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DISCOURSE
The term ‘discourse’ has a wider range of possible significations
than any other term in literary and cultural theory. Yet it is often the
term within theoretical texts which is least defined.
Discourse uses a number of literary and non-literary texts to
illustrate how the term has been used. Mills discusses the ways
that feminist, colonial and post-colonial discourse theorists have
appropriated the term developed by Michel Foucault for use in
other contexts.
In this clear and helpful analysis, Sara Mills has provided a sense
of the historical development of the term discourse as well as
some straight-forward working definitions, as they are currently
used within different disciplines.
Sara Mills is a Research Professor at the School of Cultural
Studies, Sheffield Hallam University. She has published on
feminist linguistic and literary theory and on feminist post-colonial
discourse theory.
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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory
guides to today’s critical terminology. Each book:
= provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and
abuse) of the term
= offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading
literary and cultural critic
= relates the term to the larger field of cultural
representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest
possible breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an
indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies.
= See below for new books in this series.
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Metre, Rhythm and Verse by Philip Hobsbaum
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
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DISCOURSE
Sara Mills
LONDON AND NEW YORK
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First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1997 Sara Mills
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mills, Sara, 1954–
Discourse / Sara Mills.
p. cm. – (The New critical idiom)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-415-13854-X (alk. paper).
– ISBN 0-415-11053-X (alk. paper).
1. Discourse analysis. I. Title. II. Series.
P302.M55 1997
401´.41–dc21
97–10848
CIP
ISBN 0-415-11053-X
ISBN 0-203-13172-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17849-1 (Glassbook Format)
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To Tony, Gabriel and Francis
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CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
IX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
X
1 Introduction
1
Cultural theory/critical theory/literary theory
8
Mainstream linguistics
9
Social psychology/critical linguistics
9
Cultural theory and models of discourse
10
Michel Foucault and discourse
16
Literature as a discourse
22
Note
28
2 Discourse and ideology
29
Ideology and truth
32
The subject
33
Determinants of discourse
36
Language, discourse and ideology
42
Notes
47
3 Discursive structures
48
The episteme
56
The statement
60
The discourse/discourses
62
The archive
63
Exclusions within discourse
63
Circulation of discourses
67
Conclusions
75
Notes
76
4 Feminist theory and discourse theory
77
Confessional discourse
80
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VIII CONTENTS
Discourses of femininity and heterosexuality
86
Access to discourse
97
Discourses in conflict
99
Conclusions
102
Notes
103
5 Colonial and post-colonial discourse theory
105
Othering
106
Challenging othering
118
Psychoanalysis and discourse theory
123
Conclusions
128
Notes
129
6 Discourse analysis, critical linguistics and social
psychology
131
Discourse analysis
135
Social psychologists and discourse
142
Critical linguists/discourse theorists
147
Conclusions
157
Notes
158
BIBLIOGRAPHY
160
INDEX
174
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks
to extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical
changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the
last decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear,
well-illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently
in use, and to evolve histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where
there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of
terminology. This involves, among other things, the boundaries
which distinguish the literary from the non-literary; the position of
literature within the larger sphere of culture; the relationship
between literatures of different cultures; and questions concerning
the relation of literary to other cultural forms within the context of
interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic
and heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual volumes
on terms which combine clarity of exposition with an
adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application. Each
volume will contain as part of its apparatus some indication of the
direction in which the definition of particular terms is likely to move,
as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries within which
some of these terms have been traditionally contained. This will
involve some re-situation of terms within the larger field of cultural
representation, and will introduce examples from the area of film
and the modern media in addition to examples from a variety of
literary texts.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Tony Brown for many useful discussions of the use
of the term discourse, and also for making detailed comments on
drafts of this book. John Drakakis, Lynne Pearce and Keith Green
also read drafts of the book and made very constructive
suggestions. I would like to thank members of the Sheffield Hallam
University staff and postgraduate Critical Theory reading group for
discussions of Foucault’s work and cultural theory in general.
Thanks are also due to Judy Simons, Robert Miles, Jill LeBihan,
Christine White, Christine Christie, Deirdre Burton and Elaine
Hobby for discussions of the ideas within this book.
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INTRODUCTION
The term ‘discourse’ has become common currency in a variety of
disciplines: critical theory, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, social
psychology and many other fields, so much so that it is frequently
left undefined, as if its usage were simply common knowledge. It is
used widely in analysing literary and non-literary texts and it is often
employed to signal a certain theoretical sophistication in ways
which are vague and sometimes obfuscatory. It has perhaps the
widest range of possible significations of any term in literary and
cultural theory, and yet it is often the term within theoretical texts
which is least defined. It is interesting therefore to trace the ways in
which we try to make sense of the term. The most obvious way to
track down its range of meanings is through consulting a dictionary,
but here the more general meanings of the term and its more
theoretical usages seem to have become enmeshed, since the
theoretical meanings always have an overlaying of the more general
meanings. The history of the development of the general use of the
term has been chequered; if we take even the simplest route
through its history we can see a shifting from the highlighting of one
aspect of usage to another:
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2
INTRODUCTION
discourse 1. verbal communication; talk, conversation; 2. a
formal treatment of a subject in speech or writing; 3. a unit of
text used by linguists for the analysis of linguistic phenomena
that range over more than one sentence; 4. to discourse: the
ability to reason (archaic); 5. to discourse on/upon: to speak
or write about formally; 6. to hold a discussion; 7. to give forth
(music) (archaic)
(14th century, from Medieval Latin. discursus: argument, from
Latin, a running to and fro discurrere)
(Collins Concise English Dictionary, 1988)
discourse: 1. a conversation, especially of a formal nature;
formal and orderly expression of ideas in speech or writing;
also such expression in the form of a sermon, treatise, etc.; a
piece or unit of connected speech or writing (Middle English:
discours, from Latin: act of running about)
(Longman Dictionary of the English Language, 1984)
This sense of the general usage of discourse as having to do with
conversation and ‘holding forth’ on a subject, or giving a speech, has
been partly due to the etymology of the word. However, it has also
been due to the fact that this is the core meaning of the term discours
in French, and since the 1960s it is a word which has been associated
with French philosophical thought, even though the terms discours
and discourse do not correspond to one another exactly. Thus a
French/English dictionary gives us:
discours: a) speech; tous ces beaux discours: all this fine
talk (pejorative); suis moi sans faire de discours: follow me
and no arguing! perdre son temps en discours: to waste
one’s time talking; b) discours direct/indirect: direct/indirect
speech (linguistics); c) discourse: (philosophical treatise);
discourir: faire un discours: to discourse; to hold forth upon;
to chat (pejorative)
(Collins Robert Concise French Dictionary, 1990)
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INTRODUCTION
3
During the 1960s the general meaning of the term, its philosophical
meaning and a new set of more theoretical meanings began to
diverge slightly, but these more general meanings have always been
kept in play, inflecting the theoretical meanings in particular ways.
Within the theoretical range of meanings, it is difficult to know
where or how to track down the meaning of discourse. Glossaries
of theoretical terms are sometimes of help, but very often the
disciplinary context in which the term occurs is more important in
trying to determine which of these meanings is being brought into
play. This book aims to try to map out the contexts within which the
term discourse is used, in order to narrow down the range of
possible meanings. It is largely the constraints that bound
disciplinary structures which demarcate the various meanings of the
term: when linguists talk of a ‘discourse of advertising’, they are
clearly referring to something quite different to a social psychologist
who talks of a ‘discourse of racism’.
Yet, even within a particular discipline, there is a great deal of
fluidity in the range of reference of the term discourse. Consider, for
example, David Crystal’s attempt to pin down the meaning of the
terms use within linguistics, by contrasting it to the use of the term
text:
Discourse analysis focusses on the structure of naturally
occurring spoken language, as found in such ‘discourses’ as
conversations, interviews, commentaries, and speeches. Text
analysis focusses on the structure of written language, as
found in such ‘texts’ as essays, notices, road signs, and
chapters. But this distinction is not clear-cut, and there have
been many other uses of these labels. In particular, ‘discourse’
and ‘text’ can be used in a much broader sense to include all
language units with a definable communicative function,
whether spoken or written. Some scholars talk about ‘spoken
or written discourse’; others about ‘spoken or written text’.
(Crystal, 1987: 116; emphasis in original)
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4
INTRODUCTION
Discourse, like any other term, is also largely defined by what it is
not, what it is set in opposition to; thus, discourse is often
characterised by its difference to a series of terms: text, sentence,
ideology – each of these oppositional terms marks out the meaning
of discourse. For example, Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short argue
that:
Discourse is linguistic communication seen as a transaction
between speaker and hearer, as an interpersonal activity
whose form is determined by its social purpose. Text is
linguistic communication (either spoken or written) seen
simply as a message coded in its auditory or visual medium.
(cited in Hawthorn, 1992: 189)
And Hawthorn himself comments on this opposition between text
and discourse:
Michael Stubbs (1983) treats text and discourse as more or
less synonymous, but notes that in other usages a text may be
written, while a discourse is spoken, a text may be non-
interactive whereas a discourse is interactive . . . a text may be
short or long whereas a discourse implies a certain length, and
a text must be possessed of surface cohesion whereas a
discourse must be possessed of a deeper coherence. Finally,
Stubbs notes that other theorists distinguish between abstract
theoretical construct and pragmatic realization, although,
confusingly, such theorists are not agreed upon which of these
is represented by the term text.
(Hawthorn, 1992: 189; emphasis in original)
Emile Benveniste contrasts discourse with ‘the language system’,
when he states:
The sentence, an undefined creation of limitless variety, is the
very life of human speech in action. We conclude from this that
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INTRODUCTION
5
with the sentence we leave the domain of language as a
system of signs and enter into another universe, that of
language as an instrument of communication, whose
expression is discourse.
(Benveniste, 1971: 110)
He thus characterises discourse as the domain of communication,
but goes on to contrast discourse with history, or story (histoire),
which is a distinction more finely developed in French than in
English because of the use of different past tenses for formally
narrating events and representing events within a more oral frame
of reference:
Discourse must be understood in its widest sense: every
utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the
speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way. . .
It is every variety of oral discourse of every nature from trivial
conversation to the most elaborate oration . . . but it is also the
mass of writing that reproduces oral discourse or that borrows
its manner of expression and its purposes: correspondence,
memoirs, plays, didactic works, in short, all genres in which
someone addresses himself [sic] as the speaker, and
organizes what he says in the category of person. The
distinction we are making between historical narration and
discourse does not at all coincide with that between written
language and the spoken. Historical utterance is today
reserved to the written language, but discourse is written as
well as spoken. In practice, one passes from one to the other
instantaneously. Each time that discourse appears in the midst
of historical narration, for example, when the historian
reproduces someone’s words or when he himself intervenes
in order to comment upon the events reported, we pass to
another tense system, that of discourse.
(ibid.: 208–9)
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6
INTRODUCTION
Because this seems to be such a specific use of the term, many
theorists sometimes prefer to retain the French usage, histoire/
discours, rather than using the English words.
Some theorists contrast discourse with ideology, for example,
Roger Fowler states:
‘Discourse’ is speech or writing seen from the point of view of
the beliefs, values and categories which it embodies; these
beliefs etc. constitute a way of looking at the world, an
organization or representation of experience – ‘ideology’ in the
neutral non-pejorative sense. Different modes of discourse
encode different representations of experience; and the
source of these representations is the communicative context
within which the discourse is embedded.
(cited in Hawthorn, 1992: 48)
Thus, when we try to define discourse, we may resort to reference
to dictionaries, to the disciplinary context of utterance or to terms
which are used in contrast to discourse, even though none of these
strategies produces a simple, clear meaning of the term, but rather
only serves to show us the fluidity of its meaning.
In order to try to introduce some clarity into the definition of the
term, this introduction aims to provide some fairly straightforward
working definitions, as they are currently used within different
disciplines. However, discourse, as will be readily observed, cannot
be pinned down to one meaning, since it has had a complex history
and it is used in a range of different ways by different theorists. As
Michel Foucault comments:
Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of
the word ‘discourse’, I believe I have in fact added to its
meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all
statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of
statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that
accounts for a number of statements.
(Foucault, 1972: 80)
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INTRODUCTION
7
If we analyse this quotation a little, we will be able to isolate the
range of meanings that the term discourse has accrued to itself
within Foucault’s work. The first definition that Foucault gives is the
widest one: ‘the general domain of all statements’; that is, all
utterances or texts which have meaning and which have some
effects in the real world count as discourse. This is a broad definition
and is generally used by Foucault in this way, particularly in his
earlier work, when he is discussing the concept of discourse at a
theoretical level. It may be useful to consider this usage to be more
about discourse than about a discourse or discourses, with which
the second and third definitions are concerned. The second
definition that he gives – ‘an individualizable group of statements’
– is one which is used more often by Foucault when he is discussing
the particular structures within discourse; thus, he is concerned to
be able to identify discourses, that is, groups of utterances which
seem to be regulated in some way and which seem to have a
coherence and a force to them in common. Within this definition,
therefore, it would be possible to talk about a discourse of
femininity, a discourse of imperialism, and so on. Foucault’s third
definition of discourse is perhaps the one which has most resonance
for many theorists: ‘a regulated practice which accounts for a
number of statements’. I take this to mean that, here, he is interested
less in the actual utterances/texts that are produced than in the rules
and structures which produce particular utterances and texts. It is
this rule-governed nature of discourse that is of primary importance
within this definition. Within most discourse theorists’ work, these
definitions are used almost interchangeably and one can be
overlaid on the other.
To make matters even more complex, whilst Foucault’s
definitions of discourse have been extremely influential within
cultural theory in general, he is by no means the only theorist to use
the term, and other definitions of discourse often became
enmeshed in the general meanings of the term. For example,
Mikhail Bakhtin sometimes uses discourse to signify either a voice
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8
INTRODUCTION
(as in double-voiced discourse) or a method of using words which
presumes authority (this usage is influenced by the meaning of the
Russian word for discourse, slovo) (Hawthorn, 1992: 48). Within
structuralist and post-structuralist theory, the use of the term
discourse signalled a major break with previous views of language
and representation. Rather than seeing language as simply
expressive, as transparent, as a vehicle of communication, as a form
of representation, structuralist theorists and in turn post-
structuralists saw language as a system with its own rules and
constraints, and with its own determining effect on the way that
individuals think and express themselves. The use of the term
discourse, perhaps more than any other term, signals this break with
past views of language.
As I mentioned above, what makes the process of defining
discourse even more complex is that most theorists when using the
term do not specify which of these particular meanings they are
using. Furthermore, most theorists, as I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5,
modify even these basic definitions. What is necessary is to be able
to decide in which context the term is being used, and hence what
meanings have accrued to it. This book is concerned with
demarcating the boundaries of the meanings of discourse, and in
the chapters which follow I will be concerned with three contexts
of usage, broadly speaking, cultural theory, linguistics and critical
linguistics/social psychology. But perhaps it may be useful here to
sketch out in a schematic way the range of definitions and the
contexts within which they occur, before going on to analyse these
in more detail.
CULTURAL THEORY/CRITICAL THEORY/ LITERARY
THEORY
Influenced largely by Foucault’s work, within cultural theory as a
whole, discourse is often used in an amalgam of the meanings
derived from the term’s Latin and French origins and influences (a
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INTRODUCTION
9
speech/conversation) and a more specific theoretical meaning
which sees discourse as the general domain of the production and
circulation of rule-governed statements. A distinction may be
usefully made between this general, abstract theoretical concern
with discourse and the analysis of individual discourses, or
groupings of statements produced within power relations. In
Bakhtin’s work, and also in Roland Barthes’ work, however, as I
noted above, a discourse can be taken to represent a voice within a
text or a speech position. For theorists such as Benveniste, discourse
is the representation of events in a text without particular concern
to their chronology in real-time (histoire/story).
