Books
Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse
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MPH, MSc
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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) took a keen interest in discourse as a tool of power. Most everyday words are born to be forgotten and will remain in our consciousness for only a few seconds. However, other discourses are characterized by the fact that they do not disappear, but are permanent, persistent, and reworked, and we talk about them for years, centuries; perhaps with certain transformations, but they continue to convey new discursive acts. "They are said, they remain said, and they are still to be said." That is, they become consolidated as discourse, they will continue to be said in the future, they will be taken up again and recited. A first discourse will create new discourses from itself; what is said may take different forms, but it continues to perform what has already been said. The first discourse will generate other future discourses, and in turn the new discourses will continue to return to what has already been said, despite different discursive forms and changes in context.
Foucault sheds light on the history that has been left out of the spotlight, but he does not limit himself to presenting the facts in a positive way; rather, he focuses on archaeology, on the conditions of possibility, as well as on exclusion through discourse. History shows that discourse is not merely a narrative that expresses certain facts, but that discourse is itself a power, that the struggle is for the power to impose a discourse, and that this is the main gain of any historical struggle. Discourse is not the totality of what can be said, nor is what is said in it fundamental; a discourse is discourse above all because of its exclusionary character, because of what it excludes from itself.
"...in every society, the production of discourse is found; discourse production is simultaneously controlled, selected, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures."
Foucault refers to procedures that can be defined above all by exclusion, prohibition being the clearest of all. But it is not necessary to resort to prohibition for a mechanism of exclusion and control of discourse to exist in any society; it is enough to create discursive mechanisms of separation and rejection. It is enough to indicate through institutional and social mechanisms that a word should be considered worthless. A separation occurs. New institutions produce new lines of separation, new official discourses that people integrate and normalize in their daily lives.
"How can the coercion of truth be reasonably compared to separations such as these, separations that are arbitrary from the outset or, at the very least, organized around historical contingencies; that are not only modifiable but in perpetual flux; that are sustained by a whole system of institutions that impose them and accompany them in their validity and that ultimately are not exercised without coercion and without a certain amount of violence?"
We can ask ourselves what our will to know is when we coercively separate and institutionalize certain discourses. We can think of history as simply the discourses of empire. But later they began to mean something; they were no longer just what they were, they had a meaning, a relationship, a significance, etc. Later, classical culture had a desire to know, until some British people began to think that knowledge should be empirical, measurable, classifiable, quantifiable, related to the object that is made sensorially accessible. Knowledge and the knowing subject were required to see, rather than read or comment. Knowledge was transformed once again; now knowledge had to be measurable, and knowledge became that which allows for an instrumental end. Knowledge must be put into practice in societies, it needs to be disseminated, institutionalized, it needs a coercive power that ultimately imposes it as a worldview. The new knowledge, the new "will to truth," through its institutionalization, through its separation from the other, also implies the exclusion of other things.
"It is necessary to conceive of discourse as a violence exercised over things."
A practice seeks to legitimize itself by relying on successive discourses. For example, the modern penal institution legitimizes itself first in law, then in sociology, and then in medicine and psychiatry. This is the search for a discourse that allows institutionalization to be rationalized as the "truth" of each era. Today, the truth is biomedical, because that is what society perceives today as its legitimate authority. However, many practices of the judicial and penal systems are carried out in direct opposition to scientific evidence; one need only look at the scientific literature. What will to truth is being pursued, then?
"In the will to speak that true discourse, what is at stake if not desire and power?"
One of the centers of discourse is the author, not as material production and authorship, but rather as the very meaning of discourse. This point made by Foucault shows the sociocognitive reality of human reasoning, which is far from mere logical reasoning. The meaning of a discourse is not determined by Aristotelian logic, propositional logic, or by a systematic analysis of empirical data. Our brain selects truths and accepts discourses for other reasons, above all for their social meaning. One of the most important points of truth and meaning in a discourse is the author of the discourse itself. It is the author who gives language its reality, coherence, and dissemination as social truth. A statement about health will be as valid as its author, hence the abuse of "experts" in this field, and in many others. There are discourses whose meaning is only that of the author who speaks them, and it is not the true or accurate words of the discourse that are expert, but rather it is the author who confers the property of expert on that discourse. The person is the meaning. Discourse is the identity of what is acceptable.
From the author we could arrive at authority, not particularly addressed in this book by Foucault, who tells us that "a discipline is not the sum of everything that can be said." On this point, the author tells us that "medicine is not constituted by the totality of what can be said." A discipline is above all the suppression of other discourses. Medicine, Foucault tells us, is built "as much on errors as on truths, errors that are not residues or foreign bodies, but which perform positive functions and have historical efficacy." We could discuss the concept of error that Foucault uses. For example, the concept of serotonin is not an error, something scientifically without evidence; it is above all the transformation of mood into a pharmaceutical discourse, involving changing people's language, their beliefs, their way of communicating, their way of perceiving themselves as people, and their way of perceiving their anxieties, even imposing a popular culture. "There are perhaps no errors in the strict sense, since error can only arise and be decided within a defined practice."
