The order of the discourse
The order of the discourse was the subject of Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture on December 2, 1970 for his appointment to the chair on the “History of Thought Systems” at the Collège de France, which was set up especially for him . The lecture was published in an expanded version in 1971 as L'ordre du discours in Paris by Gallimard .
In this lecture Foucault shows mechanisms that control the discourse . On this basis, he outlines the problems he intends to deal with at the Collège de France. The term discourse he uses here marks a transition between his archeology of knowledge and the later power analysis work.
The order of the discourse
"I assume that in every society the production of the discourse is controlled, selected, organized and channeled at the same time - through certain procedures whose task it is to tame the forces and the dangers of the discourse, to banish its unpredictable eventuality, to avoid its heavy and threatening materiality. "
Foucault divides the procedures by which this happens into three classes.
- Exclusion systems that work from 'outside' and affect the discourse in its “interplay with power and desire”, that is, seek to control its forces.
- Internal procedures with which discourses control themselves through “principles of classification, order, [and] distribution” in order to “tame” the randomness of events and make their emergence and content manageable.
- The shortage of speaking subjects , which is bound by conditions for participation in discourses and by rules to which the particular discourse is subject.
Exclusion systems
The ban
According to Foucault, there are three types of prohibitions : “You know that you do not have the right to say everything, that you cannot talk about everything at every opportunity, that after all not everyone can talk about anything.” He names these three basic forms taboo of the object , ritual of the circumstances and preferred or exclusive right of the speaking subject .
The distinction between madness and common sense
The next exclusion system is "[...] not a [direct] ban, but a demarcation and a rejection".
By distinguishing between reason and madness, parts of the discourse are discarded and cannot circulate. Either the madman's word "[...] means null and void, it has neither truth nor meaning [...]", or he is trusted to have "strange powers" such as predicting the future or expressing hidden truths.
This creates a tension between the listener, who is following a discourse - but can arbitrarily admit or deny relevance to it - and the overheard and the discourse overheard by the listener. The 'overheard' discourse is penetrated and functionalized by the desire of the listener.
The will to truth
Finally, Foucault names the will to truth, a term adopted from Friedrich Nietzsche , as the third exclusion system. He argues that there was a fundamental rejection in the history of discourse: at the beginning there was only a true discourse in which one had respect and awe for those who were legitimized to conduct it according to certain rituals. Since Plato, "the highest truth was no longer in what the discourse was or in what it did , it was in what it said ".
The carrier of the truth claim is no longer the discourse itself, but the individual statement which legitimizes itself through its meaning, its form, its object and its referential relation and proves to be true or false. Since the 17th century, this “platonic demarcation” has been supplemented by the will to prescribe a certain technical level for the verification of knowledge (“will to know”).
Today, more and more perfected institutional mechanisms for safeguarding knowledge are being added: The will to truth is cemented by epistemological foundations as well as by the selective evaluation, sorting and use of knowledge by institutions - for example in case law. Foucault works on the dialectical character of truth, in its meaning as wealth on the one hand, as an exclusion mechanism on the other: The will to truth necessarily contains elements that are untruthful, namely desire and power, it is therefore always a "machinery of exclusion" .
Internal procedures
The comment
The commentary divides the discourse into primary and secondary texts. On the one hand, the comment enables new discourses to be constituted, on the other hand, it claims to say what has always been implicitly said: “He must [...] say for the first time what has already been said, and must incessantly repeat what has actually never been said. "
The randomness of the discourse is mastered with the help of the comment: “[...] it allows something other to be said than the text itself, but on the condition that the text itself is said and in a certain way completed [through the commentary, HvdL] will."
The author
Another institution that regulates discourse is the author , as a constructed “principle of grouping discourses, as the unity and origin of their meanings, as the center of their cohesion”.
Through the principle of the author, the potential endlessness and limitlessness of possible meanings is attached to a reference to the legitimate meaning of certain contributions to the discourse.
The discipline
The discipline represents a 'construction guide' for participating in a certain part of the discourse, endless new sentences can be formed, "but according to very specific rules of the game".