MAINSTREAM LINGUISTICS
For many theorists within mainstream linguistics, the term discourse
signifies a turning away from sentences as exemplars of usage in the
abstract, that is, examples of the way that language is structured as
a system, to a concern with language in use (Brown and Yule, 1983).
For others, discourse implies a concern with the length of the text
or utterance; thus, discourse is an extended piece of text, which has
some form of internal organisation, coherence or cohesion (Sinclair
and Coulthard, 1975; Carter and Simpson, 1989). For other
mainstream linguists, discourse is defined by the context of
occurrence of certain utterances (thus, the discourse of religion, the
discourse of advertising). These contexts of production of texts will
determine the internal constituents of the specific texts produced.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY/CRITICAL LINGUISTICS
For social psychologists and critical linguists, discourse is used in a
variety of ways, but all of them fuse meanings derived from
mainstream linguistics and cultural theory. Thus, social
psychologists tend to integrate a concern with power relations and
the resultant structures of authorised utterances, such as racism or
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10 INTRODUCTION
sexism, with a methodology derived from early discourse analysis
(Wetherell and Potter, 1992; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1995). Critical
linguists such as Norman Fairclough have tended to be similarly
concerned with power relations and the way these shape the
production of utterances and texts, but his methodology has been
influenced by more recent discourse analysis, and he is thus able to
provide a more complex model of the way that discourse functions,
and the effects that it has on participants (Fairclough, 1992b). This
fusion of linguistics and cultural theory has inevitably resulted in an
overlaying of the meanings of discourse from both fields.
This book is mainly focused on how Michel Foucault’s ideas on
discourse have been integrated into various disciplines in different
ways. I will now turn, therefore, to a brief discussion of his work,
together with a discussion of Michel Pecheux’s theorisation of
discourse. I then consider the way that literature might be usefully
seen as a discourse, drawing on Foucault’s work. This will be
followed in Chapters 2 and 3 by more detailed examinations of the
uses to which Foucault put the term. In Chapters 4 and 5, I will
examine the modifications which cultural theorists, particularly
those working within feminist theory, colonial and post-colonial
discourse theory, have made to his work and the way that they put
the term discourse to work in analysis. Chapter 6 then analyses the
way that discourse has at the same time had different trajectories in
terms of the way that it has worked out its meanings within
discourse analysis, critical linguistics and social psychology.
CULTURAL THEORY AND MODELS OF DISCOURSE
Whilst Michel Foucault is one of the theorists most often referred to
when discussing the term discourse, as Diane Macdonnell has
clearly shown, there are a large number of theorists whose work on
the theorising of discourse is important (Macdonnell, 1986).
Macdonnell discusses in detail the differences between the
definitions developed by Michel Foucault, Barry Hindess and Paul
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INTRODUCTION 11
Hirst, and Louis Althusser and Valentin Voloshinov/Mikhail
Bakhtin. She concludes that it is the institutional nature of discourse
and its situatedness in the social which is central to all these different
perspectives. She states: ‘dialogue is the primary condition of
discourse: all speech and writing is social’ (ibid.: 1), and goes on to
say: ‘discourses differ with the kinds of institutions and social
practices in which they take shape and with the positions of those
who speak and those whom they address’ (ibid.). Thus, a discourse
is not a disembodied collection of statements, but groupings of
utterances or sentences, statements which are enacted within a
social context, which are determined by that social context and
which contribute to the way that social context continues its
existence. Institutions and social context therefore play an
important determining role in the development, maintenance and
circulation of discourses. This institutional nature of discourse is
particularly notable in the work of Michel Pecheux, and in
discussing his theorising of discourse, Macdonnell comments:
A ‘discourse’ as a particular area of language use may be
identified by the institutions to which it relates and by the
positions from which it comes and which it marks out for the
speaker. The position does not exist by itself, however. Indeed,
it may be understood as a standpoint taken up by the discourse
through its relation to another, ultimately an opposing
discourse.
(ibid.: 3)
Thus, particularly in Pecheux’s work, discourses (here, groups of
utterances/texts which have similar force or effect) do not occur in
isolation but in dialogue, in relation to or, more often, in contrast
and opposition to other groups of utterances. A simple example of
this is the way that the discourse of environmentalism has been
structured in reaction to government economic and strategic
development policies, and also in reaction to ecological disasters.
In this sense, the form that environmental philosophies have
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12 INTRODUCTION
developed has depended in a large measure on events and
discursive frameworks external to it. However, it could equally be
argued that government policy is framed precisely in reaction to
pressure groups such as environmental groups; therefore, each
group will have its discursive parameters defined for it by the other.
A further aspect which all these views of discourse have in
common is that they consider discourses to be principally organised
around practices of exclusion. Whilst what it is possible to say seems
self-evident and natural, this naturalness is a result of what has been
excluded, that which is almost unsayable. Thus, for example, it
seems self-evident that we should talk about menstruation in
negative terms, describing it in terms analogous to imprisonment
and cloaking it in secrecy. One has only to look at advertisements
for tampons and sanitary towels to feel this discursive pressure. This
feels fairly uncontroversial, since many Western women experience
menstruation as a burden, as painful and as limiting their normal
lives; but the fact that some women’s experience ties in with or is
conditioned by discursive pressure does not mean that it has some
authentic or real existence. This particular view of menstruation and
the experience of menstruation is made possible by the fact that
other ways of knowing about menstruation have been excluded.
This way of looking at the way women’s bodies function can be
seen to be part of a medicalised discourse of women’s health, which
categorises such events as childbirth and menstruation as
pathological in relation to a perceived male norm (Shuttle and
Redgrove, 1978; Laws, 1990). This is not to suggest, as Shuttle and
Redgrove have, that women should therefore celebrate
menstruation, but rather to call for a recognition of the excluding of
any positive appraisal of the way women’s bodies function. What
feminist theorists have attempted to do in the last twenty years is to
question the naturalisation of these dominant discursive structures
within which women’s health is discussed in order to make those
excluded discursive positions available and to gain credence for
them.
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INTRODUCTION 13
A further factor which Macdonnell isolates as pertaining to all
definitions of discourse is that ‘whatever signifies or has meaning
can be considered part of discourse’ (Macdonnell, 1986: 4). Whilst
this may be seen by some as being too wide a definition of
discourse, it does emphasise the fact that discourses are not simple
groupings of utterances or statements, but consist of utterances
which have meaning, force and effect within a social context. As I
will show in Chapter 3, statements – the most fundamental building
blocks of discourse – are those utterances or parts of text which
have an effect. Statements are not the same as sentences, but are
those utterances which can be seen to be grouped around one
particular effect.1 Thus, when a judge says ‘I sentence you to three
years imprisonment’, there are a number of these effects. The judge
is institutionally sanctioned, and therefore the force of her/his
pronouncement is to transform the accused into a criminal and to
enforce a particular sentence on that person. Thus, ‘I sentence you
. . .’ can be regarded both as a statement and as part of a discourse,
since such a statement can only have effect if it is uttered within the
context of other utterances (i.e., if certain procedures have been
adhered to) and if it takes place within an institutional setting (i.e.,
within a court room, by an appointed judge).
One theorist whose work can usefully be read in conjunction
with Michel Foucault’s is the Marxist linguist, Michel Pecheux. His
work on discourse (Pecheux, 1982) is important in that he tried to
analyse the meanings of words and their relations to larger
structures without assuming that words and sentences had a
meaning in themselves. He conducted an experiment, later termed
the ‘Mansholt report’, whereby he gave students an economics text
to read; he told one group of students that it was a left-wing text and
the other group that it was a right-wing text. The text itself could be
broadly categorised as a middle-of-the-road economics text, but he
showed that each group read the text selectively to fit in with the
political framing that he had given it. In this sense, he gives shape
to Foucault’s work on discourse by giving a concrete example of the
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14 INTRODUCTION
way in which discourses shape our interpretation of texts. If we
employ a discourse of ‘left-wing economics texts’ to interpret a text,
we will imbue that text with the meanings of the larger framing
discourse.
Pecheux’s work is important in that he stresses more than
Foucault the conflictual nature of discourse, that it is always in
dialogue and in conflict with other positions. He stresses the fact
that ideological struggle is the essence of discourse structure.
Pecheux also makes a useful addition to thinking on discourses,
since he is concerned, as are such theorists as Renée Balibar, with
questions of access; whilst Foucault tends to deal with a fairly stable
notion of access to discourses, Pecheux is concerned that, for
example, people who are not privileged within the class system,
through lack of access to education, knowledge and familiarity with
information networks and capital, are similarly prevented from
having easy access to discourses. Thus, although the same language
may be spoken throughout a country (this itself is debatable given,
for example, the multicultural environment of Britain in the 1990s),
there is a sense in which access to those discursive frameworks
which circulate in society is not equally available to all. An example
of this is the exclusions in operation with regard to who can publish
in an academic journal; in theory, anyone can submit an article for
an academic journal, but in practice the article will only be
published if it submits to the formal rules of the discourse governing
the structures contained within academic papers (i.e., it uses the
vocabulary and formal language recognised as appropriate for such
writing; it draws critically on other academic articles and cites recent
publications by other academics; it conforms to the concerns of
articles within that particular journal and uses the vocabulary
associated with those concerns). However, generally there are other
unspoken rules which govern whether an article is published or not,
and these are related to whether the writer is employed by an
educational institution, whether the writer is known to the editors
or referees of the article, and so on. Thus, whilst access to
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INTRODUCTION 15
publishing is, apparently, open to all, in fact there are a number of
discursive and institutional barriers which limit academic
publishing to those people who are employed in academic posts,
who know the discursive rules for writing academic articles and
who are able to manipulate their own concerns in line with those
discursive structures.
Discourses structure both our sense of reality and our notion of
our own identity. Pecheux’s work is also very useful in that it
enables us to consider ways in which subjects can come to a
position of disidentification, whereby we not only locate and isolate
the ways in which we as subjects have been constructed and
subjected, but we also map out for ourselves new terrains in which
we can construct different and potentially more liberating ways in
which we can exist. The Women’s Movement has been important
for many women in mapping out new discursive roles both for men
and women. These roles are strongly contested by media
representations and by the representations which are constructed
through people’s interactions with stereotypes of all kinds. But this
type of critical knowledge has fundamentally changed and re-
presented what it means to exist as a gendered subject. Thus, to go
back to the earlier example of menstruation, it is clear that feminist
writing and action on women’s health has enabled menstruation to
be talked about within the public domain, and even for women’s
sanitary products to be advertised on television. Feminist
reappraisals of menstruation have meant that advertising no longer
stresses imprisonment; in fact, it could be said that the pressures of
feminism have resulted in the altogether surreal advertisements for
such products as Bodyform and Tampax where menstruating
women perform athletic acts (skydiving, swimming, surfing,
pushing broken-down cars) which perhaps are not featured in other
forms of advertising for products targeted at women. Thus, feminist
disidentification with the dominant discourses concerned with
menstruation has resulted in changes in the representation of
menstruation within the public domain, and ultimately in
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16 INTRODUCTION
alternative ways of considering women’s health. However, in this
instance, the surreal nature of the advertising concerning sanitary
products does signal a singular inability to cope with the experience
of menstruation – the advertisements are still concerned with the
erasing of menstruation, rather than with dealing with more positive
views of menstrual periods.
Thus, for Pecheux in particular, discourses do not exist in
isolation, but are the object and site of struggle. Discourses are thus
not fixed but are the site of constant contestation of meaning.
MICHEL FOUCAULT AND DISCOURSE
What I have said is not ‘what I think’ but often what I wonder
whether it couldn’t be thought.
(Foucault, 1979d: 58)
Foucault’s study begins the immense task of dismantling the
theme that knowledge is an expression of men’s [sic] ideas.
(Macdonnell, 1986: 86)
Michel Foucault’s work has been crucial to the development of a
range of different theories which have been broadly grouped under
the term ‘discourse theory’, and it is for this reason that this book
will focus primarily on his work. Foucault’s work is often difficult to
understand, partly because of its sometimes convoluted style and
the density of reference he uses. But perhaps, the main reason why
Foucault is considered difficult is because, more than any other
theorist, he challenges many of the preconceived notions that we
have about a wide range of different subjects: sexuality, madness,
discipline, subjectivity, language.
I endeavour in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book to draw on some of
Foucault’s writing which helps readers to think about the term
discourse. Foucault does give some general definitions of discourse
which I shall discuss in some detail, but perhaps the most useful
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INTRODUCTION 17
way to investigate the term is to see how it is used by Foucault in his
discussions of power, knowledge and truth, since this configuration
is essentially what constitutes discourse.
Foucault’s work is not a system of ideas nor a general theory; his
work ranges over an extremely wide variety of subjects and it is very
difficult to pin him down as a historian, a philosopher, a
psychologist or a critical theorist. As he himself says:
All my books . . . are little tool boxes . . . if people want to open
them, to use this sentence or that idea as a screwdriver or
spanner to short-circuit, discredit or smash systems of power,
including eventually those from which my books have
emerged . . . so much the better.
(cited in Patton, 1979a: 115)
Thus, the term discourse is not rooted within a larger system of fully
worked-out theoretical ideas, but is one element in Foucault’s work.
This lack of system sometimes causes difficulty for theorists and
may be one of the reasons that there are so many different
definitions of the term discourse, and so many modifications of the
meaning of the term. However, this lack of general system is also
what makes for a certain flexibility when theorists are trying to use
Foucault’s work to fit changing social circumstances.
One of the most productive ways of thinking about discourse is
not as a group of signs or a stretch of text, but as ‘practices that
systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault,
1972: 49). In this sense, a discourse is something which produces
something else (an utterance, a concept, an effect), rather than
something which exists in and of itself and which can be analysed
in isolation. A discursive structure can be detected because of the
systematicity of the ideas, opinions, concepts, ways of thinking and
behaving which are formed within a particular context, and because
of the effects of those ways of thinking and behaving. Thus, we can
assume that there is a set of discourses of femininity and
masculinity, because women and men behave within a certain
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18 INTRODUCTION
range of parameters when defining themselves as gendered
subjects. These discursive frameworks demarcate the boundaries
within which we can negotiate what it means to be gendered. It is
these discourses which heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transsexual/transvestite subjects engage with when coming to
understand themselves as sexed: when a lesbian takes up a ‘femme’
position, it is her perception of the discourse of heterosexual
femininity that she is actively modifying and reworking and
ultimately destabilising (Bell, et al., 1994). This discursive
framework of femininity may determine the types of clothes she
chooses to wear, the types of bodily stance she adopts and ways of
thinking about herself and others in relation to power.
In terms of thinking about discourse as having effects, it is
important to consider the factors of truth, power and knowledge,
since it is because of these elements that discourse has effects.
