For this assignment, students will employ the strategies outlined in Adler’s “How to Mark a Book” to annotate “Discursive Formations” (under Shared Files).As discussed in class, one of the most important strategies is using the margins for questions, thoughts, etc. Keep track of these, even if in a separate notebook. This is the strategy on which I would like you to focus.After annotating “Discursive Formations”, students will compose a brief reflection that responds to their own personal line of inquiry. Specifically, I want you to focus on 2 or 3 instances from your annotation where you noted questions about the text, found something intriguing, found something problematic, etc.For each of these instances, you will compose a paragraph that either speculates an answer to your own question or explicates why you noted a particular moment in the text. There should be no introduction or conclusion, just entries identified by quoting the first few words of the sentence you’ve noted.For example:”I have decided to describe statements . . .”Foucault uses the term “statements” repeatedly throughout this passage. He even references using the word indiscriminately which makes me wonder if there is a specific meaning to his use of the word. When I think of the word “statement”, I imagine verbal or written expression, but Foucault’s meaning seems to go beyond . . .and so on, and so on.Reflections should be approximately 1 page in length (double-spaced).
foucault__michel___discursive_formations.pdf
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TIIE DISCURSIVE REGULARITIES
of construction, but that of
the moment of its formal structure and laws
by dealing with
the rules that govern its appearance’ ifnot
;.;;;;
“nd
the statements do
;;;;;i;;;{b.*rrk”a g”oi’ of di”ooises’ in which
syntax? How can we
;;; ,e# necessarily ,o f,” boilt on the rules of pure ot
as
;;-; of avoiding such divisions as the euvre’ such categories
{ieids
broad
‘influence’, unlcss, no- rit”tty outset’ we adoptsufficiently
CHAPTER 2
Discursive Formations
tno’gh? LT’|I’ how can wc be
.h.onologically
“‘t
those over-hasty
we will not find oursel’et in the grip of all
the speaking-iou.jt”t’ orthe author of the
*J ,.rf*’rt,”, ,..
,*”1fr”,
unities or
syntheses..;;;;i”;
.nth,opolog;i’l ttttgo’itJ unltt” pcrhaps’.we t”i:i|::
“ll out of which these categories are constltuted – all tnc
all thc statements
subject oidi”ot”” (their own subject)
statements that have
“l’o””
‘i’t
deploy it as their field of
and f””t
,r ifr.”
;;;:l;;h;1,,
“”a”t”‘kt” ‘o
“i:ect’
I
ifro .iprrts thc r/e
“ir'”facto privrlege. t1t l1ve “:t’i1,11-::1′;:1′;
the’sciences
.#; fi;, ; ;
.:f f-1]”y”tht,,,ltittlly’ -define be constantly
borne:
a p’rovisionalirivilegc’ Two facts must
knowledgc?
s;iir;, o,rly
I”-r;i;;,;# th'” rrr.lyri, oidi”t’i’i'”
events is in no way limited
:: Tth
regarded erther as
that thc division of this freld itself cannot be
approximainitial
an
”
J.i”iri”” or as absolrrely valid; it is no more thanerase the limits
of this
tion that must allow .”iitior” to aPPcar that may
initial outline.
A”fat
ancl
have undertaken, then, to describe the relatiols between statements. I
have been careful to accept as valid none ofthe unities that would normally
embarking- on such a task. I have decided to
present themselves to
“rrlon”
ig,ro.” no form of discontinuity, break, threshold, or limit. I have decided
tI describe statements in the field of discourse and the relations of which
they are capable. As I see it, two series of problems arise at the outset:
tlre Iirrt, *hi.h I shall leave to one side for the time being and shall return
to later, concerns the indiscriminate use that I have made of the terms
statement, event, and discourse; the second concerns the relations that
,rr”y legitimately be described between the statements that have been left
in their provisional, visible grouping.
There^are statements, for.*”mpl., that are quite obviously concerned rnd have been from a date that is easy enough to determine – with political
cconomy, or biology, or psychopaihologl’; there are others that equally
,rbviousiy belong to those age-old continuities known as grammar or
,ucdicine. But rnihat are these unities? How can we say that the analysis
,,f headaches carried out by’Willis or Charcot belong to the same order
,rf discourse? That Petty’s inventions are in continuity with Neuntann’s
cconometry? That the analysis of judgement by the Port-Royal Ft:-rnarians b”iorrgr to the same domain as the discovery ofvowel gradations
I
tlre Indo-E,i.op..n languages? What, in fact, are medicine, gramma_r, ar
yolitical economy? ,Lr. they m.t.ly retrospective regrouping by-wlich the
”
as to their,own- past? Are they
rrr
,
,,,r,”*po.”rfrci.nces deceive tL.-telr”i
li,rrns tirat have become established once and for all and have gone on
,lcvcloping through time? Do they conceal other unities? And what sort
,,1’links c”ln
be recognized between all these statements that form,
“alidf
,,, such a familiar and insistent way, such an enigmatic mass?
lrirst hypothesis – and the one that, at first sight, struck n1e as being the
3r
3o
DISCURSIVE TORMATIONS
THE DISCURSIVE REGULARITIES
most likely and the most easily proved: statements di{Grent in forrn, and
dispersed in time, form a group if they reGr to one and the same object.
