History of Feminist Theories and Movements
Women's Studies 539
Notes to Michel Foucault's "The Discourse on Language"
Kari Boyd McBride

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 prolegomenon for the work he proposed to do, which appears later as The Archaeology of Knowledge. Page numbers in the following notes refer to the version of this essay in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 215-37.

He would like to be "freed from the obligation to begin" so that "speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path-a slender gap-the point of its possible disappearance" (215). F. picks up this thread at the end of the lecture, where he makes a gracious nod to Hyppolite, the translator and explainer of Hegel, whom he credits with defining much contemporary philosophical discourse. But F. is also commenting here on two of his central concepts, "discourse" and "the author function." Heidegger had said that "language speaks through us," that it is not something that we control or construct, but rather that the forms and meanings of language are already there when we open our mouths to speak, and we must use those already-existing forms to say anything at all. F. will build on this concept by suggesting that not just language but entire discourses provide the limits to what can and can't be said or understood. As a result, F. calls into question the role of the author. If "language speaks through us," an author isn't entirely in control of what s/he writes. So F. prefers the term "author function" to the romantic, humanist, modern notion of the author. In addition, not everything an author writes is "authored," so to speak; when Sandra Cisneros writes a grocery list,  we don't consider that to be "authored" by her. This is another example of how it's not the "author" that produces the oeuvre but rather the oeuvre that produces the author, or rather, the author function. So, in these opening paragraphs, F. is illustrating the way in which this particular "discourse" on language is capable of producing him as author. In more general terms for F. it is discourse as a medium for power that produces subjects or, as he puts it, "speaking subjects," which, for him, are the only kind there are.

<>F. further notes that"in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its power and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality" (216). In this sense, we might think of discourse as a kind of Althusserian ideology, a conceptual framework by means of which we make sense of the world through languages, images and signs, all of which "evade [the] . . . awesome materiality" of society, of the world--of life. 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 ay speak), and the privileged or exclusive right to speak of certain subjects (who may speak).

<>F. is led to some of these conclusions by considering the way in which the words of madmen was considered in the middle ages: their words "either fell into a void-rejected the moment they were proffered-or else men deciphered in them a naive or cunning reason . . . . At all events, whhther excluded or secretly invested with reason, the madman's speech did not strictly exist" (217). 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.

<>F. sees this kind of discursive system arising with Plato, and he sees a break between the 6th C BCE world of Hesiod, when one could identify a true statement based on who spoke it, "as of right, according to ritual" (218), and the 4th C BCE Plato, when "the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was, nor in what it did: it lay in what was said." This kind of discourse is produced by a "will to knowledge" or "will to power," wherein discourses "discipline" us: "a will to knowledge emerged which . . . sketched out a schema of possible, observable, measurable and classifiable objects; a will to knowledge which imposed upon the knowing subject-in some ways taking precedence over all experience-a certain position, a certain viewpoint, and a certain function . . . " (218). So the will to knowledge or truth or power has a history-"of a range of subjects to be learned, the history of the functions of the knowing subject," etc. (219).

And, like ideology that mystifies social and economic relationships, discourse "is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it" (219). That is, all discourses (like biology, or psychology, or philosophy, or feminism) exist to express certain truths (their "will to truth"). But after we have learned how to think and speak in the terms and truths of any discourse, we lose sight of the fact that those truths are constructed through a discourse, and they seem to exist independent of the insights and limits of the discourse that created them.

<>To understand this concept, we might think of the way physiological and psychological health and disease wwere theorized in the ancient and medieval West. The theory of humours (a discourse about the body) held that particular organs produced substances that had to be in balance in order for a person to be healthy. The liver produced blood, which made a person courageous; the gall bladder produced yellow bile, which made one angry; the spleen produced black bile, which made one despondent and lethargic; and the lungs and brain produced phlegm, which made one calm. When the humours were in balance, one was healthy in body and mind. When out of balance, the humours produced disease. If one had just enough yellow bile in relationship to the other humours, one would appropriately defend oneself and others. But too much bile made one intemperate, violent, touchy, etc. The physicians of the ancient and medieval worlds practiced medicine based on these principles, bleeding the person with too much blood, purging the person with too much bile, etc. Once this view of the body was widely accepted, it became almost impossible to think outside the humoural model, even when treatments were unsuccessful or one failed to find black bile in a spleen or phlegm in the brains. The discourse, which emerged in the first place to express a theory about the functioning of the body (the will to truth) obscured the theoretical and discursive nature of the truth. The truth came to seem absolute, universal--a Truth.

Similarly, there is a tendency today to understand the body and disease in terms of the discourses of genetics and Darwin's theories of evolution. Even when the evidence suggests that genetics doesn't explain everything--as, for instance, when clones do not turn out exactly the same as the genetically-identical parent, or when not all females are "feminine," or when creatures who are nearly genetically identical develop differing behaviors or social structures--geneticists tend to continue to look for explanations in genetics rather than developing a new theory (discourse) that would credit a combination of agents (genetics plus environment, for instance). Furthermore, genetics is seen to explain all behavior. Hence the field of sociobiology, which attempts to account for all human behaviors, including moral and ethical thinking as well as social roles and structures (subordinate females and dominanat males) through genetics. The limits of the discourse--the very discursive nature of the discourse--are obscured, and its truths seem to exist independent of the discourse. The field of genetics seems to be Truth for all time and all situations rather than a hypothesis or theory or discourse that attempts to account for the evidence, a theory/discourse that should be set aside or at least retheorized to account for some situations.

F. 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 (220-21).

F. elaborates on the author function, 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 seventeenth century 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" (222). This is the kind of discursive truth that predominates even now, when we care less about 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.