Truth, for Foucault, is not something intrinsic to an utterance, nor is
it an ideal abstract quality to which humans aspire; he sees truth as
being something far more worldly and more negative:
Truth is of the world; it is produced there by virtue of multiple
constraints. . . . Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general
politics’ of truth: that is the types of discourse it harbours and
causes to function as true: the mechanisms and instances
which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the
way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and
procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth: the status
of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
(Foucault, 1979e: 46)
Truth, therefore, is something which societies have to work to
produce, rather than something which appears in a transcendental
way. Foucault analyses the labour which people perform to exclude
certain forms of knowledge from consideration as ‘true’. To
consider an example which Norman Fairclough discusses
(Fairclough 1992b), ‘alternative’ knowledge about health is not
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INTRODUCTION 19
given the same status as conventional medical science; a great deal
of effort and discursive work is expended on ensuring that
alternative medicine is considered inferior, amateurish and falling
within the sphere of charlatans, thus maintaining for medical
science the authority of the ‘true’ and the ‘scientific’. Thus,
discourses do not exist in a vacuum but are in constant conflict with
other discourses and other social practices which inform them over
questions of truth and authority. As Foucault puts it: ‘I want to try to
discover how this choice of truth, inside which we are caught but
which we ceaselessly renew, was made – but also how it was
repeated, renewed and displaced’ (Foucault, 1981: 70). Thus,
Foucault is not interested in which discourse is a true or accurate
representation of the ‘real’, in this case whether alternative therapies
work more effectively than conventional medicine; rather he is
concerned with the mechanics whereby one becomes produced as
the dominant discourse, which is supported by institutional
funding, by the provision of buildings and staff by the state, and by
the respect of the population as a whole, whereas the other is
treated with suspicion and is housed both metaphorically and
literally at the margins of society.
Power is therefore a key element in discussions of discourse.
Foucault has been instrumental in the rethinking of models of
power; rather than simply assuming, as many liberal humanists
have, that power is a possession (so that someone takes or seizes
power from someone else) or that power is a violation of someone’s
rights (for example, the idea that power is simply preventing
someone from doing what they want to do) or, as Marxist theorists
have, that power relations are determined by economic relations,
Foucault has attempted to come to terms with the complexity of the
range of practices which can be summed up under the term power.
He is very critical of what he terms the ‘repressive hypothesis’ that
power is simply about preventing someone from carrying out their
wishes and limiting people’s freedom. John Frow puts it this way:
If power is no longer thought simply as a negative and
repressive force but as the condition of production of all
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20 INTRODUCTION
speech, and if power is conceived as polar rather than
monolithic, as an asymmetrical dispersion, then all utterances
will be potentially splintered, formally open to contradictory
uses.
(Frow, 1985: 206)
This sums up the sense of Foucault’s analysis of power, that is, that
power is dispersed throughout social relations, that it produces
possible forms of behaviour as well as restricting behaviour. This
productive model of power is something many theorists have found
useful, particularly when looking at ways of thinking about
discourse. In thinking about the sexuality of children, in The History
of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault gives an example of the way in
which power relations produce forms of subjectivity and behaviour
rather than simply repressing them. Speaking particularly about
views of children’s masturbation and sexuality within the Victorian
period, he states:
It would be less than exact to say that the pedagogical
institution has imposed a ponderous silence on the sex of
children and adolescents. On the contrary, since the
eighteenth century it has multiplied the forms of discourse on
the subject; it has established various points of implantation for
sex; it has coded contents and qualified speakers. Speaking
about children’s sex, inducing educators, physicians,
administrators, and parents to speak of it, or speaking to them
about it, causing children themselves to talk about it, and
enclosing them in a web of discourses which sometimes
address them, sometimes speak about them, or impose
canonical bits of knowledge on them, or use them as a basis
for constructing a science that is beyond their grasp – all this
together enables us to link an intensification of the
interventions of power to a multiplication of discourse.
(Foucault, 1978: 32)
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INTRODUCTION 21
Thus, far from institutional pressures repressing children’s
sexuality, in fact, as Foucault goes on to discuss, this discursive work
created the forms within which that sexuality could appear:
Educators and doctors combatted children’s onanism [male
masturbation] like an epidemic that needed to be eradicated.
What this actually entailed, throughout this whole secular
campaign that mobilized the adult world around the sex of
children, was using these tenuous pleasures as a prop,
constituting them as secrets (that is, forcing them into hiding so
as to make possible their discovery), tracing them back to their
source . . . wherever there was a chance they might appear,
devices of surveillance were installed; traps were laid for
compelling admissions; inexhaustible and corrective
discourses were imposed; parents and teachers were alerted,
and left with the suspicion that all children were guilty.
(ibid.: 42)
As Foucault goes on to argue, this vigilance around the question of
male children’s masturbation, rather than eradicating the practice,
was one of the factors which led to an increasing sexualisation of
childhood in the Victorian period.
Foucault argues for the imbrication of power with knowledge, so
that all of the knowledge we have is the result or the effect of power
struggles. To give an example, what is studied in schools and
universities is the result of struggles over whose version of events is
sanctioned. Knowledge is often the product of the subjugation of
objects, or perhaps it can be seen as the process through which
subjects are constituted as subjugated; for example, when
consulting a university library catalogue, if you search under the
term ‘women’, you will find a vast selection of books and articles
discussing the oppression of women, the psychology of women,
the physical ailments that women suffer from, and so on. If you
search under the term ‘men’ you will not find the same wealth of
information. (In Chapter 4 I will analyse closely the relation
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22 INTRODUCTION
between feminist theory and discourse theory.) Similarly, if you
consult the catalogue again and look up ‘India’ or ‘Africa’, you will
find that in the nineteenth century the production of knowledge
about these countries by British writers coincided with the period
when there was the greatest degree of colonial involvement. (I will
also go on to consider this issue in Chapter 5 on colonial and post-
colonial discourse theory.) Foucault has described this connection
between the production of knowledge and power relations as
‘power/ knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980a). Most theorists of power
have seen individuals as oppressed by power relations, but
Foucault sees them as the effects or instances of power relations:
The individual is not to be conceived of as a sort of elementary
nucleus . . . on which power comes to fasten. . . . In fact, it is
already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies,
certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to
be identified and constituted as individuals.
(ibid.: 98)
Here the individual is seen as an effect of power and not that which
is acted upon by power.
LITERATURE AS A DISCOURSE
Although not all of the readers of this book will be students of
literary or cultural studies, these are perhaps the areas in which
Foucault’s work has been most influential. It may therefore be asked
why Foucault’s notion of discourse is important for literary and
cultural studies, because although Foucault did analyse some
literature, mainly in the form of reviews, literature was certainly not
his primary concern, and in his theoretical work he does not
produce textual analyses as such. In some ways, discourse as a term
is most important for the questions it allows us to ask about
literature and textuality in general. Literature has been variously
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INTRODUCTION 23
designated by different theorists as a privileged site of critique or as
an arbitrary set of conventions which we learn to read as literary,
whereas as Macdonnell states:
The methods and concepts of recent study of discourse make
possible an analysis of the discourses, in their relation to
institutional practices, through which a division of texts has
been marked out and ‘literature’ has been constituted as the
object of a certain enshrinement.
(Macdonnell, 1986: 7)
The study of discourse does not differentiate between those texts
which are designated as literary and those which are designated as
non-literary, although discourse theorists are keenly aware of the
institutionalised differences that exist between the two sets of texts.
History texts are privileged in their relation to truth, for example;
autobiographical writings are privileged in terms of their supposed
authenticity in relation to an authorial voice; and literary texts have
a complex relation to both truth and value, on the one hand being
seen as providing a ‘truth’ about the human condition, and yet doing
so within a fictional and therefore ‘untrue’ form. However, for the
discussion of the construction, say, of discourses of femininity and
masculinity, it is possible to discuss literary texts alongside other
texts, such as works of history and autobiography, and even more
ephemeral texts, such as cookery books, advice manuals and so on,
in order to reveal the similarities these texts display across generic
boundaries. Discourse is therefore useful in that it can allow us to
analyse similarities across a range of texts as the products of a
particular set of power/ knowledge relations.
Foucault can be seen as having held particularly conservative
ideas about literature; for example, in arguing for it to be considered
as a privileged zone where language is used in non-referential ways.
However, in most instances where Foucault is discussing literature
he is describing avant-garde writing, and not literature in general.
For example, he states:
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24 INTRODUCTION
there has of course existed in the Western world, since Dante,
since Homer, a form of language that we now call ‘literature’.
But the word [literature] is of recent date, as is also, in our
culture, the isolation of a particular language whose peculiar
mode of being is ‘literary’. . . . Literature is the contestation of
philology . . . it leads language back from grammar to the naked
power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed,
imperious being of words.
(Foucault, 1970: 299–300)
Here Foucault seems to be characterising literature as a particular
type of self-reflexive writing, since he goes on to describe literature
as
a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of
a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor
interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do
but shine in the brightness of its being.
(ibid.: 300)
However, he also analyses the processes of exclusion which
operate around institutions such as literature, and the critical
discourses which are necessary to support and keep literary texts in
circulation. As I show in Chapter 3 on discursive structures, the
constituents of discourse itself are less important than the range of
practices which are necessary to support that discourse and to
exclude other discourses from positions of authority.
Foucault’s work has helped a number of theorists to consider the
way that English literature as a discipline works. Foucault himself
states:
literary criticism and literary history in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries constituted the person of the author, and
the figure of the oeuvre, using, modifying and displacing the
procedures of religious exegesis, biblical criticism,
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INTRODUCTION 25
hagiography, historical or legendary ‘lives’, autobiography or
memoirs.
(Foucault, 1981: 71)
This move to analyse the support given to literature as a discourse
and as an institution, and the cannibalising of previous discourses
by literary critics, has been an important move away from text-
immanent analyses of literature, where, for example, the
Renaissance or the eighteenth century are seen as ‘natural’ self-
contained categories not invented by scholars. As Brian Doyle,
Chris Baldick and Terry Eagleton have shown, although the study
of literature feels familiar and ‘normal’, it became institutionalised
at a crucial moment in English cultural history when religious faith
was declining and when there was pressure to open up areas of
study for those who had been previously excluded from formal
education (i.e., women and the working classes) (Doyle, 1982;
Baldick, 1983; Eagleton, 1983). Indeed, the study of literature was
undertaken using very much the same discursive structures as those
previously used for the study of religion, with the construction of
canons (itself a religious categorisation of texts) and the focus on
morality and values. As Brian Doyle has noted ‘the teaching of a
“national” language and literature operates as a key feature in
reproducing the cultural relations within what is usually called “our”
society’ (Doyle, 1982: 17).
It should also be stated that, given a Foucauldian flame of
reference, literature, as well as being the means whereby a sense of
a national culture is established, is also the means whereby those
norms of a shared culture can be contested. This contestation can
be seen with the growth of women’s studies courses and the
inclusion of more women’s writing on the mainstream literature
syllabus, together with Black writing and writing in English. But, as
Doyle states:
It needs to be noted immediately that “the English language
and literature” as a field of semantic and practical activity did
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26 INTRODUCTION
not simply arrive on the scene from nowhere, full and
complete. It had to be worked for, constructed, forged out of
struggles between differing lived meanings and cultural forms.
(ibid.: 19)
In the same way that the sense of a national culture or canon had to
be worked for, the contestation of the form of that national culture
is also something which has involved struggle.
This is why Foucault’s archaeological analysis of discourse is
important; he is not interested in simply analysing the discourses
which are circulating in our society at present, what he wants us to
see is the arbitrariness of this range of discourses, the strangeness
of those discourses, in spite of their familiarity. He also wants to
chart the development of certain discursive practices, so that we can
see that, rather than being permanent, as their familiarity would
suggest, discourses are constantly changing and their origins can be
traced to certain key shifts in history. Although Foucault’s notion of
historiography has been criticised (Hacking, 1986; Taylor, 1986;
Walzer, 1986), it is important to stress the uniqueness of Foucault’s
work in attempting to chart the changes in discursive structures over
time. For Foucault, a discourse is not a set of utterances which is
stable over time; he tries to work against the notions of progress and
development which dominate many liberal ways of thinking.
Instead of viewing history, for example, as a simple progression
towards greater civilisation or, as Marxists have done, as a series of
class conflicts which lead to greater equality, Foucault has argued
that history is discontinuous; there is not a seamless narrative which
we can decipher underlying history, nor is them any continuity at
all. He argues for seeing history as discontinuous, as shifting and
lurching in ways which are not entirely within human grasp, and not
entirely within our control. He said in an interview:
My problem has not at all been to say: there it is, long live
discontinuity . . . but to pose the question: how can it be that
there are at certain moments and in certain orders of
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INTRODUCTION 27
knowledge these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of
evolution, these transformations which do not correspond to
the calm and continuist image that is ordinarily accepted.
(Foucault, 1979e: 31)
Foucault is therefore concerned with charting these moments of
discontinuity when discursive structures undergo radical change.
In this book, I aim to detail the use Foucault himself made of the
term discourse and, in Chapter 2, to contrast its use with that of the
term ideology. Since Marxist thinking was such a crucial reactive
force in the development of the notion of discourse for Foucault, it
is important to chart the history of that difference of meaning and
emphasis. In Chapter 3 I analyse the structures that go to make up
the building blocks of discourse. I then go on, in Chapters 4 and 5,
to discuss the modifications that have been made to the definition
of discourse by feminist theorists and colonial and post-colonial
discourse theorists. These chapters serve also as examples of the
way that the term discourse can be useful in textual analysis. In
Chapter 6, I examine some of the work in linguistics which focuses
on the term discourse, covering both the earlier discourse analysts
and the more Foucauldian-influenced critical linguists and social
psychologists. This book will thus circle around the meanings
associated with the term discourse and around the complex matrix
of issues concerning knowledge, truth and power, in order to define
the parameters of its usage. The purpose of this circling around will
not be to privilege one particular set of meanings which the term
has accrued, nor to suggest that one set of interpretations of the term
are ‘true’ or more adequate than others. Nor am I attempting to
fossilise one particular set of meanings for the term. Rather, I am
concerned throughout this book to focus on the limitations and
theoretical difficulties which beset the term and perhaps to suggest
ways in which these difficulties might be used as stepping-off points
for further theoretical investigation.
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28 INTRODUCTION
NOTE
1 Michel Foucault had numerous rather heated debates about the meaning of the
word ‘statement’. In some of these discussions it was asserted that the
statement was the same as the speech act, as developed by John Austin and
John Searle. See Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 44–49) for a fuller discussion,
and also the section in Chapter 3 on the statement (pp. 60–62).
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
For all cultural and critical theorists there has been intense
theoretical difficulty in deciding whether to draw on work which is
based around the notion of ideology or work which refers to
discourse. These problems have to do with political orientation,
which, in the pessimistic political climate of the 1990s, has meant
that many theorists have found themselves more comfortable
dealing with notions of discourse than aligning themselves with
Marxist-inflected theories through the use of the term ideology. This
is not to suggest that discourse is necessarily an apolitical term, or
that it signals a lack of political commitment, since, as I argue in
Chapters 4 and 5, it is possible to conduct a politically informed
analysis based on the use of discourse theory, but this political
commitment is in no way as straightforwardly formulated as it is
when using the term ideology. Thus, many theorists, after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the seeming world-wide collapse
of communism as a viable political system, wanted to develop an
intellectual practice concerned to analyse the determinants of
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30 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
thinking and behaviour in a more complex way than is possible
when using terms like ideology. For many working with a vulgar
Marxist model, ideology implied a simplistic and negative process
whereby individuals were duped into using conceptual systems
which were not in their own interests. Discourse, because of its lack
of alliance to a clear political agenda, offered a way of thinking
about hegemony – people’s compliance in their own oppression –
without assuming that individuals are necessarily simply passive
victims of systems of thought. For those who work within discourse
theory, the model of political activity and the perceived outcomes
of that activity are very different from those developed within
schools of thought informed by notions of ideology. Whereas
Marxist views of history and progress tend to lead to fairly clear-cut
Utopian views of what is to be achieved (a revolution, a remodelling
of the economy, an alleviation of oppression of the working class,
a widespread critique of consumerism and capitalism), models of
action formulated using discourse tend to formulate rather messy,
complex visions of the future. This is because, as I hope to show in
this chapter, within discourse theory, questions of agency are less
clear and, as a consequence, questions of how much control one
has over what happens as a result of one’s own actions are very
much to the fore. Therefore, whilst political action can be accounted
for theoretically within discourse theory, at the same time it is clear
that one’s actions may have several effects which do not match
one’s intentions. For example, you might intend simply to prevent
the live export of veal calves through demonstrating outside British
ports; this might in fact be one of the outcomes of your presence in
the demonstration. However, another outcome might also be that
you are photographed by the police and a file is opened on you as
a potential agitator. Exporters might decide to employ security
guards and also to use air freight rather than sea transport. The
government might decide to bring in new legislation aimed at
restricting the number of people allowed to demonstrate at any one
time. Whereas a Marxist analysis of collective actions such as
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 31
demonstrations would only be concerned with the immediate
effects in relation to live animal export (the effect that had been
intended), discourse theory would be as interested in the other
outcomes, which it would see as similarly entailed by such action.