Thus, statements belonging to psychopathology all seem to refer to an
object that emerges in various ways in individual or social experience and
which may be called madness. But I soon realized that the unity of the
object ‘madness’ does not enable one to individualize a group of statements, and to establish between them a relation that is both constant and
describable. There are two reasons for this. It would certainly be a mistake
to try to discover what could have been said of madness at a particular
time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its
silent, self-enclosed truth; mental illness was constituted by all that was
said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations,
judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own. Moreover, this group of statements is 6r from referring to a single object, formed once and for all, and
to preserving it indefinitely as its horizon of inexhaustible ideality; the
object presented as their correlative by medical statements of the seventeenth or eighteenth century is not identical with the object that emerges
in legal sentences or police action; similarly, all the objects of psychopathological discourses were modified from Pinel or Esquirol to Bleuler:
it is not the same illnesses that are at issue in each of these cases; we are not
dealing with the same madmen.
One might, perhaps one should, conclude from this multiplicity of
objects that it is not possible to accept, as a valid unity forming a group of
statements, a ‘discourse, concerning madness’. Perhaps one should confine one’s attention to those grouPs of statements that have one and the
same object: the discourses on melancholia, or neurosis, for example. But
one would soon realize that each of these discourses in turn constituted its
object and worked it to the point oftransforming it altogether. So that the
problem arises ofknowing whether the unity of a discourse is based not so
much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object as on the space in
‘W’ould
which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed.
not the typical relation that would enable us to individualize a group of
statements concerning madness then be: the rule of simultaneous or
successive emergence of the various objects that are named, described,
analysed, appreciated, orjudged in that relation?The unityofdiscourses on
madness would not be based upon the existence ofthe object’madness’, or
the constitution ofa single horizon ofobjectivity; it would be the interplay
32
of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given
period of time: objects that are shaped by measures of discrimination and
repression, objects that are differentiated in daily practice, in law, in
religious casuistry, in medical diagnosis, objects that are maniGsted in
pathological descriptions, objects that are circumscribed by medical codes,
practices, treatnent, and care. Moreover, the unity of the discourses on
madness would be the interplay ofthe rules that define the transformations
of these different objects, their non-identity through time, the break
produced in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence. Paradoxically, to deline a group of statements in terms of its
individuality would be to define the dispersion of these objects, to grasp
all the interstices that separate them, to measure the distances that reign
between them – in other words, to formulate their law of division.
Second hypothesis to define a group of relations between statementsl
their form and type of connexion. It seemed to me, for example, that
from the nineteenth century medical science was characterized not so
much by its objects or concepts as by a certain style, a certain constant
manner of statement. For the first time, medicine no longer consisted of a
group of traditions, observations, and heterogeneous practices, but of a
corpus ofknowledge that presupposed the same way oflooking at things,
the same division of the perceptual field, the same analysis of the pathological fact in accordance with the visible space of the body, the same
system of transcribing what one perceived in what one said (same vocabulary, same play of metaphor); in short, it seemed to me that medicine was
organized as a series of descriptive sratements. But, there again, I had to
abandon this hypothesis at the outset and recognize that clinical discourse
was just as much a group of hypotheses about life and death, of ethical
choices, of therapeutic decisions, of institutional regulations, of teaching
models, es a group of descriptions; that the descriptions could not, in any
case, be abstracted from the hypotheses, and that the descriptive starement
was only one ofthe formulations present in medical discourse. I also had to
recognize that this description has constantly been displaced: either
because, from Bichat to cell pathology, the scales and guide-lines have
been displaced; or because from visual inspection, auscultation and palpation to the use of the microscope and biological tests, the information
system has been modified; or, again, because, from simple anatomoclinical correlation to the delicate analysis ofphysiopathological processes,
the lexicon ofsigns and their deciphermenthas been entirely reconstituted;
or, finally, because the doctor has gradually ceased to be himselfthe locus
33
THE DISCURSIVE REGULARITIES
DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS
of the registering and intcrprctation of informatiou, and
him, outside him, there have appeared
becausc, besidc
of
documentation, instruments of correlation, and techniques of analysis, which, of course, he
makes use of, but which modify his position as an observing subject in
relation to the patient.
All these alterations, which may now lead to the threshold of a new
medicine, gradually appeared in medical discourse throughout the nineteenth century. If one wished to define this discourse by a codified and
normative system of statement, one would have to recognize that this
medicine disintegrated as soon as it appeared and that it really found its
formulation only in Bichat and Laennec. If there is a unity, its principle
is not therefore a determined form ofstatements; is it not rather the group
of rules, which, simultaneously or in turn, have made possible purely
perceptual descriptions, together with observations mediated through
instruments, the procedures used in laboratory experiments, statistical
calculations, epidemiological or demographic observations, institutional
regulations, and therapeutic practice? What one must characterize and
masses
individualize is the coexistence of these dispersed and heterogeneous
statements; the system that governs their division, the degree to which
they depend upon one another, the way in which they interlock or exclude
one another, the transformation that they undergo, and the play of their
location, arrangement, and replacement.
Another direction of research, another hypothesis: might it not be
possible to establish groups of statements, by determining the system of
permanent and coherent concepts involved? For example, does not the
Classical analysis oflanguage and grammatical facts (from Lancelot to thc
end of the eighteenth century) rest on a definite number of concepts
whose content and usage had been established once and for all: the concept of judgement defned as the general, normative form of any sentencc,
the concepts o{ subject and predicate regrouped under the more general
category of noun, the concept of uerb used as the equivalent of that of
of word defined as the sign ofa representation,
In this way, one might reconstitute the conceptual architecture of
Classical grammar. But there too one would soon come up against
limitations: no sooner would one have succeeded in describing with such
logical copula, the concept
etc.?
elements the analyses carried out by the Port-Royal authors than one woul
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