In order to belong to a discipline, a sentence must meet certain conditions: The sentence must relate to a defined object level and fit into a certain theoretical horizon.
Foucault emphasizes that one can always tell the truth somewhere , but at the same time be outside the truth within a discourse . The boundaries of the discipline are created by its identity , which “takes the form of a permanent update of [its] rules”.
Shortage of speaking subjects
The ritual
The ritual limits access to discourse through three instruments: the qualification, the sign system and the limits of the meaning that an utterance made within a ritual has.
Under these conditions, participation in the discourse without preconditions is not possible and actors or groups of actors are excluded.
The discourse societies
Discourse societies are organized in such a way that discourses are produced and stored and are organized and distributed in closed rooms according to certain rules. The discipline is the production limits - "discipline" them - and continually updated their rules. The decisive criterion is that the owners do not lose ownership of the discourse. The roles of listener and speaker in discourse societies are not interchangeable.
The doctrine
The doctrine works with the aim of only permitting certain types of statements, but to multiply these types in such a way that the discourse is dominated by them. Individuals are subjected to the discourse that is subjected to the group of speaking individuals.
The social appropriation of the discourses
Finally, the social appropriation of the discourses represents a form of scarcity . "Every educational system is a political method to maintain or change the appropriation of the discourses together with their knowledge and power."
Methodological principles
From this analysis of the discourse-forming principles, Foucault concludes that his future analyzes should follow methodological principles, the reversal (the recording of the excluded and the mechanisms of scarcity and exclusion, e.g. the prohibition of speaking), discontinuity (the meaning of the individual event in the fragmented series of discourses instead of emphasizing an imaginary continuity), specificity (the renunciation of the assumption of prior meanings) and externality (the focusing of the “external conditions of possibility” of the discourse instead of the assumption of a “center of thought”). With this, Foucault abandons the principle of a continuity of reason and its perfection. With the attempt to escape the “ghostly” shadow of Hegel , at the end of his lecture he gives his teacher Jean Hyppolite an explicit reference.
Critique and Genealogy
Under the terms criticism and genealogy , which Foucault elaborates further in the following years (see literature), he describes possible critical and genealogical research on sexuality and madness, which he envisages for future work at the Collège de France. Criticism refers to the understanding of the changing forms of exclusion and the constraints it exerts. With genealogy he describes the growth of discourse series and the norms and conditions for change that apply.
Significance in the overall work
Beginning with the order of the discourse , the methodological terms “criticism” and “genealogy” replace the term “archeology” used by Foucault for his approach (cf. archeology of knowledge ). In the lecture of 1970 there are already interesting echoes of critical theory , which Foucault said he was not yet familiar with at the time. In Max Horkheimer's work, mechanisms of "inhibition, discipline and renunciation determine the practice of modern rationality"
The original title L'ordre du discours in French denotes both a purely descriptive order and a normative rule, even an order. This ambiguity pervades the work. Both descriptive elements and normative procedures of exclusion are laid out in sociological culture and in the concept of systems. Foucault's concept of discourse oscillates between the two.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michel Foucault: The order of the discourse. Frankfurt 1991. p. 10 f.
- ↑ a b c Michel Foucault: The order of the discourse, p. 17
- ↑ a b ibid., P. 11
- ↑ a b ibid., P. 12
- ↑ ibid., P. 14
- ↑ ibid., P. 19
- ↑ a b ibid., P. 20
- ↑ ibid., P. 22
- ↑ ibid., P. 25
- ↑ ibid., P. 30
- ↑ Ralf Konersmann, The Philosopher with the Mask , in: Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse , exp. Frankfurt edition 1991, p. 87
literature
- Didier Eribon : Michel Foucault. A biography. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
- Michel Foucault: On the subversion of knowledge . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1987 (contains an essay on genealogy).
- Michel Foucault: The order of the discourse . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-10083-6 .
- Michel Foucault: The order of things . Frankfurt am Main 1971 (especially p. 72 ff.).
- Michel Foucault: What is Criticism? Merve, Berlin 1992.
- Michel Foucault: Archeology of Knowledge . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2003.