Foucault was working at a time when academic allegiance to
Marxism in France was being questioned and when there was a
great deal of debate about the possibility of forging a new type of
political theorising drawing on Marxist thought but not involving
the type of doctrinaire thinking which often accompanied some
Marxist theory in France at the time. Foucault at various times
openly acknowledged his debt to Marxist thought and at other times
also sought clearly to distinguish and distance his work from Marxist
thinking. What is clear is that Marxism and notions of ideology were
crucial for him in the development of the notion of discourse.
The political events of May 1968 in Paris seemed to galvanise
many academics, including Foucault, who were searching for a way
of acting and of questioning liberal humanist and conservative
orthodoxies. The student unrest and the subsequent wider unrest
involving workers and other groups drew many academics into
open political activity, campaigning and demonstrating alongside
and for the rights of workers, homosexuals, prisoners and others
(Macey, 1993). During the 1970s Foucault was actively involved in
a number of campaigns and was often called upon to act as a
figurehead for certain actions. For example, in 1971 Foucault
became involved with a group of prisoners who were demanding
rights and political status under a particularly harsh prison regime;
with them Foucault set up the Groupe d’Information sur les
Prisonniers (GIP), which aimed to give voice to prisoners and allow
them access to the debates which were taking place in the public
sphere about the conditions in prisons. He also became involved in
the struggle for Algerian independence and for a wide range of
political movements which gained greatly from the very visible
presence of a well-known public figure. Thus, although discourse
theory is often characterised as apolitical, Foucault’s work can best
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32 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
be seen as a debate with Marxism about what is possible as a form
of political action and, particularly, his work should be seen as an
intense debate about the role of the intellectual in political struggle.
Much of Foucault’s work on discourse has been an open
discussion and dialogue with the term ideology, and in some sense
the term discourse has been defined in dialogue with and in
reaction to the definition of ideology. There are a number of
differences between the terms discourse and ideology which I
would like to examine in some detail. Firstly, let us consider what
Foucault himself has to say on this:
The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to use for
three reasons. The first is that, whether one wants it to be or
not, it is always in virtual opposition to something like the truth.
. . . The second inconvenience is that it refers, necessarily I
believe, to something like a subject. Thirdly, ideology is in a
secondary position in relation to something which must
function as the infra-structure or economic or material
determinant for it.
(Foucault, 1979e: 36)
Let us consider these differences which Foucault has found
between ideology and discourse in some detail. Firstly, let us take
the opposition of ideology to a position of truth or critique which is
located outside ideology.
IDEOLOGY AND TRUTH
The theorising of ideology, especially the work of Louis Althusser,
is based on the notion that the position from which the theorist
speaks is one of scientific critique (see Althusser, 1984; Eagleton,
1991). Thus, ideology is often characterised as false consciousness
or an imagined representation of the real conditions of existence;
the position from which this falseness is apprehended is that of
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 33
critique and stands outside ideology. Foucault, however, does not
hold that his own position is completely outside the ideas and
practices which he is analysing. For some, this has meant that
Foucault’s own theoretical position is fundamentally undermined,
since it seems to suggest that, within a discourse theory view, all
statements – whether theoretical or not – have the same status and
validity; that is, any act of critique is determined and formed by the
power relation of which it is a part. It seems also to suggest that all
statements are similarly determined by institutional pressures. This
makes it difficult to distinguish between statements and acts which
oppose oppression and those which are complicit with that
oppression. However, this seeming relativism does not invalidate
Foucault’s own critical position and in fact is completely in line with
his own theoretical statements on truth. Foucault is not claiming to
speak from a position of ‘truth’ – he is aware of the fact that he
himself as a subject can only speak within the limits imposed upon
him by the discursive frameworks circulating at the time. That does
not mean that it is not possible to be critical, but there are limits to
what can be thought and, particularly, there are limits on what can
be classified as ‘knowable’. The notion within ideology of false
consciousness assumes that there is a consciousness which is not
false (the position of critique); for Foucault, all knowledge is
determined by a combination of social, institutional and discursive
pressures, and theoretical knowledge is no exception. Some of this
knowledge will challenge dominant discourses and some will be
complicit with them.
THE SUBJECT
Foucault was concerned to write about the history of ideas without
referring to the sovereign subject – the individual. He tried to move
away from the notion of the Cartesian subject, the subject whose
existence depends on its ability to see itself as unique and as self-
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34 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
contained, distinct from others, because it can think and reason. By
refusing to refer to the subject as a unitary being, Foucault is very
much part of post-structuralist thinking, which questioned the very
fundamental bases of liberal humanist ideology, rooted as it is in the
notion of the individual self with agency and control over itself.
Post-structuralist psychoanalytic theory questioned the unity of the
subject, finding it more useful to analyse the subject-in-process or
the subject-in-crisis, that is, the disintegration of the notion of the
unified subject (Moi, 1986; Vice, 1996). Psychoanalysts describe the
wide range of subject positions which individuals inhabit
precariously, sometimes wilfully adopting particular subject roles
and sometimes finding themselves being cast into certain roles
because of their past developmental history or because of the
actions of others. This focus on a range of shifting and precarious
subject positions means that the subject is no longer seen to be in
control. However, Foucault went further than these models of the
self developed within psychoanalysis (and adopted by Marxist
theorists such as Althusser), since he tried to formulate a way of
examining historical processes without relying on the notion of the
subject. Foucault found it necessary to start his analyses elsewhere
and shift the centre of attention away from the subject entirely.
Perhaps this is where his work is most controversial, since he is
concerned to see the subject as simply an effect of power and in a
sense to chart the death of the subject. Rather than seeing the subject
or even the subject-in-crisis as an element whose existence and
features could be charted, Foucault chose rather to ignore the
subject in itself, and concentrate on the processes which he
considered to be important in the constitution of our very notion of
subjectivity. Particularly in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)
and The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1978), he sees his task as
charting the changes in the production and circulation of
knowledge which led to the notion of subjectivity becoming of such
fundamental importance for Western societies since the eighteenth
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 35
century, and this focus constitutes for him a change in historical
method:
One had to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of
the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which
can account for the constitution of the subject within a
historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy,
that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution
of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without
having to make reference to a subject which is either
transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its
empty sameness throughout the course of history.
(Foucault, 1980a: 59)
Later in his work, he did return to the question of the subject, not to
write the subject into history as such but to situate the historical
changes and constitution of the concept of the sexed subject
(Foucault, 1985). This is perhaps where discourse theory seems to
be disengaged from a concern with individuals or groups of people,
since, for example, Foucault sees the invention of the homosexual
as a type of person, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to
have been the result of a number of changes within Western
knowledge about the nature of sexuality, rather than a simple
expression of the sexual preference of an individual self. An
ideological analysis may downplay the importance of the subject
because of its concern with groups or classes of individuals, and
because of its interest in the construction of individual subjectivity
through the actions of institutions such as the state. However, an
ideological analysis still, in the last instance, retains the notion of the
individual subject who is capable of resisting ideological pressures
and controlling his or her actions. Discourse theory has far more
difficulty in locating, describing and even accounting for this
individual subject who resists power.
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DETERMINANTS OF DISCOURSE
Foucault did not believe that there was a simple relationship
between economic and social structures and discourses. He did not
believe, as some Marxists do, that the economic base determines
what can be said and thought at a particular time; instead, he saw
the relation between economics, social structures and discourses as
being a complex interaction with none of the terms of the equation
being dominant. Whilst he was very aware of the importance of
state control and power relations based on economic imbalance, he
did not see economic relations as primary, but as one type of power
relation within a range of power relations. Foucault was also
concerned to show that power relations were not, as many Marxist
theorists had tried to show, coterminous with economic relations.
He tried to move the analysis of power relations within capitalism
away from assuming that certain structures of power and capitalism
are the same, as Patton comments:
It is not, perhaps, capitalist production which is autocratic and
hierarchised, but disciplinary production which is capitalist.
We know after all that disciplinary organisation of the
workforce persists even when production is no longer strictly
speaking capitalist.
(Patton, 1979: 124)
This is a matter of interest, particularly after the collapse of the
Eastern bloc, since it is clear that the seeming disintegration of the
socialist apparatus has in fact brought about few major changes in
the exploitative relations of production in Eastern Europe. It may be
that there are more forces at work in the organisation of industrial
labour within this context than a simple matter of communist
ideology.
I would like now to consider some further differences between
conceptions of ideology and Foucault’s notion of discourse, for
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example, the relation of discourse and ideology to notions of
power. As Foucault states: ‘If power was never anything but
repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really believe
that we should manage to obey it?’ (Foucault, 1979e: 36). Marxist
thought in particular seems to characterise power within what
Foucault termed the ‘repressive hypothesis’, that is, it sees power as
simply a negative infringement on someone else’s rights; here,
power is taken or seized from others, and it is viewed as something
which one can possess or hold at another’s expense. Foucault tries
to move the conception of power away from this negative model
towards a framework which stresses its productive nature, that it
produces as well as represses. The example Foucault gives is
contained within The History of Sexuality, Volume I, where he
discusses the repression of children’s sexuality in the nineteenth
century. He argues that attempts to regulate (male) children’s
masturbation in fact undoubtedly produced the very sexuality that
they were trying to eradicate. Parents’ interventions actually
produced different types of pleasures because of the perceived
need for the child to hide such sexual practices, and this in a sense
structured the child’s sexuality. This sense of surveillance of
children and the treating of masturbation as an epidemic that
needed to be eradicated entailed a certain vigilance on both the
parents’ and the child’s part, and therefore a certain awareness and
foregrounding of sexuality:
Wherever there was a chance they [traces of sexual
behaviour] might appear, devices of surveillance were
installed; traps were laid for compelling admissions;
inexhaustible and corrective discourses were imposed;
parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the suspicion
that all children were guilty, and with the fear of being
themselves at fault if their suspicions were not sufficiently
strong; they were kept in readiness in the face of this recurrent
danger; their conduct was prescribed and their pedagogy
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38 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
recodified; an entire medico-sexual regime took hold of the
family regime. The child’s ‘vice’ was not so much an enemy as
a support; it may have been designated as the evil to be
eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went into the task
was bound to fail which leads one to suspect that what was
demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to the limits of
the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good.
(Foucault, 1979a)
Thus, counter-intuitively, the seeming repression of male children’s
sexuality served only to produce a particular type of pleasurable
sexual practice within the confines of secrecy and guilt.1 In The
History of Sexuality, Foucault also details the way that
homosexuality was produced as a sexual practice and as a type of
personality in the very process whereby sexologists attempted to
describe homosexual acts as deviant and perverted. Thus, the
notion that repression of acts by those in power simply results in the
erasing of those acts is a simplistic model of actions and power
relations; it is clear from Foucault’s work that forms of subjectivity
are produced in negotiation with existing power relations.
Whilst Marxist theorists tend to stress the importance of the State
in the maintenance of power relations and in the distribution of
access to the means of the mode of production, Foucault is at great
pains to develop a different model of power which does not locate
power as a possession within the hands of a monolithic State.
Although Marxists such as Louis Althusser complicate the notion of
the State by trying to formulate a model of State power which has a
dispersion of agents of the State throughout society, in the final
analysis, the State is still the supreme determinant and source of
power relations (Althusser, 1984). Instead of this institutional focus,
Foucault says: ‘I don’t want to say that the State isn’t important; what
I want to say is that relations of power . . . necessarily extend beyond
the limits of the State’ (Foucault, 1979e: 38). This notion of moving
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 39
views of power away from a fixation on the State and hence on a
top-down model of power is important in the sense that it enables
us to see power as a relation rather than a simple imposition. This
relation involves more possible role positions than simply that of
master–slave presupposed in the State power model; it also
involves an analysis of the degrees of power involved in the relation
rather than an assumption that in any power relation there is simply
a powerful participant and a powerless one.
Foucault argues strongly against the notion of the repressive
hypothesis, as shown above, because for him it is clear that power
circulates through a society rather than being owned by one group.
Power is not so easily contained. Power is more a form of action or
relation between people which is negotiated in each interaction and
is never fixed and stable. Whilst Foucault would not minimise the
importance of the power of the State, he would suggest that power
operates around and through the networks which are generated
around the institutions of the State; in some senses power has
always been more thoroughly dispersed throughout society than
had been realised. For example, a Marxist analysis of prisons would
discuss the oppression and harsh treatment of the inmates, focusing
on the curtailment of rights and liberty, and perhaps would
concentrate on the ways that prisoners resist the penal regime. A
discourse theory analysis would be more concerned with the
structures through which that power relation is manifested in the
prison. For example, Foucault has described the architectural
organisation of space in the prison so that each prisoner has the
sense that s/he is under surveillance even when that is not in fact
the case (Foucault, 1979a). He has also gone on to describe the
process whereby those disciplinary structures have informed the
way that other power relations are lived out in the wider contexts
of schools, churches and military institutions, so that individuals
learn to discipline themselves or learn self-discipline through this
notion that they are potentially under surveillance.
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40 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
Foucault is also more concerned with the ways in which people
negotiate power relations, rather than assuming that the powerful
person in a institutionalised relation is in fact all-powerful. For
example, in work I have undertaken on the way that secretaries
speak to their bosses, I have found that there is not a clear-cut
distinction to be made between powerful talk, on the one hand, and
powerless talk on the other. Particularly through their verbal
dexterity and use of language, those who are not in economically
powerful positions, may nevertheless manage to negotiate for
themselves fairly powerful positions in the hierarchy (Mills, 1992a,
1996d). Furthermore, those who are in powerful positions may
have to be careful how they negotiate the enactment of their power,
and may have to temper the types of direct commands that they
give. For example, a stereotypical view of a power relation between
a secretary and a boss would produce an interaction such as the
following:
Boss: I want this letter typed up by the afternoon post.
Secretary: Yes, certainly.
Here, the boss manifests in his utterance the fact that he is in an
economically and institutionally sanctioned privileged position in
relation to the secretary and is thus able to issue her with direct
commands (or, in this case, statements of his needs that she will
interpret as commands). The secretary will also signal to the boss
her acknowledgement of her inferior position by her compliance to
his command.2 However, in most interactions between bosses and
secretaries that I have analysed, this type of powerful/powerless
verbal structure rarely occurs. What is far more common is for the
boss to display deference and tentativeness to the secretary
(seemingly classic signs of powerlessness) and for the secretary to
be very resistant to complying with the requests made by the boss
(seemingly classic signs of a powerful position). Here is an example
from one of the interactions which I recorded:
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 41
Boss: I wonder . . . if . . . er. . . could you possibly . . . you
know, this report thing here . . . could that be sort of
sent out // this afternoon
Secretary:
// Well. I’ve got a lot of work on
// but I suppose. . .
