The father of discourse theory: Michel Foucault

The father of discourse theory: 

Michel Foucault

 

 

 

Many of the commonalities I have listed above go back to the most famous discourse theorist: the French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Foucault, to put it simply, was convinced that the world we live in is structured by knowledge, or in other words: certain people and social groups create and formulate ideas about our world, which under certain conditions turn into unquestioned truths and start to seem normal.

The aim of Foucault’s research was to analyze such “regimes of truth” (Potter 2005: 86) and their history, for instance the development, demise and re-occurrence of statements on subjects like mental health (Foucault 1988/1965), crime and its punishment (1995/1977), or sexuality (1990/1978). Foucault originally attempted to map the rules that govern how statements emerge, as well as how knowledge is historically ordered (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982: 102-103). Foucault applied this approach, which he himself referred to as an archaeology of knowledge ( Foucault 2005/1989), to such fields as the history of medicine, of psychology, and of the social sciences (Foucault 2005/1970). He questioned how objective the truths these disciplines produce actually are. Foucault attempted to uncover mechanisms, such as classification strategies or theory building, which he believed created the objects of our social world (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982: 61). In other words, Foucault was examining the structures of knowledge. This is why his early work is often referred to as structuralist.

In his later work, Foucault became more post-structuralist (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982: 118-119 & 199): He started exploring the question of agency. He shifted his emphasis from the objects of social interaction to the subjects. Foucault’s works on disciplinary and confessional technologies (Foucault 1995/1977 & 1990/1978) is an example of this, and one jof his famous cases is the panopticon: a prison in which the prisoners discipline themselves because they constantly feel watched. In these later genealogical works, Foucault explicitly questioned how discourse influences people’s mentality and prompts them to govern themselves in certain ways – a process he called governmentality. Throughout his work, Foucault showed how specific opinions came to be formed and preserved as what is today commonly called the hegemonic discourse, that is as the dominant viewpoint(s) throughout society, kept stable by political power dynamics (MacDonald 2003: 32).