences for the individual person thereby constituting a psychological anthropology in the sense that she challenged her readers to investigate ever more carefully how cultures (..., habitus, etc.) shape selves and make life difficult for certain selves. From toilet traning hypotheses to post-Geertzian ruminations (Varenne 1984) about identity, a discourse expands itself around which a discipline organizes itself. From Benedict to Geertz the emphasis is on the mad person. In Foucault, the emphasis is on madness or, more exactly, on the duality sanity/madness and the arbitrariness of the boundary. Benedict would have understood this but her descendants continued to jump over the institutional analysis.
It is because of this focus on institutions that Foucault (along with Dumont and Bourdieu--not to mention R. Williams) can be seen as a significant expansion on the parallel work of the Boasians and Saussure (Lévi-Strauss?). But Foucault's work is limited in a aprallel fashion to Benedict's: he does not offer a set of techniques to justify either his generalizations about "discourse" (e.g. p. 55) or his argument for any set of texts (propositions, etc.) actually to form a system.
These are the issues that have made me deliberately ignore Foucault during most of my career, particularly starting with the dialogue with Ray McDermott and my confrontation with American pragmatism and ethnomethodology. "Culture as disability" (1995) could have claimed Foucault (or claimed him as an ancestor). Our claim at the end of Successful Failure (1998) that analysts should turn away from the child to understand the conditions of the child is an aspect of the call for culturally-aware institutional analyses that I recognize in the early Benedict (and that Ray McDermott recognizes in Dewey and G.H. Mead) and that gets so much more fully developed in someone like Foucault. However his work is but a more systematic justification for a kind of research to conduct than a guide for how to actually conduct this research in a way that will make it convincing to those who continue to hope to transcend culture.