Boss:
// I’d really appreciate it thanks
(Mills, 1996d); . . . indicates pause, // indicates simultaneous
speech)
Here the boss displays all of the signs of powerlessness – hesitating,
hedging (using ‘sort of’, ‘report thing’ rather than ‘report’, ‘I wonder
if you could possibly’ rather than a bare command) – and he even
avoids stating explicitly his command: he only asks if the report
could be sent out and not if his secretary could make the necessary
revisions before sending it out. The secretary does not answer in the
affirmative; instead, she tells the boss about how busy she is,
implicitly stating that she cannot do the work. However, once she
says ‘but’, the boss realises that she will do the work and thanks her.
Even here, the secretary does not say that she will willingly do the
work, for she only says ‘I suppose [I will do the work]’. It is clear that
secretaries cannot refuse to undertake tasks which their bosses have
asked them to do, but they can certainly make it evident to their
bosses that each request that they make will have to be couched in
polite, deferent language which acknowledges the effort the task
will entail. This is not to suggest that in all interactions between
bosses and secretaries the secretaries in fact hold the position of
power; rather, it suggests ways in which people who have been
assigned a fairly powerless position within a hierarchy negotiate
with that position and accrue power to themselves through their use
of seemingly powerful styles of language (see also Holmes, 1995).
Within the theorising of ideology, whilst great stress is laid on the
overthrow of repressive power relations, it is difficult at a theoretical
level to account for the fact that revolutions do in fact take place.
The emphasis within Marxist theory is on the nature of the
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42 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
oppressive power relations and, whilst the notion of the
revolutionary subject is central to this process because of the
characterisation of power as oppressive, it is sometimes hard to
understand how subjects can develop a revolutionary
consciousness, how they can resist oppression. Foucault argues that
resistance is already contained within the notion of power: ‘Where
there is power there is resistance’, as he puts it. This is a very
attractive concept, since for Foucault no power relation is simply
one of total domination. Entailed within that relation is the force
which may challenge or overthrow it. For many feminist theorists
this notion of resistance being always present within power
relations has been particularly useful and has helped move theory
away from a concern with oppressor–victim models of dominance,
which had been prevalent in early feminist thinking. It also helped
many theorists within post-colonial theorising, since it consolidated
concerns around the issue of analysing resistance to colonial rule
rather than simply charting the workings of colonial power (see
Guha and Spivak, 1988). However, as Macdonnell puts it: ‘If power
is always already there, if every power situation is immanent in
itself, why should there ever be resistance? From where would
resistance come and how would it even be possible?’ (Macdonnell,
1986: 122) This is a major criticism, and it is one which I will be
considering in more detail in the chapters on feminism and colonial
discourse theory. For the moment, it is important to stress that
Foucault’s conception of power enables us to see the complexities
of power – that power is not simply an imposition. In order to deal
with questions of agency (which is crucial to both feminist and post-
colonial theory) however, it is necessary to modify Foucault’s work.
LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
Foucault’s conceptualisation of power forces us to re-evaluate the
role of language/discourse/texts in the process of the constitution
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 43
of subjects within a hierarchy of relations. Some Marxist theorists
have tended to view language as simply a vehicle whereby people
are forced to believe ideas which are not true or in their interests
but, within discourse theory, language is the site where those
struggles are acted out; as Foucault states: ‘as history constantly
teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or
systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there
is struggle’ (Foucault, 1981: 52–3). A good example of the contrast
between theorists who base their work around notions of ideology
and those who draw on discourse theory would be the debates over
political correctness/sexism (for overviews see Dunant, 1994;
Sunderland, 1994; Mills, 1995a). For both groups of theorists, sexism
consists of those statements and underlying beliefs which make
unnecessary and discriminatory distinctions between people on the
grounds of gender (Vetterling-Braggin, 1981). For example,
referring to Suzanne Charlton as a ‘weathergirl’ and Michael Fish as
a ‘weatherman’ would be considered to be sexist, since Fish is
assigned adult status and Charlton is given the term normally
assigned to a child; this is a common strategy within sexism
whereby women are consigned to a less powerful position, even
when they are in fact in an equally powerful position to men.
Similarly, stating that ‘women make terrible drivers’ would be
considered to be sexist, because it assumes that all women behave
in a similar way and makes it appear that this is part of the nature of
being female. Thus, the statement is sexist because it is a globalising
assertion which makes a connection between elements which have
no connection with the condition of being female (see Mills, 1995a
for a fuller discussion).
Both ideological critics and discourse theorists would agree on
which statements count as sexist. However, within an ideological
view, sexism would be seen as a form of false consciousness, a way
that subjects were, in Althusserian terms, interpellated, that is, called
upon to recognise themselves as certain types of gendered subjects
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44 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
(Spender, 1980; Althusser, 1984). By accepting sexism within
language, subjects are called upon to recognise themselves as
taking up a position within a hierarchised system of gendered
differentiation; thus, sexism forces subjects into an acceptance of
the status quo and of prevalent views of women as inferior and
sexually available to men, with men as superior, in control, and so
on. Dale Spender’s ideological analysis of sexism would see sexism
as an indicator of men’s wider control over women as a group and
an index of the systematic nature of patriarchy (Spender, 1980).
However, whilst this is a useful first stage in analysing sexism, one
which enables us to recognise the process whereby sexism comes
to feel ‘natural’ or dominant within a culture, it does not allow us
any real sense of how it would be possible to intervene and change
that process. In Spender’s view, women are seen as victims of male
oppression and are homogenised as a group, unable to intervene in
the process whereby they are oppressed.
A discourse theory perspective enables us to question whether
sexism is ever simply a matter of the imposition of a set of beliefs on
a group of subjects. The debate around sexism has been a struggle
to change words, a struggle over language, at the same time as it has
been a struggle over legitimacy and about who has the right to
define the usage of language, as well as who has the right to decide
what is studied in schools and universities. Although much of the
debate has been muddied by arguments about freedom of speech
and curtailment of freedoms, the struggle itself has highlighted the
conflicts and tensions which exist in educational institutions
particularly, over the entry of women and ethnic minorities to
positions of power. Perhaps, indeed, one of the major effects of
campaigns over sexist language within educational institutions has
been less a change of language (although it is clear that this has
taken place), but rather a fundamental exposing of sexist and racist
structures. Thus, such campaigns have led to a position where it is
not possible to sit on the fence; questions of language usage have
led to wider political actions. As Foucault states:
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DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 45
Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or
raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must
make allowances for the complex and unstable process
whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of
power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of
resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.
Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but
also undermines it and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes
it possible to thwart it.
(Foucault, 1978: 100–1)
Thus, whilst within an ideological view sexism is an oppressive
strategy employed by men to bolster their own power, within a
discourse theory model, sexism is the site of contestation; it is both
the arena where some males are sanctioned in their attempts to
negotiate a powerful position for themselves in relation to women,
but it is also the site where women can contest or collaborate with
those moves. The fact that there have been strong efforts made by
many conservatives to label struggles over sexist and racist
language as mere political correctness – an implicitly negative term
– and that feminists and anti-racists have attempted to resist that
naming demonstrates the way that struggle over language is more
than a simple imposition of a particular view on powerless people
by people in power. As Deborah Cameron puts it:
the . . . movement for so-called ‘politically correct’ language
does not threaten our freedom to speak as we choose, within
the limits imposed by any form of social and public interaction.
It threatens only our freedom to imagine that our linguistic
choices are inconsequential, or to suppose that any one group
of people has an inalienable right to prescribe them.
(Cameron, 1994: 33)
Thus, whilst the two positions both see sexism as being
symptomatic of wider differentials in power, an ideological analysis,
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46 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY
because of its view of power, is forced to characterise the female
subject as powerless. A discourse theory view characterises subjects
as engaging in their own constitution, acquiescing with or
contesting the roles to which they are assigned.
There are many theorists who do not separate discourse and
ideology so distinctly as terms as I have in this chapter, and many
continue to use ideology as a term whilst situating themselves
largely within a discourse theory framework (Fairclough, 1989;
Hennessy, 1993). For some, discourse is the larger term within
which there exist a range of different ideologies, whilst for others
ideologies are made manifest through a variety of different
discourses (Eagleton, 1991: 193–219). Eagleton tries to sum up this
possible relation as follows:
It may help to view ideology less as a particular set of
discourses, than as a particular set of effects within
discourses. Bourgeois ideology includes this particular
discourse on property, that way of talking about the soul, this
treatise on jurisprudence and the kind of utterances one
overhears in pubs where the landlord wears a military tie. What
is ‘bourgeois’ about this mixed bunch of idioms is less the kind
of languages they are than the effects they produce: effects for
example of closure whereby certain forms of signification are
silently excluded, and certain signifiers ‘fixed’ in a
commanding position.
(ibid.: 194; italics in original)
Whilst Eagleton’s view suggests ways in which the terms discourse
and ideology may in fact work in tandem in analysis, for the
purposes of this book it is quite useful to see these terms as distinct
in order to map out the parameters of the usage of discourse. It is
part of the history of the usage of the term discourse that it has been
constituted in reaction to the meanings associated with the term
ideology, and that struggle with the concept ideology is still a part
of its current range of meanings.
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NOTES
DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 47
1 I should make it clear that, although Foucault discusses this type of repression
in relation to children in general within the nineteenth century, it is clear that in
fact he only has in mind male children. Female children were produced as
asexual in a sense through this concentration on the repression of the
seemingly more visible male child’s masturbatory practices, a fact which
Foucault does not consider.
2 For a stereotypical view of politeness and power relations, see Brown and
Levinson (1978).
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Structuralist thought focused largely on mapping out the rules
governing the production of texts and systems of signification;
theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were both
interested not only in the structures which could be found in
cultural artefacts, but also in the larger-scale structures which could
be traced in discourse itself. One of the important assertions that
Michel Foucault made in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) was
that discourses are not simply groupings of utterances, grouped
around a theme or an issue, nor are they simply sets of utterances
which emanate from a particular institutional setting, but that
discourses are highly regulated groupings of utterances or
statements with internal rules which are specific to discourse itself.
In this chapter, I discuss the constituents of discourse itself – the
more abstract element within which particular discourses are
produced. Discourse as a whole consists of regulated discourses.
Discursive rules and structures do not originate from socio-
economic or cultural factors as such, although they may be shaped
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DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES 49
to an extent by these factors; rather, they are a feature of discourse
itself and are shaped by the internal mechanisms of discourse alone.
Both Barthes’ and Foucault’s later work moves away from this
original premise, but it is still important to retain this notion of
discourse being rule-governed and internally structured. Thus, the
study of discourse is not simply the analysis of utterances and
statements; it is also a concern with the structures and rules of
discourse. These structures and rules are the focus of this chapter.
Foucault termed this type of analysis of discursive structures
‘archaeology’. For him archaeology:
does not imply the search for a beginning; it does not relate to
geological excavation. It designates the general theme of a
description that questions the already-said at the level of its
existence, of the enunciative function that operates within it, of
the discursive formation, and the general archive system to
which it belongs. Archaeology describes discourses as
practices specified in the element of the archive.
(Foucault, 1972: 131)
This description of archaeological analysis may seem particularly
intractable at first sight; in fact, Foucault is simply trying to stress that
the main reason for conducting an analysis of the structures of
discourse is not to uncover the truth or the origin of a statement but
rather to discover the support mechanisms which keep it in place.
These support mechanisms are both intrinsic to discourse itself and
also extra-discursive, in the sense that they are socio-cultural. Thus,
in this quotation, Foucault is concerned to set statements in their
discursive frameworks, that is, statements do not exist in isolation
since there is a set of structures which makes those statements make
sense and gives them their force.1
Before beginning a description of discursive structures, it is
necessary to describe the relation between discourse and the real.
The focus of The Archaeology of Knowledge is largely on the relation
of texts and discourses to the real, and the construction of the real
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50 DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES
by discursive structures. There is a strong sense in which the real is
characterised as a set of constructs formed through discourse. The
real itself is never defined as such by Foucault, since for him we
have access only to the discursive structures which determine our
perceptions of the real. John Frow comments: ‘The discursive is a
socially constructed reality which constructs both the real and the
symbolic and the distinction between them. It assigns structure to
the real at the same time as it is a product and a moment of real
structures’ (Frow, 1985: 200). There has been a great deal of rather
pointless debate about whether Foucault is in fact denying the
existence of the real when he stresses the formative powers of
discourse, and historians in particular have attacked him for
denying the existence of historical events (see Taylor, 1986 for an
overview). However, perhaps it is more useful to see Foucault’s
views on the relation between discourse and the real in the
following terms, as set out by Laclau and Mouffe:
The fact that every object is constituted as an object of
discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world
external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An
earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly
exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently
of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is
constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of
the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive
field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to
thought, but the rather different assertion that they could
constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive
condition of emergence.
(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 108)
Thus, Foucault does not deny the existence of the real; on the
contrary, he asserts that what we perceive to be significant and how
we interpret objects and events and set them within systems of
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DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES 51
meaning is dependent on discursive structures. Those discursive
structures are, for Foucault, what make objects and events appear
to us to be real or material. This view of the materiality of discursive
structures has, however, been questioned by many theorists, most
notably by Terry Lovell, when she criticises this very determinist
view: ‘signs cannot be permitted to swallow up their referents in a
never-ending chain of signification, in which one sign always points
to another, and the circle is never broken by the intrusion of that to
which the sign refers’ (Lovell 1980: 16). However, whilst Foucault
suggests that discourses structure our sense of reality, he does not
see these systems as being abstract or enclosed. He is concerned
with the way that discourses inform the extent to which we can
think and act only within certain parameters at each historical
conjuncture. Thus, although he sees the real as constructed through
discursive pressures, he is also well aware of the effect of this
‘reality’ on thought and behaviour.
For Foucault, our perception of objects is formed within the limits
of discursive constraints: discourse is characterised by a
‘delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate
perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for
the elaboration of concepts or theories’ (Foucault, 1977a: 199). Let
us analyse the three assertions in this quotation in some detail. The
first thing to notice is that, for Foucault, discourse causes a
narrowing of one’s field of vision, to exclude a wide range of
phenomena from being considered as real or as worthy of attention,
or as even existing; thus, delimiting a field is the first stage in
establishing a set of discursive practices. Then, in order for a
discourse or an object to be activated, to be called into existence,
the knower has to establish a right for him/herself to speak. Thus,
entry into discourse is seen to be inextricably linked to questions of
authority and legitimacy. Finally, each act somehow maps out the
possible uses which can be made of that statement, or future rules
for its use (although of course that is not necessarily what happens
to it). Each statement leads to others and, in a sense, it has to have
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52 DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES
embedded within it the parameters of the possible ways in which
future statements can be made.
Discourse, for Foucault, constitutes objects for us. One of
Foucault’s most famous quotations about the constitution of objects
is the following: ‘We must not imagine that the world turns towards
us a legible face which we would have only to decipher. The world
is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive
providence which disposes the world in our favour’ (Foucault,
1981: 67). That is, there is no intrinsic order to the world itself other
than the ordering which we impose on it through our linguistic
description of it. An example of this constitution of objects through
discourse is the changes in the way the borderline between animals
and plants has been drawn differently at different historical periods.