Some of the most important contemporary discourses are "disciplines," by which he particularly means academic disciplines that discipline our thinking. Disciplines are "opposed to . . . the author, because disciplines are defined by groups of objects, methods, . . . the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system . . . without there being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them" (222).

"A discipline is not the sum total of all the truths that may be uttered concerning something; it is not even the total of all that may be accepted by virtue of some principle of coherence and sytematisation, concerning some given fact or proposition." Rather, "disciplines consist of errors as well as truths, errors that are in no way residuals, or foreign bodies, but having their own positive functions and their own valid history" (223).

Furthermore, for a (true) "proposition to belong to botany or pathology, it must fulfil certain conditions, in a stricter and more complex sense than that of pure and simple truth." So, since the end of the 17th C, for a proposition to be "botanical, [it] had to be concerned with the visible structure of plants, with its system of close and not so close resemblances, or with the behavior of its fluids (but it could no longer retain, as had still been the case in the sixteenth century, references to its symbolic value or to the virtues and properties accorded it in antiquity)" (223). A new discourse (genetics) and its truths had superseded the earlier discourse and its truths. The earlier discourse is henceforth seen as offering lies rather than truths. and within a short space of time, the new discourse ceases to be seen as a discourse, theory, hypothesis--indeed, it ceases to be "seen" at all, and the Truth of genetics is all there is.

Outside the discipline of science are "immediate experience" and "imaginary themes" which are neither true nor false but, in a sense, nonexistent (223). Also outside disciplines are ideas that are later thought to be true, like Mendel's theory of heredity (genetics) (224). So disciplines "constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits." Furthermore, only some speaking subjects may deploy certain discourses: "none may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he has satisfied certain conditions or if he is not, from the outset, qualified to do so. More exactly, not all areas of discourse are equally open and penetrable; some are forbidden territory . . . while others are vitually open to the winds and stand, without any prior restrictions, open to all" (224-25). There are even "'fellowships of discourse', (like universities) whose function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations . . . " (225).

"Doctrine, on the other hand, tends to diffusion: in the holding in common of a single ensemble of discourse that individuals, as many as you wish, could define their reciprocal allegiance" (226). Thus "[d]octrine links individuals to certain types of utterance while consequently barring them from all others. Doctrine effects a dual subjection, [the subjections] of speaking subjects to discourse, and [the subjection] of discourse to the group . . . of speakers."

"Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every education system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it" (226).

The founder of a system of thought "animates the empty forms of language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within them. Beyond time, he indicates the field of meanings-leaving history to make them explicit-in which propositions, sciences, and deductive ensembles ultimately find their foundation" (227-28).

<>F. says that "originating experience plays an analogous role." I take "originating experience" to mean a formative experience that originates a new train of thought--perhaps a mystical experience or one of those "Aha!" moments--when one has an original/originating experience, "even before it could be grasped in the form of a cogito, prior significations, in some ways already spoken, were circulating in the world, scattering it all about us, and from the outset made possible a sort of primitive recognition." (228). So whether it's a case of a founding subject or an originating experience experienced by a subject, the building blocks of discourse-"prior significations"-are always already there waiting to be put together to make meaning of what we think or experience. And this deploying of signs produces the subject. So . . .  "Whether it is the philosophy of a founding subject, a philosophy of originating experience or a philosophy of universal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange, this writing, this reading never involve[s] anything but signs. Discourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier" (228).

We are a civilization absolutely dependent on discourse-logophilia seems to define us (228). But F. suggests that behind the logophilia is logophobia, a fear that, without all these discursive "taboos, . . . barriers, thresholds and limits," discourse might be dangerous and uncontrollable--a fear "of everything that could possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered even and perilous in [discourse], of the incessant, disorderly buzzing of discourse" (228, 229).

To counter this fear (and, presumably, our subjection to disciplines and discourses), we must "question our will to truth; . . . restore to discourse its character as an event; . . . [and] abolish the sovereignty of the signifier," the word or image that merely points to the event (the aha! moment of insight) but is not the event (229). We can do this through these tasks:

Reversal: rather than thinking we can identify the source of a discourse and its principles, we must rather "recognize the negative activity of the cut-out and rarefaction of discourse."

Discontinuity: we must not imagine that as an alternative to the negative activity of discourse there is some kind of place of "limitless discourse, continuous and silent, repressed and driven back" which it is our task to restore. Rather, we must recognize discourse as a "discontinuous activity."

Specificity: we must not imagine that we can make sense of or decipher a particular discourse by a "prior system of significations" that is more true to reality, one that will reveal all and make sense of everything; the world does not present us with "a legible face." Rather, discourse is "a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, . . . a practice we impose upon them."

Exteriority: there is no center, no core, no heart of a discourse where true meaning resides. (Derrida's point--there is no transcendent signifier, no Truth beyond language) Rather, discourses must be understood by their "external conditions of existence."

F. then takes up a critique of historical methodology. History deals with events and attempts to place them in a series in order to make sense of them (even though historians have given up the attempt "to understand events in terms of cause and effect" (230). But if discourses are composed of "ensembles of discursive events" (231), how do we understand them historically? F. answers that they have to be treated differently because they are discontinuous: "If, on the other hand, discursive events are to be dealt with as homogeneous, but discontinuous series, what status are we to accord to this discontinuity? Here we are not dealing with a succession of instants in time, nor with the plurality of thinking subjects; what is concerned are those caesurae breaking the instant and dispersing the subject in a multiplicity of possible positions and functions" (231). In his later work, F. will propose using a methodology of archeology rather than history in order to read the "caesurae," the ruptures rather than the continuities.

The rest of the article is his plan for the study of discourse, which produces, among other works, The Archaeology of Knowledge.