Q) Position of discourse in Post Structuralism from your reading of Foucault.

Foucault was not a social theorist. He did not concern to create a social theory that would "explain" or "interpret" the history of the West in terms of "power." He was not a historian of ideas. He presented himself as an "archaeologist," who must be content with describing the invisible cultural formations that, he believed, produced the visible social and literary evidence he examined. He sought the conditions of possibility of discourse, the rules which governed the putting together of statements, and the ruptures in formations where novelty could appear. He wrote: "Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules." (Horus Publications, 1998) The main influences on Foucault's thought were German philosophers Frederick Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche maintained that human behavior is motivated by a will to power and that traditional value had lost its power over society. The terms genealogy, discourse, essentialism, power/knowledge, repressive, hypothesis, subject, discipline, panopticon have remarkable significance in Foucault's terminology. However in most of his work a special emphasize will be given to these two terms: Discourse and Power. "Discourse in Foucault's vocabulary is an authoritative way of describing. Discourses are propagated by specific institutions and divide up the world in specific ways. For example, we can talk of medical, legal, and psychological discourses. Literary criticism is also a discourse, as is the terminology associated with grading."

Like the structuralism of de Saussure, Michel Foucault was concerned with, the principles by which elements can be organized together to produce coherent and meaningful patterns. However, whereas de Saussure would seek the value of such patterns with respect to an idealized language system, Foucault always seeks to describe concrete relationships that can be described between concrete items. Foucault describes arrangements of this kind as discursive formations. Simply put, a discursive formation refers to the ways in which a collection of texts are organized with respect to each other. To draw on Foucaults words, whenever, between objects,types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order. . .), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation .

For Foucault discursive formations are entities to be seen, touched, and experienced because they are composed of material objects, such as books. It follows, then, that because discursive formations are material, they have material effects. According to Foucault, we see that 'discourse' (a group of statements) is a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a particular historical moment. Discourse constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others. So the meaning is constructed through discourse, nothing has any meaning outside of discourse. The main point here is the way discourse, representation, knowledge and 'truth' are historicized by Foucault, in contrast to the ahistorical tendency in semiotics. That is, things meant something and were 'true' only within a specific

historical context. He thought that in each period, discourse produced forms of

knowledge, objects, subjects and practices of knowledge which differed from period to period, with no necessary continuity between them. For instance, there may always have been what we now call homosexual forms of behaviour. But 'the homosexual' as a specific kind of social subject which was produced, and could only make its appearance within the moral, legal, medical and psychiatric discourses, practices and institutional apparatuses of the late nineteenth century, with their particular theories of sexual perversity. Knowledge about and practices around all these subjects were historically and culturally specific. The question of the application and effectiveness of power/knowledge was more important, Foucault thought, than the question of its 'truth'. He thought that knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make

itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects, and in that
sense 'becomes true'. So there is no 'Truth' of knowledge in the absolute sense -- a Truth, whatever the period, setting, context, is a discursive formation sustaining a regime of truth (not 'what is true' but 'what counts as true'). For Foucault, power does not function as a center but exercise through a net-like organization. This suggests that we are all caught up in the circulation of power relation

-- oppressors and oppressed. Power is also productive network which runs through the whole social body because it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. For Foucault, the concept of power knowledge is thus a pragmatic conceptualization. Foucault's approach to representation is that he concerned with the production of knowledge and meaning through discourse. For him, the production of knowledge is always crossed with questions of power and the body, and this expands the scope of what is involved in representation. For him, it is discourse, not the subject which produces knowledge. Discourse is enmeshed with power, but it is not necessary to find a 'subject' like the king, the ruling class, the state -- for power/knowledge to operate. Of course Foucault was deeply critical of the traditional conception of the subject (an individual, the core of the self, and the independent, authentic source of action and meaning). His most radical propositions is that the 'subject' is produced

within discourse. That is, the subject cannot be outside discourse because it must be subjected to discourse and also exists within the knowledge (which is produced by
discourse), the discursive formation of a particular period and culture. So the subject can become the object through which power is relayed, and should be located in the position from which the discourse can make sense of it. Anyhow, individuals may differ as to their social class, gendered, racial characteristics, they will not be able to take meaning until they have identified with those positions which are constructed by the discourse, subjected themselves to its rules, and hence become the subjects of its

power/knowledge. Foucault suggests that there are epistemic breaks, that is, at certain
moments in a culture, there are discontinuous developments in discursive structures.