In the nineteenth century, bacteria were placed within the category
‘animal’, whereas now they are located in a separate categorisation
of their own. Several organisms have been switched from one
category to another, for example, algae, diatoms and other micro-
organisms. In fact, the categories ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ are constantly
being redefined by which living things are placed within each
categorisation – a post-hoc categorisation system which is discursive
rather than one which is determined by the ‘real’ nature of plants
and animals. Plants and animals, in fact, share many elements, but
the fact that we separate them into two groupings means that we
concentrate on the differences we perceive between these two
categories rather than on their shared features. The fact that the
boundary has shifted shows clearly that there is no natural ready-
made boundary between animal and plant life, but that humans
have thought it necessary to draw this boundary. It might be more
useful for the difference between animals and plant to be thought
of on a cline or continuum, but within current systems of thinking
about this subject it is considered necessary to classify plant and
animal life as separate. This could be related to the fact that we have
moved away from the nineteenth-century polymath ability to
undertake multi-disciplinary work; instead, at present, botany and
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DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES 53
zoology are seen as two separate sciences with separate
departments in universities, and as separate disciplines with
different methodologies and spheres of interest.
A further example of the way that discursive boundaries structure
what we consider to be real categories might be Linnean typologies
of plant categorisation. When nineteenth-century botanists
travelled to foreign countries to investigate non-European plant
species, they carried with them a categorisation system originally
developed by Linneaus to categorise European plants. As Mary
Louise Pratt has shown, this meant that the plants which were
‘discovered’ by Europeans within India and Africa were categorised
within a European system of classification which aimed to be a
global system (Pratt, 1992). The plants were extracted from the
systems of classification which indigenous subjects had developed
to describe their properties, uses and habitats, and they became part
of a wider colonial project which aimed to demonstrate the
‘civilising’ force of colonialism. The plants were thus no longer seen
in terms of their original classification system, which often related
to their use in medicine, their food-value, their relation to other
elements within an eco-system and their position within a
cosmological and symbolic system, but rather they were seen out of
context in terms of the similarity or dissimilarity of their morphology
(plant structure) to European plant species. When the plant species
were ‘discovered’ by Europeans, their names were changed from
their indigenous names to classifications generated from the
Linnean system (i.e., by analogy with previous Latin names) and
often they were named after the European who had ‘discovered’
them. Thus, this global Eurocentric knowledge did not simply
rename a few plant species, but annihilated indigenous knowledge
and transformed the knowledge about plants in non-European
countries into colonial knowledge (Mills, 1994b).
Discourse does not simply construct material objects, such as
particular groups of plants; discourse also constructs certain events
and sequences of events into narratives which are recognised by a
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54 DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES
particular culture as real or serious events. For example, within
Western cultures, miscarriage is considered to be simply a failed
pregnancy, rather than the death of a baby. Therefore, there are no
ritualised structures within which those who suffer miscarriages can
deal with their loss. Through discourse, miscarriage is constructed
as a failed event and not a real event in its own right. In a similar
way, relationships which do not result in the couple living together
or getting married are viewed by many people as not ‘serious’. Thus,
there is only one sanctioned narrative within the discourse of
romantic love: there are many other pathways within which
individuals work out their relations with other people, but this
particular narrative sequence, which has as its end a formalised
union of some sort, excludes certain types of relationships from
being counted as real (Mills and White, forthcoming).
Foucault’s position, which suggests that objects and ideas are
created by humans and institutions and that it is this which
constitutes reality for us, has been criticised because it seems to
suggest that there is nothing which is non-discursive and outside
discourse. But Foucault is not denying that there is a reality which
pre-exists humans, nor is he denying the materiality of events and
experience, as some of his critics have alleged; it is simply that the
only way we have to apprehend reality is through discourse and
discursive structures. In the process of apprehending, we categorise
and interpret experience and events according to the structures
available to us and, in the process of interpretation, we lend these
structures a solidity and a normality which it is often difficult to think
outside of. Foucault does not consider these structures to be simply
the invention of institutions or powerful groups of people, as some
Marxist thinkers have suggested in their formulating of the notion
of ideology, nor does he propose that they are simply abstract and
arbitrary. Rather, he considers that there is a combined force of
institutional and cultural pressure, together with the intrinsic
structure of discourse, which always exceeds the plans and desires
of the institution or of those in power.
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Roland Barthes’ analysis of discursive structures, in Fragments: A
Lover’s Discourse (1990), is complementary to Foucault’s work, in
that he too is concerned to describe the structures within which
individuals in love are at the mercy of the tropes, moods, emotions,
gestures, tones of voice which the discourse of the lover lays out for
them. Barthes considers all of these structured elements to
constitute what he calls ‘fragments’, which make up the discourse
as a whole. As he puts it:
throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any
order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or
external?) accident . . . the amorous subject draws on a
reservoir (the thesaurus?) of figures . . . the figures are non-
syntagmatic, non-narrative.
(Barthes, 1990: 6–7)
The questioning tone that Barthes adopts in this quotation is
emblematic of his analysis of discursive structures as a whole – he
wants to be able to describe the way that these figures determine
the feelings and states which the lover experiences without
concerning himself with explaining or discovering a source for
these figures. Thus, he offers to the reader a list of alphabetically
organised fragments which for him constitute the discourse of the
lover; these figures are wide-ranging, from descriptions of states
such as waiting, deception and absence, to analyses of the quality
of language used by the lover. It is less an attempt to chart the
‘grammar’ of the lover’s discourse than it is a testing of the limits of
the personal within discourse. It is clear that he chose to analyse the
lover’s discourse since it is at one and the same time the experience
which seems to most people to be the most deeply personal, and
yet it is also that which is the most intensively discursively
structured. Perhaps connected with this ambivalence is the fact that
it is the experience which most tests one’s powers of expression:
Barthes suggests that it seems like ‘the end of language’ where in
effect one repeats endlessly ‘I love you because I love you’ (ibid.:
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56 DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES
21). Barthes’ experiment with describing the discursive structures of
love has wider implications for the analysis of discourse as a whole.
The fragment as a constituent part of discourse is certainly a
suggestive way of mapping out these structures.
However, in order to try to examine in more detail some of the
constituents of discourse, I now turn to Foucault again, since his
work is perhaps more ‘grammatical’ and in a sense more easily
applicable to other contexts. I examine the structures which
Foucault suggests are intrinsic to discourse, most notably the
episteme, the statement, the discourse and the archive. Boundaries
and limits are very important, in the sense of the function of these
categories and structures, and I therefore go on to consider the ways
in which perhaps the most important structure of discourse is less
its constituent parts but rather the function of exclusion. Following
on from this, I then consider the way that certain discourses are
circulated and in effect kept in existence.
THE EPISTEME
The sense of the world of objects being constructed by institutions
within social groups, particularly through language, has been a
concern of a great many post-structuralist theorists and linguists.
But perhaps Foucault is the only theorist who has seriously
attempted to examine the change in these discursive systems over
time and the changes that this subsequently causes to those
cultures’ views of reality. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972),
Foucault attempts to chart these changes systematically so that he
can map the discursive limits of an episteme, that is, the sets of
discursive structures as a whole within which a culture thinks.
Groups of discourses make up the structures of an episteme and, as
Macdonnell states, an episteme ‘may be understood as the ground
of thought on which at a particular time some statements – and not
others – will count as knowledge’ (Macdonnell, 1986: 87). These
groups of discursive units do not constitute a Weltanschauung or
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world-view, since this assumes a coherence and cohesiveness to a
set of ideas. Thus, we might discuss the ‘Romantic world-view’ or
the ‘Elizabethan world-view’, which is the philosophical and
cultural underpinning of a particular group of people. Instead, an
episteme consists of the sum total of the discursive structures which
come about as a result of the interaction of the range of discourses
circulating and authorised at that particular time. Thus, an episteme
includes the range of methodologies which a culture draws on as
self-evident in order to be able to think about certain subjects.
Foucault shows that within certain periods there is a tendency to
structure thinking about a subject in a particular way and to map out
certain procedures and supports for thinking. So, for example,
within the set of epistemes available within the Victorian era,
scientific thought was characterised by a tendency to produce
detailed tables, to label and systematise seemingly heterogeneous
materials into very rigidly defined systems of classification.
Consider this table from Brown’s The Races of Mankind (1873–9).
Tschudi table of Peruvian Mongrelity illustrating the mongrel
character of the Spanish American population of Peru:
Parents
White father and negro mother
White father and Indian mother
Indian father and negro mother
White father and mulatto mother
White father and mestiza mother
White father and chino mother
White father and cuarterona mother
White father and quintera mother
Negro father and Indian mother
Children
mulatto
mestiza
chino
cuarteron
creole (pale brownish
complexion)
chino–blanco
quintero
white
zambo
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58 DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES
Negro father and mulatto mother
Negro father and mestiza mother
Negro father and chino mother
Negro father and zamba mother
...
zambo–negro
mulatto–oscura
zambo–chino
zambo–negro
(perfectly black)
and so on for thirty-two different ‘crosses’ of white, Indian and
‘Negro’.
(cited in Young, 1995: 176)
For Victorians, this way of thinking about the world appeared the
‘natural’ way to describe racial difference, whereas when we look
at these nineteenth-century classifications of racial distinctions they
seem pathological in their excessive detail and scrupulous
systematicity. We are alienated because here people are classified
in the same way as dogs or horses might be classified, in terms of
their breeding stock and the ‘purity’ of their lineage. As Young has
shown, the same system of classification for hybridity in plants and
cross-breeding in animals was transferred to the description of
indigenous people (Young, 1995). But we are also distanced from
this concern with charting in such meticulous detail the constituents
of a field of knowledge, since this form of thinking has now been
superseded by other ways of organising knowledge and
information.2 Within late twentieth-century Western thought, it is
not assumed that you will grasp the essence of a subject, in this case,
racial difference, merely by accumulating large amounts of data
relating to the subject and organising this material into tabular form.
Foucault suggests that there are epistemic breaks, that is, at
certain moments in a culture, there are discontinuous developments
in discursive structures, so that for the Victorians the tabular
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representation of reality seemed entirely natural, whereas in the
twentieth century this method of representation has begun to seem
unusual. A further example that Foucault offers is of the significance
given to events in relation to a divine order. Within Early Modern
Europe, every event was interpreted according to a system of
thought which linked the mundane world with the supernatural or
religious order. Thus, what would now be classified as a natural
phenomenon, such as a severe storm, would then be classified in
terms of its significance in this wider symbolic system, perhaps as a
portent or as a sign of divine displeasure. Events took their meaning
from their place within this cosmological system, whereas in late
twentieth-century Europe, no wider supernatural significance is
attributed to storms. The constituents of this particular form of
knowledge have changed; and whereas we would normally see this
as due to the advance of scientific and secular thinking, Foucault
proposes that our own systems of knowledge constituting current
epistemes will appear equally as contrived and alien to future
generations. It is easier to examine the epistemes that were current
in past periods and past cultures precisely because the machinery
of thinking within the contemporary culture is so naturalised.
This notion of the discontinuity of discourse enabled Foucault to
counter the idea of the progress of cultures; rather than European
history being seen as a progression from ignorance to greater truth,
where previous stages along the road to the present could be
viewed only in relation to the improved present, he suggested that
in fact intellectual history should be seen as simply a series of
lurches from one system of classification and representation to
another. In this sense, Foucault differs in his thinking from both
conservative and Marxist accounts of history; for central to both of
these is the notion of improvement and progress: for conservatives
greater scientific knowledge brings inevitable improvement to
humankind; for Marxists, revolutionary change can only bring
about improvement to the conditions of the working classes. This is
perhaps where Foucault has most influenced postmodern thinking,
for this Utopian notion of history is very much embedded in forms
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of thought. Indeed, when Catherine Belsey tried to explain her
move away from a Marxist feminist position to what she called a
materialist feminist position, she did so in Foucauldian terms:
because of problems in mapping out the possible Utopias and clear
goals which could be achieved by feminism, because of lack of
consensus on what those might be, Belsey decided that the model
of history – the grand narrative – which is an essential part of Marxist
thought, would have to be discarded (Belsey, 1992). When she
considered the advances which had been made within the past
twenty years in relation to women’s rights, she felt that it was
necessary also to give some consideration to the areas in which
women’s rights had deteriorated. The model of a seamless
progression of events towards an improved future disallows the
consideration of such deterioration. A Foucauldian discontinuous
model of history simply charts the shifts which take place within the
machinery of thinking.
THE STATEMENT
Epistemes are constructed from sets of statements (énoncé)
grouped into different discourses or discursive frameworks. Let us
now consider what a statement is, as the primary building block of
a discourse. Dreyfus and Rabinow state: ‘The statement is neither an
utterance nor a proposition, neither a psychological nor a logical
entity, neither an event nor an ideal form’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow,
1982: 45). A statement is not an utterance, in the sense that one
sentence can actually function as several different statements,
depending upon which discursive context it appears in. As Foucault
puts it:
At a certain scale of micro-history, one may consider that an
affirmation like ‘species evolve’ forms the same statement in
Darwin and in Simpson; at a finer level, and considering more
limited fields of use (‘neo-Darwinism’ as opposed to the
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Darwinian system itself) we are presented with different
statements. The constancy of the statement, the preservation
of its identity through the unique events of the enunciations, its
duplication through the identity of the forms is constituted by
the functioning of the field of use in which it is placed.
(Foucault, 1972: 104)
Dreyfus and Rabinow explain that several different utterances can,
in fact, constitute one single statement, as when an airline steward
makes the same announcement in several different languages. They
go on to say: ‘Maps can be statements, if they are representations of
a geographical area, and even a picture of the layout of a typewriter
keyboard can be a statement if it appears in a manual as a
representation of the way the letters of a keyboard are standardly
arranged’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 45). Statements do seem to
bear a striking similarity to the speech acts described by John Searle
(1979) and John Austin (1962), although perhaps speech act
theorists are more concerned with the force of an utterance, the way
that an utterance is understood and acted on, than is Foucault.3
Statements are for him those utterances which have some
institutional force and which are thus validated by some form of
authority – those utterances which for him would be classified as ‘in
the true’: ‘It is always possible one could speak the truth in a void;
one would only be in the true, however, if one obeyed the rules of
some discursive “police” which would have to be reactivated every
time one spoke’ (Foucault, 1972: 224). Those utterances and texts
which make some form of truth-claim (and how many do not?) and
which are ratified as knowledge can be classified as statements. In
a sense, statements could be considered ‘serious’ speech acts
(Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 48). Foucault’s archaeological
analysis is concerned with the systems of support which govern the
production and the ordering of these statements and, more
importantly perhaps, the systems whereby other utterances are
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excluded from the position of being ‘in the true’ and therefore being
classified as statements.
THE DISCOURSE/DISCOURSES
As I have tried to make clear in this chapter, there is an important
distinction in Foucault’s work to be made between discourse as a
whole, which is the set of rules and procedures for the production
of particular discourses, and those discourses or groups of
statements themselves. A discourse is a set of sanctioned statements
which have some institutionalised force, which means that they
have a profound influence on the way that individuals act and think.
What constitutes the boundaries of a discourse is very unclear.
However, we can say that discourses are those groupings of
statements which have similar force – that is, they are grouped
together because of some institutional pressure, because of a
similarity of provenance or context, or because they act in a similar
way. Thus, for example, the discourse of middle-class femininity in
the nineteenth century consisted of the set of heterogeneous
statements (i.e., those utterances, texts, gestures, behaviour which
were accepted as describing the essence of Victorian womanhood:
humility, sympathy, selflessness) and which in fact constituted the
parameters within which middle-class women could work out their
own sense of identity. There were other discourses which
challenged this knowledge (for example, the discourses of
feminism), but this discourse of femininity was the type of
knowledge that was sanctioned by many of the institutions within
the Victorian era – the Church, the education system and so on – and
which acted together to produce the boundaries of the possible
forms of middle-class womanhood. It is this concern with the
constituents of discourses which has received most critical attention
and which perhaps has proved most useful to cultural and critical
theorists, as I show in Chapters 4 and 5 on feminist theory and post-
colonial theory. Foucault himself is less interested in statements in
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DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES 63
and of themselves than in the way they coalesce into discourses or
discursive formations and take some of their force from such
groupings.
