aka - The Archeology of Knowledge
Excerpts from Video above:
...Let us jump into Michelle Foucault's "The Discourse on Language" now. Just to begin let's talk about discourse analysis, which can also be called with a little asterisk, a kind of archeology. This is what Foucault develops in "The Archaeology of Knowledge", and simply, discourse analysis analyzes discourse. Really, that's all it is. It looks at discourse, which is language, and all of its' forms, signs, codes, words, statements and asks, "How come these are the things that are being said instead of something else? And so Foucault says that to perform discourse analysis means not just like looking at a context or trying to find an origin point for the development of a kind of discourse, but instead he asks, "What rules and codes and regulations guide and determine what can even be said?" and "What things are made intelligible?" So, for example, if you look at a field or a discipline like psychology or sociology or biology, you'll find that there are a number of specific words that they use, specific statements, specific ways of constructing their arguments that you must accommodate to be taken seriously in that field. But this reveals something of a paradox of these discursive fields; of these disciplines like psychology, biology, or whatever. And that is, that on the one hand to be taken seriously in that field you have to properly accommodate the history that came before you in that field, you have to drop the right names in, you have to use the right language, the right terms, you have to do the right methods, and so on. But, if you just did that, no one would take you seriously. They would say, "Oh, you're just reciting the same stuff over, and over, and over again". No, to actually be taken seriously in that field you must do all of those things, but add a little bit of "newness". Just a little bit now, that "newness" is where the real ambiguity lies. That is, how do we know what things will be accepted in this realm of "newness" because it must escape all those rules and codes and regulations to some extent.
And so, Foucault invites us in the process of doing Discourse Analysis to ask how do these rules and regulations even extend beyond themselves in how they determine a field, and how do they then just delimit, and establish, and kind of Border, what "newness" can emerge? And so discourse analysis in practice is asking, "Who is actually determining", and it's not really who but, "what confluence of factors are determining what is taken seriously in a field? What things are made intelligible, and how even fields are 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, 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 has very clearly established 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, 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, "Hmmm, 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 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 really 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 "Field".
Now that's kind of basically what Discourse Analysis is. Let's jump into "The Discourse on Language", in which he starts out by just meditating, just essentially professing one of his secret desires. And one of his secret desires is that he could just do the thing that you're not supposed to do when you enter a field like philosophy or history or whatever. Where he's like, wouldn't it be great if I could just recite everything that came before me, and I could just disappear into discourse, I could just be one cog in this machine and not have to worry about anything else, or creating "newness" or anything. Isn't this exactly what we strive for, or at least, that we kind of Desire? We don't want to over complicate things as humans, we just want to be simple. We just want to just disappear into the fold of humanity and to just enjoy some kind of comfort found in that. But he says, that this isn't what's expected of him or others, at least expected of him by various institutions like Academia, like Medicine, like Politics, that do not expect people to just recite what came before, but put certain expectations on people to always create "newness". Now I'm using this in scare quotes, in case "quotation marks" for anyone who's just listening, and not seeing, this. Because Foucault is cautious about this idea that "anyone" can really offer "newness" in a field, because newness implies a certain amount of autonomy, a certain amount of Liberation and emancipation from the rules and regulations bound within any discursive field. And so he says, "Well, it seems like this newness, as I said before about Discourse Analysis, is actually quite a controlled thing. And it's really less about "newness" at all."
And so, what's his point here? His point is to say that these institutions love "newness" because they veil the fact, or the celebration in "newness", the celebration of the quote unquote "Genius of somebody who pushes a field forward". All of these things conceal the fact that these institutions only work, these discursive Fields only work, by carefully regulating and limiting what can be said and understood. So it will instead point to these exemplary figures, the Galileos of the world, the Miles Davis' of the world in music and so on, any exemplary figure and say, "Look, we as an institution, I mean we welcome "newness", we welcome autonomy, we welcome brilliance. We are not a system that regulates, that controls. Instead, we encourage."
But, if you know anything about Foucault, he's always cautious of these claims of encouragement, and how people are actually controlled in what he calls, "Their incitement to discourse, in being expected to speak, in being expected to offer themselves". People are actually controlled through that. So this is the distinction that he raises between himself, his own like secret desire to just disappear in history, and how these institutions always pull him out and says, "Look, isn't Foucault so interesting? Look, this Renegade Maverick thinker has been able to essentially push the field forward". But Foucault is totally aware that the only reason he's able to do that is because he has adopted and accommodated these various regulations in one form or other, and he's not totally aware of what they are. It's actually he's inviting us and encouraging us to be vigilant about it, to question what these codes and rules are, through Discourse Analysis or through Archaeology to essentially reveal how we are limited and controlled within discourse.
And this type of control is made plain to see in various different spaces, you walk into to a doctor's office, this is probably an experience many of you can relate to, you walk into a doctor's office and you don't talk right. You feel the power there. You feel like you have to say the right things, yet you have to be true to yourself in describing what symptoms you might have, while always accommodating that doctor now here in this space. This power relation makes it so that you are always an object of the doctor's gaze, you are always some that the doctor is going to encourage to speak so that that doctor can decipher what you're saying and supply you with a narrative about yourself. And of course, there are good things that come out of this, I mean diagnosis, and treatment, and so on. But Foucault is cautious about thinking that this just emerged to make people healthy, or to care for people. And actually, if you look at the history of Medicine, it was a lot more about finding ways to control people, or to use their bodies to test on them for rich people, so that they could get treatments after experimenting on the lowly proletarian class, so that the rich people could get treatments and knowledges to extend their own lives and keep enjoying all of the privileges that they love.
Now, if it was truly a matter of these institutions loving knowledge, loving truth, loving honesty, and so on, do you think that if you walked into a doctor's office and started to diagnose the doctor, that they would say, "Yes, what an exemplary demonstration of knowledge and wisdom, this is amazing, thank you for doing this to me?" I really don't think that that would happen. I think instead the doctor might look at you like there's something wrong with you as though, even demonstrating knowledge, even if you truly possess that knowledge, if it's quote unquote "possible to truly possess that knowledge" but just humor me here, the doctor would look at you like there's something fundamentally wrong with you. So this encourages us to ask, "at what point can knowledge no longer actually perform these functions when encountering the rules and regulations put forth through these various, or within these various institutions?"
And this type of control is not just found in these institutions, it's found within language itself. Think about words, and this is Nietzsche's Point as well, and what Foucault picks up on from Nietzsche, and that if we were truly linguistic animals, if we were animals that relied upon language, then that would mean that we would have a different word for every different noun. If we're working in a system a language that has this designation of "nouns", if they being nouns like in English, we would have a different word for every different thing. So we wouldn't be able to say the word "tree", and have it mean something to somebody else. Because if I say the word "tree", each one of you listening will conjure up a different image of a "tree" in your mind, and there's a kind of violence there, there's a kind of homogenization that goes on there in that it reduces and collapses all differences between trees into this one identity of "the tree", which is exactly what Nietzsche says in his essay "Truth and Lying in a non-moral sense", or "an extra-moral sense" depending on the translation. Where, he says, that 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, Nietzsdche is like 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."
Back to Nietzsche. Nietzsche makes it clear how within certain languages, how there's this this obsession with gendering nouns, like within French there's like "Le tableau", which is to say, "the table", 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 swathes of people into various categories. And this is how things like 'Race' works, how Race is used to designate entire peoples, 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. And that pretty much covers his essay
"Speech has to be controlled for the benefit of Society..."
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