What is true or false is above all the discourse that is imposed and the discourse that is suppressed, since all discourse is the suppression of a part of the whole that can be said. Discourse is not so much characterized by what is said as by what is suppressed. The history of medicine is fundamentally the history of the suppression of other discourses through a "discourse police." I could give many examples of this, starting with the gross error of confusing public health and medical provision, something strongly coerced into silence by various institutions, but this is not the place.
"Are not the judicial system and the institutional system of medicine also, at least in some respects, similar systems of discourse submission?"
Final comments
Our daily life forms a "society of discourse, perhaps diffuse, but certainly coercive," Foucault tells us, generating "rituals of speech." Nothing could be more accurate. Coercion is everywhere, in the moralistic panic of the balcony police we have seen in generous doses, in the institutions that claim to be science and the ultimate truth of things, in the educational institutions that impose certain discourses and suppress others, in the institutions that defend oligarchic interests through positive law and claim to be the justice of public life, etc. This creates a routine, unconscious, vicarious operating framework that separates permitted, true, acceptable discourse from excluded discourse. Because it is normalized, it is highly coercive. The curious thing is how people vehemently defend this institutionalized system of chain coercion that suppresses the very possibility of speech between people. If we think about it, what are we without discourse? We find something terrible: ourselves, without the discourse of others, and without the discourse of institutions that we repeat, we are nothing more than insecure and fearful beings. In a society made up of people who reason coercively under positivist schemes aimed at instrumental reason and the object, non-coercive understanding becomes difficult.
Many "postmodern" authors are accused of being "obscure." My view is that many people have difficulty with reading comprehension and with reasoning about deep epistemic issues that go beyond the refined cause-and-effect relationships of positivist thinking, which fits perfectly into the nervous system of weak central coherence. The clarity or obscurity of any text depends on the reader's knowledge, analytical ability, and reading comprehension. Many scientific texts are as obscure as many "postmodern" texts, and they use sophisticated jargon to hide their lack of empirical substance.
Foucault addresses madness as a classic example of separation and exclusion. Today, it is the denialist or the anti-vaxxer who is against "science" that separates true discourse and worthy people from the undesirable. The end is the same: it is about labeling to generate rejection before any kind of reasoning, understanding, deep comprehension, or debate about something can take place. The aim is precisely to torpedo these processes. We Westerners do not censor, or at least that is what we believed until recently. It is more subtle, a coercion spread throughout society that imposes the correct discourse, the truths to be sought, and the exclusion of the undesirable.
"...the constraints of discourse: those that limit its powers, those that dominate its random appearances, those that select the subjects who can speak." Michel Foucault.
Cite as: Bordallo. A. Review of The Order of Discourse, by Michel Foucault. ICNS. Available at https://www.icns.es/en/news/michel-foucault-the-order-of-discourse
Copyright© ICNS Institute
Foucault sheds light on the history that has been left out of the spotlight, but he does not limit himself to presenting the facts in a positive way; rather, he focuses on archaeology, on the conditions of possibility, as well as on exclusion through discourse. History shows that discourse is not merely a narrative that expresses certain facts, but that discourse is itself a power, that the struggle is for the power to impose a discourse, and that this is the main gain of any historical struggle. Discourse is not the totality of what can be said, nor is what is said in it fundamental; a discourse is discourse above all because of its exclusionary character, because of what it excludes from itself.
"...in every society, the production of discourse is found; discourse production is simultaneously controlled, selected, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures."
Foucault refers to procedures that can be defined above all by exclusion, prohibition being the clearest of all. But it is not necessary to resort to prohibition for a mechanism of exclusion and control of discourse to exist in any society; it is enough to create discursive mechanisms of separation and rejection. It is enough to indicate through institutional and social mechanisms that a word should be considered worthless. A separation occurs. New institutions produce new lines of separation, new official discourses that people integrate and normalize in their daily lives.
"How can the coercion of truth be reasonably compared to separations such as these, separations that are arbitrary from the outset or, at the very least, organized around historical contingencies; that are not only modifiable but in perpetual flux; that are sustained by a whole system of institutions that impose them and accompany them in their validity and that ultimately are not exercised without coercion and without a certain amount of violence?"
We can ask ourselves what our will to know is when we coercively separate and institutionalize certain discourses. We can think of history as simply the discourses of empire. But later they began to mean something; they were no longer just what they were, they had a meaning, a relationship, a significance, etc. Later, classical culture had a desire to know, until some British people began to think that knowledge should be empirical, measurable, classifiable, quantifiable, related to the object that is made sensorially accessible. Knowledge and the knowing subject were required to see, rather than read or comment. Knowledge was transformed once again; now knowledge had to be measurable, and knowledge became that which allows for an instrumental end. Knowledge must be put into practice in societies, it needs to be disseminated, institutionalized, it needs a coercive power that ultimately imposes it as a worldview. The new knowledge, the new "will to truth," through its institutionalization, through its separation from the other, also implies the exclusion of other things.
"It is necessary to conceive of discourse as a violence exercised over things."
A practice seeks to legitimize itself by relying on successive discourses. For example, the modern penal institution legitimizes itself first in law, then in sociology, and then in medicine and psychiatry. This is the search for a discourse that allows institutionalization to be rationalized as the "truth" of each era. Today, the truth is biomedical, because that is what society perceives today as its legitimate authority. However, many practices of the judicial and penal systems are carried out in direct opposition to scientific evidence; one need only look at the scientific literature. What will to truth is being pursued, then?
"In the will to speak that true discourse, what is at stake if not desire and power?"
One of the centers of discourse is the author, not as material production and authorship, but rather as the very meaning of discourse. This point made by Foucault shows the sociocognitive reality of human reasoning, which is far from mere logical reasoning. The meaning of a discourse is not determined by Aristotelian logic, propositional logic, or by a systematic analysis of empirical data. Our brain selects truths and accepts discourses for other reasons, above all for their social meaning. One of the most important points of truth and meaning in a discourse is the author of the discourse itself. It is the author who gives language its reality, coherence, and dissemination as social truth. A statement about health will be as valid as its author, hence the abuse of "experts" in this field, and in many others. There are discourses whose meaning is only that of the author who speaks them, and it is not the true or accurate words of the discourse that are expert, but rather it is the author who confers the property of expert on that discourse. The person is the meaning. Discourse is the identity of what is acceptable.
From the author we could arrive at authority, not particularly addressed in this book by Foucault, who tells us that "a discipline is not the sum of everything that can be said." On this point, the author tells us that "medicine is not constituted by the totality of what can be said." A discipline is above all the suppression of other discourses. Medicine, Foucault tells us, is built "as much on errors as on truths, errors that are not residues or foreign bodies, but which perform positive functions and have historical efficacy." We could discuss the concept of error that Foucault uses. For example, the concept of serotonin is not an error, something scientifically without evidence; it is above all the transformation of mood into a pharmaceutical discourse, involving changing people's language, their beliefs, their way of communicating, their way of perceiving themselves as people, and their way of perceiving their anxieties, even imposing a popular culture. "There are perhaps no errors in the strict sense, since error can only arise and be decided within a defined practice."
What is true or false is above all the discourse that is imposed and the discourse that is suppressed, since all discourse is the suppression of a part of the whole that can be said. Discourse is not so much characterized by what is said as by what is suppressed. The history of medicine is fundamentally the history of the suppression of other discourses through a "discourse police." I could give many examples of this, starting with the gross error of confusing public health and medical provision, something strongly coerced into silence by various institutions, but this is not the place.
"Are not the judicial system and the institutional system of medicine also, at least in some respects, similar systems of discourse submission?"
Final comments
Our daily life forms a "society of discourse, perhaps diffuse, but certainly coercive," Foucault tells us, generating "rituals of speech." Nothing could be more accurate. Coercion is everywhere, in the moralistic panic of the balcony police we have seen in generous doses, in the institutions that claim to be science and the ultimate truth of things, in the educational institutions that impose certain discourses and suppress others, in the institutions that defend oligarchic interests through positive law and claim to be the justice of public life, etc. This creates a routine, unconscious, vicarious operating framework that separates permitted, true, acceptable discourse from excluded discourse. Because it is normalized, it is highly coercive. The curious thing is how people vehemently defend this institutionalized system of chain coercion that suppresses the very possibility of speech between people. If we think about it, what are we without discourse? We find something terrible: ourselves, without the discourse of others, and without the discourse of institutions that we repeat, we are nothing more than insecure and fearful beings. In a society made up of people who reason coercively under positivist schemes aimed at instrumental reason and the object, non-coercive understanding becomes difficult.
Many "postmodern" authors are accused of being "obscure." My view is that many people have difficulty with reading comprehension and with reasoning about deep epistemic issues that go beyond the refined cause-and-effect relationships of positivist thinking, which fits perfectly into the nervous system of weak central coherence. The clarity or obscurity of any text depends on the reader's knowledge, analytical ability, and reading comprehension. Many scientific texts are as obscure as many "postmodern" texts, and they use sophisticated jargon to hide their lack of empirical substance.
Foucault addresses madness as a classic example of separation and exclusion. Today, it is the denialist or the anti-vaxxer who is against "science" that separates true discourse and worthy people from the undesirable. The end is the same: it is about labeling to generate rejection before any kind of reasoning, understanding, deep comprehension, or debate about something can take place. The aim is precisely to torpedo these processes. We Westerners do not censor, or at least that is what we believed until recently. It is more subtle, a coercion spread throughout society that imposes the correct discourse, the truths to be sought, and the exclusion of the undesirable.
"...the constraints of discourse: those that limit its powers, those that dominate its random appearances, those that select the subjects who can speak." Michel Foucault.
Cite as: Bordallo. A. Review of The Order of Discourse, by Michel Foucault. ICNS. Available at https://www.icns.es/en/news/michel-foucault-the-order-of-discourse
Copyright© ICNS Institute
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