THE ARCHIVE
Another discursive structure which Foucault isolated is the archive:
Foucault describes the archive in the following terms: ‘I mean the
set of rules which at a given period and for a definite society defined:
1) the limits and forms of expressibility; 2) the limits of forms of
conservation; 3) the limits and forms of memory; and 4) the limits
and forms of reactivation’ (Foucault, 1978: 14–15). In this sense, the
notion of the archive can be seen to be working alongside the
notion of the episteme, and can perhaps can be best apprehended
through an analysis of Foucault’s later work in his essay ‘The order
of discourse’, which I discuss below. For the moment, an archive
should be seen as the set of discursive mechanisms which limit what
can be said, in what form and what is counted as worth knowing
and remembering. It is this sense of limitation or exclusion which I
would like to consider now in more detail, since it is crucial to the
understanding of the constitution of discursive structures.
EXCLUSIONS WITHIN DISCOURSE
As well as attempting to define the way that discursive structures
map out what we can say and what we can consider as legitimate
knowledge, Foucault’s article entitled ‘The order of discourse’
(1981) also discusses the difficulties of inserting oneself within a
discourse, of starting to speak. ‘The order of discourse’ was
originally given as an open lecture at the prestigious College de
France where Foucault was obliged to give a once-yearly public
lecture. Here Foucault was having to present an academic lecture
which was also accessible to an audience containing a wide variety
of people. He comments:
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I think a good many people have a similar desire to be freed
from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to be on the other
side of discourse from the outset, without having to consider
from the outside what might be strange, frightening, and
perhaps maleficent about it. To this very common wish, the
institution’s reply is ironic, since it solemnises beginnings,
surrounds them with a circle of attention and silence, and
imposes ritualised forms on them, as if to make them more
easily recognisable from a distance.
(Foucault, 1981: 51)
The beginning of a lecture in such a prestigious setting would
generally be marked by introductions and by the recitation of the
credentials of the speaker, giving that speaker credibility and the
right to speak, the right to be considered worth listening to, the right
to have all other voices silenced. But what Foucault is isolating here
is that, even when the entry into discourse is ritualised in this way,
it cannot quite overcome the way in which discourse evades these
attempts to regulate it.
In ‘The order of discourse’ Foucault discusses the way that
discourse is regulated by institutions in order to ward off some of its
dangers. He describes the processes of exclusion which operate on
discourse to limit what can be said and what can be counted as
knowledge. The first of the procedures of exclusion he calls
‘prohibition’ or taboo: there are certain subjects which it is difficult
to discuss within Western societies, such as death and sex. Within
British culture many people have remarked that they have felt
shunned and avoided by even their closest friends if their partner
has died, because of the perceived difficulty of talking about death,
and the lack of vocabulary in English to express one’s feelings
without sounding either hackneyed, insincere or overly formal.
Within other cultures, and in the past in Britain, death was a subject
which was discussed openly and which had a wide range of
supports, i.e., material practices, rituals and artefacts which made it
possible to talk about. In some cultures, such as Mexico, there is a
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proliferation of discourses around death. And indeed, within
Victorian Britain there was an array of statements, artefacts and
practices which would now be considered morbid or sentimental,
but which allowed discussion of death and mourning.
Within Victorian Britain, it was very difficult to discuss sex openly
and remain respectable, and sexual subjects were avoided at all
costs within ‘polite’ society and mixed groups. Some of the societies
which British subjects encountered within the colonial relationship
had very different views on sexuality; for example, in India, as
Macmillan notes:
some temples had carvings which were obscene (or erotic,
depending on your point of view). Memsahibs who went sight-
seeing were carefully steered away from them by their escorts;
indeed a popular nineteenth century guidebook advised
tipping local guides at a particularly notorious temple so that
they would not call attention to shocking scenes.
(Macmillan, 1988: 105)
There is nothing intrinsic to these subjects which makes them
difficult to talk about, but for British culture, particularly within the
Victorian period, it seemed self-evident that these were difficult
topics. It is simply a discursive and institutional limitation which
becomes habitual within particular cultures at certain periods. Once
a subject is tabooed, that status begins to feel self-evident.
A second exclusion on what can be said centres around the
discourse of those who are considered insane and therefore not
rational. Foucault argues that in different historical periods, the
speech of the mad person was considered either to be on the level
of divine insight, or totally meaningless. In twentieth-century Britain
the language of schizophrenics, for example, is not given credence,
so that when seemingly ‘mad’ people speak, they are not heeded; if
they make requests for particular types of treatment which are not
sanctioned by those in authority they are generally ignored. It is
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assumed that the wishes and views of ‘rational’ people, such as
doctors and social workers, carry more weight.
The third exclusion which maps out what can count as a
statement and therefore part of a discursive framework is the
division between knowledge which is perceived to be true and that
which is considered to be false. Foucault charts the history of this
division, stating that for Greeks in the sixth century, the content of
a statement was no guarantee of its being true; rather, the
circumstances under which it was said were of prime importance:
‘a day came when the truth was displaced from the ritualised
efficacious and just act of enunciation, towards the utterance itself,
its meaning, its form, its object, its relation to its reference’
(Foucault, 1981: 54). Foucault calls this transition a movement
towards the ‘will to truth’, ‘which imposed on the knowing subject,
and in some sense prior to all experience, a certain position, a
certain gaze and a certain function (to see rather than to read, to
verify rather than to make commentaries on)’ (Foucault, 1981: 55).
An illustration of this shift within Western cultures can be found
in the work of Lennard Davis, who has shown that within the
eighteenth century there was a transition from a certain laxity
towards the division between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood,
to an obsessive and legalistic compartmentalising of the division
(Davis, 1983). With the beginning of the production of ‘news’, that
is, texts which purported to be recent, accurate representations of
noteworthy events rather than representations of events which had
a moral, symbolic or wider religious significance, there began to be
forged a division between truth and falsehood within the public
domain which was supported and enacted through government
intervention, through the introduction of libel laws and stamp
duties on certain types of publications. This had a far-reaching effect
on the production of texts in general, and it is at this time that the
distinction between novels and ‘factual’ accounts begins to be
made. Foucault demonstrates that this will to truth is supported by
a range of institutions: educational establishments, publishing
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houses, legal institutions, libraries, and so on, to the point that it is
almost impossible to question this obsession with the truth and the
factual.4 We assume that this is necessarily a distinction which must
guide our thinking. Foucault shows the way that this led in literature
within the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an obsession
with vraisemblance, to demonstrating that what was written was a
‘copy’ of external reality. This concern to produce ‘true’
representations seems to many self-evident, and the search for
‘truth’ seems to some a possible goal for academic study. Whilst we
often experience this will-to-truth as ‘a richness, a fecundity, a
gentle and insidiously universal force . . . we are unaware of the . .
. prodigious machinery designed to exclude’ (Foucault, 1981: 56).
Exclusion is, in essence, paradoxically, one of the most important
ways in which discourse is produced.
CIRCULATION OF DISCOURSES
In addition to these exclusionary procedures, Foucault remarks that
the constitution of discourses also has internal mechanisms, which
keep certain discourses in existence. The first of these circulatory
mechanisms is commentary. Those discourses which are
commented upon by others are the discourses which we consider
to have validity and worth:
we may suspect that there is in all societies, with great
consistency, a kind of gradation among discourses: those
which are said in the ordinary course of days and exchanges,
and which vanish as soon as they have been pronounced; and
those which give rise to a certain number of new speech acts
which take them up, transform them or speak of them, in short,
those discourses which, over and above their formulation, are
said indefinitely, remain said, and are to be said again.
(ibid.: 57)
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The Bible (itself considered by some to be a set of commentaries)
could be considered a text of this nature, upon which commentaries
have been written and will continue to be written; in a sense, these
commentaries keep the Bible in existence, ensure that it keeps in
circulation as legitimate knowledge. Commentary attributes
richness, density and permanence to the text at the very moment
when it is creating those values by the act of commentary. But this
is not an entirely selfless act:
commentary’s role . . . is to say at last what was silently
articulated ‘beyond’ the text. By a paradox which it always
displaces but which it never escapes, the commentary must
say for the first time, what had, nonetheless, already been
said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never
been said.
(ibid.: 58)
This reminds one of the types of strategies adopted by more
conventional literary critics when they attempted to articulate the
true meaning of a literary text. New Critics, for example, felt that
they had to produce a new, better, more comprehensive
interpretation of the literary text, whilst arguing that this meaning
was embedded in the text already, waiting to be discovered by a
particularly skilled reader or critic. Within a Foucauldian view, this
process of trying to ‘discover’ the ‘real’ meaning of the text is simply
an illusory practice, which keeps texts in circulation.
This process whereby texts are kept in circulation by
commentary on them is particularly important to consider within
the sphere of literary criticism within universities and schools.
Critical analysis by theorists is thus not a simple act of research but,
as feminist theorists have shown, has an effect on which texts are
considered worthy of publication and which ones are then
maintained in print. All researchers within literary studies recognise
that one accrues status to oneself by working on valued texts: that
is, canonical primary texts and/or theoretically complex works.
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Because of this tendency to work on canonical texts, those texts
which have been excluded from the canon tend not to be seen as
worthy of analysis. Thus, feminist critics in the 1960s not only had
difficulty accessing early texts by women, they also had difficulties
in establishing the legitimacy of such study (Showalter, 1977). Non-
canonical texts are often not in print and are therefore difficult for
the student or researcher to access, and lecturers are loath to include
them on reading lists. Thus, commentary serves not only to ensure
that certain texts will always be in print, will always be taught in
educational establishments and will always be worked upon by
researchers, but it also makes it very difficult to institute the analysis
of those texts about which little has been written.
A second internal regulator of discourse is the notion of the
academic discipline: this is a larger-order discursive grouping which
determines what can be said and regarded as factual or true within
a given domain. Thus, each discipline will determine what
methods, form of propositions and arguments, and domain of
objects will be considered to be true. This set of structures allows
for new propositions to be articulated, but only within certain
discursive limits. Foucault would argue that the structures of
disciplines exclude more propositions than they enable (as all who
have attempted to carry out interdisciplinary work will have found).
Even if your research work is factually accurate or insightful, if it
does not accord with the form and content of particular disciplines
it is likely to be disregarded, or to be regarded as non-academic or
popular. Disciplines allow people to speak ‘in the true’, that is,
within the realm of what is considered true within that discipline,
but they also exclude from consideration other knowledges which
might have been possible. For example, if an archaeologist writes
an academic paper, because of disciplinary structures, their focus of
study would necessarily be on human society and change; but
archaeologists often unearth data which could more readily be
considered to be the result of environmental change rather than of
human acts. If an archaeologist encounters a site where there is
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evidence of soil erosion or fire damage, they are likely to interpret
those traces as evidence of human activity: humans planted crops
and caused the soil to erode; humans used fire to clear a site of trees.
If a physical geographer encountered the same traces in a site, they
would be more likely to see them as evidence of environmental
activity: rivers eroded the soil; the site is subject to spontaneous fire
damage. Thus, the discipline in this case determines how this data
is classified. Disciplinary structures do not simply demarcate certain
types of knowledge as belonging to particular domains, but also
lead to the construction of distinct methodologies for analysis, and
even within university campuses to buildings devoted to each
discipline, so that philosophers, psychologists, linguists and
semioticians who are all engaged in the study of the same object –
language – do not in fact discuss their perspectives with each other.
Foucault focuses finally on the rarefaction of discourse as an
internal discursive constraint. What he means by rarefaction is the
surprising fact that although the utterances which could be
produced by any one person are theoretically infinite, in fact, they
are remarkably repetitive and remain within certain socially agreed-
upon boundaries. In theory, any person could utter anything that
they wanted to, but, firstly, people tend to remain, in the choice of
their topics of conversation and in the words that they choose, fairly
restricted by societal and personal norms, and secondly, people
tend to be fairly restricted in terms of the construction of their own
desires and needs. So what we find ourselves wanting to say falls
within fairly predictable and restricted sets of parameters. An
analogy might be with the fashion system: there are a limited
number of garment styles, fabrics and colours available in the shops
for us to buy. We structure our desires about the type of image of
ourselves which we would like to project within the boundaries of
what is available to us. Those choices we make about clothes
nevertheless feel personal. Foucault would suggest that these limits
are set up by discursive limits; we speak and act within the bounds
of what discourses map out for us. We do not, for example, wear no
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DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES 71
trousers, unless wearing no trousers has been established as
discursively acceptable and possible. An ideological analysis of the
fashion industry would focus on the interests which are served by
this limitation of the possibilities of expression, and Foucault is
certainly clear that discursive limitations are those which are
sanctioned by an institution of some kind. He is less concerned,
however, with the interests which are served by these limitations
than he is with the effects on expression that these limitations have.
Discourse is bounded about by rituals which limit the number of
people who can utter certain types of utterance: for example, only
a priest or registrar can legally marry a couple; only the monarch can
open Parliament. If someone who is not sanctioned uttered the
same words, the statement would not have an effect; thus, an actor
who ‘marries’ someone on stage is not legally married to them.
Foucault asks: ‘What, after all, is an education system, other than a
ritualization of speech, a qualification and fixing of the roles for
speaking subjects, the constitution of a doctrinal group, however
diffuse, a distribution and an appropriation of discourse with its
powers and knowledges?’ (Foucault, 1981: 64) Thus, rather than the
education system being seen as an enlightening institution where
free enquiry after the truth is encouraged, Foucault sees it rather as
simply a form of regulation of discourse. There are strict speaking
rights within educational institutions (for example, only the lecturer
speaks within a lecture and all other speech is seen as aberrant
unless sanctioned by the lecturer), and there are also strict rules
about what can pass for knowledge (those attempts to express ideas
which do not refer to past knowledge, and which are not expressed
in the conventional format of the essay or the thesis, are generally
stigmatised and are classified as failures).
Conversely, those forms of knowledge which accurately obey
the rules of discourse will be ratified. An example of this is a recent
spoof academic paper which created a scandal when it transpired,
after it had been published, that the paper was in fact a hoax. The
paper was entitled ‘Transgressing the boundaries: towards a
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transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’ and was written
by an American, the physicist Alan Sokal of New York University. It
was submitted to the cultural studies journal Social Text as a spoof.
Sokal wished to prove the vacuousness of cultural studies by
publishing an article which was in essence meaningless, but which
would gesture in the direction of citing the ‘correct’ theorists, and
making the ‘right’ arguments to fit in with the current orthodoxy
within cultural studies. It was accepted, since, as Peter Jones puts it,
‘It spoke the lingo. That was all that counted. Evaluating the
argument was of no interest’ (Jones, 1996: 16). Whilst this is clearly
an overstatement, the article was indeed accepted for publication
because it obeyed the discursive rules prevalent in that discipline.
What makes Foucault’s analysis of discourse in ‘The order of
discourse’ so insightful is that he focuses on constraint – the way that
we operate within discursive limits – rather than assuming that
people are free to express whatever they wish. This focus on
constraint may be seen as inherently negative, but when taken
together with his later work in The History of Sexuality, mentioned
in the previous chapter, this sense of constraint can be seen as
productive as well as limiting. It is only through this process of
constraint that knowledge can be produced.
Foucault’s analysis of the author is also important in analysing the
structures of discourse, since the author ceases to be the ratifier of
the meaning of the text, but becomes a form of organisation for
groups of texts. The author is no longer ‘the speaking individual
who pronounced or wrote a text, but . . . a principle of grouping of
discourses, conceived as the unity and origin of their meaning’
(Foucault, 1981: 58). Literary critics often use the notion of the
author to impose a sense of order and a set of restricted concerns
on a range of texts which in fact have little in common. Both Barthes
and Foucault proposed the ‘death’ of the author, suggesting a shift
away from a concern with the author herself, to a concern with: in
Barthes’ case, the role of the reader in the production of an
interpretation of a text, and in Foucault’s case, the function of the
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author in the process of making global statements about diverse
texts (Foucault, 1980b; Barthes, 1986). Foucault examines the way
that some discourses have authors whilst for others the concept of
authorship is almost irrelevant; a legal document is not authored,
since its authority springs from the institution, the government who
sanctions it, rather than from the individual who wrote and edited
it. An advertisement is not authored because it is seen as ephemeral
and created by groups/teams of people rather than one single
person. But literary texts are perhaps the texts which are most
clearly categorised as authored texts, even though their creative
ownership is problematic, since literary texts are formed more than
any other texts in reaction to and within the constraints set up by
other literary texts. Literary texts are, also, perhaps the most
intertextual of all texts, referring to other texts in terms of literary
allusion, and in terms of their formal structures (narrative voice,
plot, character, and so on), and yet these are the texts where the
creativity of a single author is held to be paramount. Nineteenth-
century Romantic notions of the creative artist inform our sense of
literary authorship. As Diane Macdonnell states: ‘The concept of an
“author” as a free creative source of the meaning of a book belongs
to the legal and educational forms of the liberal humanist discourse
that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries;
it is not a concept that exists within discourses that have developed
recently’ (Macdonnell, 1986: 3). Foucault questions the notion of
creativity, arguing that it is rare for something original to be said, and
even when a new idea is produced, it is produced within the
constraints of what has previously been thought; furthermore,
when a new idea is developed, Foucault questions the idea of
ownership – there are so many other factors involved in the
production of new ideas than the person themselves. Thus, a
Foucauldian analysis would focus on the conditions of acceptance
of new ideas and would perhaps attempt to analyse those ideas and
inventions which were not sanctioned by a society and which were
not classified by society as acceptable within its frames of reference.
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An example of this would be the ideas of Francis Bacon, who
noticed that the coasts of America and Eurasia seemed to fit into one
another, and he assumed that at one time these two land masses had
been joined together, thus prefiguring by four centuries the theory
of plate tectonics. What Bacon lacked was a way of explaining the
mechanism whereby such a movement might have taken place. His
idea about the relation between the two coastlines was therefore
disregarded; in scientific discourse it is not acceptable either to be
so novel or to be right but for the wrong reasons.
Foucault is not arguing that there are no creative individuals. He
is arguing instead that all individuals are potentially creative within
the discursive constraints which enable ideas and texts to be
produced. Most people have their creativity sapped at a very early
age by society’s pressures on them to conform through the
education system. Perhaps he is questioning the simple assumption
that the population is divided into a very tiny group of geniuses,
such as Einstein, Shakespeare and da Vinci, and the rest of the
population, who are not capable of creative thought (thought which
challenges the parameters of the discursive constraints).
Rather than focusing on the author, Foucault focuses instead on
the author-function, that principle of organisation which operates
to group together disparate texts which often have very few
common features. Thus, for example, Jane Austen’s oeuvre is given
a coherence and spoken of in terms of progression from the early
novels to the later novels, and epithets such as ‘immature’ and
‘mature’ are used to describe this progress. In a similar fashion,
Shakespeare’s works are grouped together and discussed in terms
of their common stylistic features, even though the authorship of
some of the plays and poems is in doubt. This narrative of progress
and the notion of an oeuvre is one which Foucault questions, since
he asks whether this is in fact an order which we impose on the text
given our knowledge of biographical information. In terms of
literary texts, Foucault’s critique of the author is insightful, since it
enables us to move away from analysing texts in terms of the
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author’s life, which for Foucault would be another and different set
of texts.
All of these mechanisms for the structuring, constraining and
circulation of information have a similar effect: they bring about the
production of discourse, but only certain types of discourse. In a
sense, they ensure that what can be said and what can be perceived
to count as knowledge is very limited and occurs within certain very
clearly delimited and recognised bounds. This ensures that the
knowledge produced within a particular period has a certain
homogeneity. That is not to suggest that all of the individuals
existing within a certain era agree on a particular view of the world,
but simply that all of the sanctioned utterances and texts are
produced within similar discursive constraints.
CONCLUSIONS
What we can draw from this structuralist phase within both Barthes’
and Foucault’s work on discursive structures is the sense of
discourse being composed of a set of unwritten regulations. The
rules for the production of discourse do not seem necessarily to be
composed by any one person, or group of people, and do not seem
to be produced in the interests of any particular group, although
they may in fact serve those interests. This arbitrariness of discursive
structures is, for many, disconcerting; here we have the sense of our
thoughts and utterances not simply springing from our own
individual will/volition; instead we see that what we can express
and what we think we might want to express is constrained by
systems and rules which are in some senses beyond human control.
These systems are ones which we are not necessarily aware of, and
it is only through the type of archaeological work which Foucault
and Barthes have initiated that we can begin to be aware of the
frameworks within which discourse is produced and within which
we construct our utterances and thoughts. Post-structuralist and
postmodernist theory has largely undermined much of the
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theoretical underpinning of structuralism, questioning the
existence of structures as a whole. However, this early work by
Barthes and Foucault was fundamental in forcing us to consider the
provenance of the very apparatus within which we think.
NOTES
1 I give a fuller definition of the statement later in this chapter.
2 Norman Fairclough’s work on change in discursive structures is interesting in
this respect, since he gives detailed accounts of small-scale change to current
epistemes (Fairclough, 1992b).
3 Foucault is not concerned with this pragmatic understanding of individual
utterances; far more than Austin or Searle, it is not individual utterances which
are his focus of attention, but the rules which govern the production of
utterances in general, and the limits of what can be expressed (see Searle,
1979).
4 Even the coining of the term ‘factional’ masks our sense of unease in the
twentieth century with texts which do not fit easily into one category or another.
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FEMINIST THEORY AND
DISCOURSE THEORY
The next two chapters will explore two areas of research where
theorists have tried to modify Foucault’s work on discourse: in both
of these areas (in this chapter, feminist theory, and in the next
chapter, colonial and post-colonial discourse theory) theorists have
tried to make the concept of discourse work to serve political ends,
and thus they have had to strive to make some of the political
potential of the theorising of discourse more overt than Foucault
did.
Feminist theory has drawn heavily on Foucault’s discourse
theory work. Recently, there have been a number of feminist
theoretical works which have explored the use of the term
discourse for feminist ends (for example Diamond and Quinby,
1988; Smith, 1990; Mills, 1991; Sawicki, 1991; McNay, 1992). Without
becoming overly embroiled in feminist theoretical debates about
the uses to which Foucault’s work can be put, this chapter aims to
examine the uses which feminist theory has made of the term
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discourse, transforming it from its original Foucauldian usage. This
chapter discusses the ways in which discourse as a term can be put
to use in analysis and focuses on a number of short texts to
demonstrate the potential of discourse theory for feminist analysis.
It might seem paradoxical to use Foucault’s work within feminist
theory, since, as Meaghan Morris has shown, Foucault’s work is not
easily translatable into feminist concerns; his work on sexuality only
touches marginally on the question of female hysteria, and he is
certainly not a theorist who addresses gender issues as they relate
to women (Morris, 1979). In addition, because of the perceived
difficulty of formulating a clear political agenda within Foucault’s
view of discourse, it may also seem paradoxical that his work has
been so widely used in feminist theory. However, discourse theory
has been particularly productive because of its concern with
theorising power.
Feminist theorists are generally concerned to analyse power
relations and the way that women as individuals and as members of
groups negotiate relations of power. Recent feminist work has
moved away from viewing women as simply an oppressed group,
as victims of male domination, and has tried to formulate ways of
analysing power as it manifests itself and as it is resisted in the
relations of everyday life. As I showed in Chapter 2 on discourse and
ideology, the way that discourse is conceptualised allows for this
sense of the complexity of power relations. Foucault’s analysis of
power has been very influential with feminist theorists, since it
seems to be possible to develop a model of power relations which
is fairly complex and which can deal with other variables such as
race and class without having to prioritise one of them over the
others. Whereas hard-line Marxist theorists would still consider
class to be the most important factor in the oppression of certain
groups, and would consider gender simply as a form of secondary
exploitation, a Foucauldian analysis would see class concerns
integrated with concerns about gender (Cliff, 1984). People are not
oppressed because of their class separately from their oppression
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 79
because of race or gender, although one of those factors might feel
dominant at any particular moment. In her discussion of the
impossibility of separating gender, race and class when describing
relations of power under imperialism, Anne McClintock puts it in
the following way:
imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of gender
power. Gender power was not the superficial patina of empire,
an ephemeral gloss over the more decisive mechanisms of
class and race. Rather, gender dynamics were, from the
outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the
imperial enterprise.
(McClintock, 1995: 6–7)
Thus, gender is always already formed through the vectors of race
and class.
Feminists have, since the 1960s, insisted on the fact that the
‘personal is political’. This slogan is still in current usage for a
number of reasons: firstly, mainstream political activity has not until
recently seemed to concern itself with matters which it considers
belong to the private sphere, i.e., childcare provision, domestic
labour, sexual abuse, domestic violence and issues of reproductive
rights. Furthermore, many feminists have come to view mainstream
political activity (i.e., voting, lobbying, party politics, petitions, and
so on) as ineffective in changing the really pressing problems in our
lives. Finally, the phrase ‘the personal is political’ has resonance
precisely because those problems which many women once
considered to be their fault, e.g. conflicts around the allocation of
responsibility over childcare and housework, have come to be seen,
in fact, as problems which are structural and therefore political,
rather than simply individual matters to be negotiated with partners.
This concern with redefining the scope of the political is one which
Foucault has been drawn to. He states:
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To say that ‘everything is political’ is to recognise the
omnipresence of relations of force and their immanence to a
political field; but it is to set oneself the barely sketched task of
unravelling this indefinite tangled skein.
(Foucault, 1979b: 72)
Thus, Foucault’s revising of the model of power relations is very
useful for feminist theorists trying to reinscribe the ‘political’ into the
private sphere and attempting to map out possible strategies for
bringing about change within an increasingly complex system of
power.
I would like to focus on certain concepts which feminist theorists
have drawn from Foucault’s work, and which have significantly
modified our notion of what discourse is. The types of discourse
which Foucault isolated and which have been used for feminist
ends, which I will discuss here, are the confessional and the
discourse of femininity. I then go on to consider women’s access to
discourse, and conflicts between discursive structures.
CONFESSIONAL DISCOURSE
The confessional is one of the types of discourse which Foucault has
discussed in relation to disciplinary society which has been
important for feminist theorists. In Discipline and Punish (1979a) he
examines the changes which have taken place in the way that
punishment for violations of the law is administered, from the
medieval period until the present day. Within the medieval period,
in order to encourage citizens to obey the law and to maintain the
status quo, punishment was meted out to individuals publicly as a
warning to others of the results of social deviance. Punishment was
thus physically displayed upon the tortured, mutilated body of the
‘criminal’, on the bodies hanging from gibbets, the heads staked on
city walls, and in the processes of hanging, drawing and quartering.
In present-day Western cultures, this type of punishment is no
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 81
longer sanctioned; instead, moves are made to reform those who
are categorised as criminals, and force them to internalise a
disciplinary regime which will regulate their future behaviour.1
Foucault argues that it is not only those who are judged to be
criminals who are subdued by these disciplinary structures, but also
the population as a whole. The regulatory regimes devised in
prisons have been extended to other spheres such as the school, the
church and the home, so that discipline is internalised by
individuals and begins to be seen as self-discipline. One of the
practices by which subjects are disciplined is the confessional.
The confessional is perhaps the discourse which displays the
operation of power most clearly. Foucault describes the
confessional in the following terms:
The Christian West invented this astonishing constraint, which
it imposed on everyone, to say everything in order to efface
everything, to formulate even the least faults in an
uninterrupted, desperate, exhaustive murmuring, from which
nothing must escape.
(Foucault, 1979c: 84)
This notion of confession has proved useful for feminist theorists
who have analysed conduct literature and women’s religious
writings, and the relation between confessing and submitting to a
relation of power. For Foucault, those who confessed and displayed
themselves as compliant subjects, in the process constructed
themselves as those compliant subjects. For example,
psychoanalytic therapy would, for Foucault, seem to be the epitome
of confessional discipline, whereby the subject internalised the
problem as her own in the process of telling the therapist about her
difficulties. The subject is turned into a ‘case’ in the process of
inserting herself into the psychoanalytic confessional discourse.
Feminist theorists have noted for some years that women tend to be
categorised as mentally ill and to suffer from depression in far
greater numbers than men; women are also more likely to be
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82 FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY
admitted to mental institutions than men for similar problems
(Showalter, 1987). The confessional, where women talk about their
difficulties, may be used as a way of dealing with these problems in
ways which are not in the woman’s interest. It may also be that these
problems are not in fact difficulties which the woman alone faces,
but may be due to the unreal demands which society places on
women as a whole. Societal demands for certain types of body
shape and certain types of compliant behaviour from women may
result in behaviour such as anorexia, bulimia, depression and
outbursts of anger, all of which may be classified by a therapist as
aberrant.
But for some feminist theorists, the process of producing
compliant subjects is not so simple. Even in the process of
producing oneself as someone who has emotional difficulties, there
can be possible sites of resistance produced at the same time;
instead of seeing the difficulties as being one’s own responsibility
or fault, in the process of therapy one can begin to trace ways in
which personal difficulties can be caused by larger societal forces
and other individuals and social groups. Dorothy Smith, a feminist
discourse theorist and sociologist, in her essay ‘K is mentally ill’, has
located this construction of someone as mentally ill as a process
which is determined by assessments of behaviour judged against
discursive norms (Smith, 1990: 12–51). Precisely because it is a
discursive procedure, it is open to revision and rewriting. Like all
texts, the interpretation depends on the context within which the
confession takes place. When therapy is undertaken within a
general institutional setting, it may be the case that a woman may
be constructed as mentally unstable and blame may be attributed to
her for her emotional difficulties. However, within the context of
feminist therapy, other interpretations may be placed on the
material. Many feminists have seen the process of ‘confessing’, and
thus locating oneself within a larger interest group or political group
(such as feminists, or working-class women or lesbian women), as
one whereby a certain amount of resistance to oppression may be
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 83
generated. The ‘consciousness-raising’ groups of the 1960s and
1970s were very much about changing the context within which
women ‘confessed’ to difficulties adjusting to societal demands.
Telling others everything about your life was seen as a way of
reframing that narrative so that different causes and different
trajectories could be formulated. Thus, whilst feminist theorists see
the confessional as potentially an oppressive form of interaction, for
example, where women are classified as mentally ill by male
psychotherapists, there is a sense in which confession within
particular politicised contexts may be empowering, setting stories
of ‘failure’ and ‘self-blame’ into contexts where those same ‘failings’
can be seen to be structural problems with Western culture’s
demands on women (Baker-Miller, 1978; Eichenbaum and Orbach,
1982; Wilkinson, 1986).
To see the way in which feminist discourse theory has modified
Foucault’s theorising of the workings of the confessional, let us
consider this extract from the diary of a seventeenth-century
woman, