An Archeology of Foucault's "Discourse Analysis"

Excerpts from video above:

Discourse analysis, in practice, is asking, "What confluence of factors are determining what is taken seriously in a field, what things are made intelligible and how even fields constructed? Where does psychology end and sociology begin? How do we actually make these kinds of distinctions? Where does Psychopathology end and biology begin, just because one focuses more on the brain than the other isn't? As opposed to the body, isn't the brain part of the body? What has happened to make it so that one of these fields is very clearly established in its own regulative mechanisms in order to differentiate itself from other fields? What has happened there?"

Another way to think about it in relation to, and in contrast to other approaches, like let's say Cultural Studies? Where Cultural Studies might say that there are these things called cultures that we can study, or that people can study to better understand other people, Discourse Analysis would say, "Hmmmm, how do you actually define what a culture is so you can give an example, like American culture? What is that what have we assumed? What characteristics have we assumed about that designation that actually excludes certain people? Who is actually permitted to belong to that thing called "American culture"? Or you can just provide so many other examples.

Like for example, if we think about music. How do we actually define what what "jazz" is compared to Rock and Roll, compared to the Blues? Like, what characteristics have been imbued upon these titles that we use to essentially describe entire Fields, entire Genres? And we always confront within those genres all of these Ideas, these Moments that break away from those expectations, yet we still pull it back in and say, "No, it's part of this Genre, we force it back in.

And this is a sign of just how deeply entrenched we are culturally, that's a joke, and ideologically in this effort to organize and categorize the world and put it into various different boxes and categories so that things can be "understood". Now by understood, what he's really saying is "controlled". Yet this control veils itself as a kind of "understanding".

So discourse analysis just looks at discourse to find out what exactly are the rules and codes that are determining what can be said, and made intelligible, and clumped into various categories and disciplines to comprise Discursive Fields.

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Language is a process of limiting what's possible in the world. Instead of it being a way to arrive at truth which, we have often been led to believe that we use language to arrive towards truth, Nietzsche is saying, "Actually language is just more and more deception. Anytime that we use language, we are just immersing ourselves deeper and deeper into illusion." And in Foucault's words he says, "That we must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things. Discourse puts limits on things. It organizes things."

Nietzsche makes it clear how within certain languages, how there's this this obsession with "gendering" nouns. Like within French there's like "La tab", which is to say that table's a feminine word. But of course, there's nothing "feminine" about a table at all. There's nothing feminine about femininity at all. Instead, these are just terms we use to Clump entire swaths of people into various categories. And this is how things like "race" works, how race is used to designate entire people. To get rid of all variation and differences among them and to just put them into one broad category which is then, and has been used, for some of the most violent means, in all of history, some of the most violent ends throughout all of history. And it comes out through racial discrimination and plays out just daily, especially for people of color in North America and Europe.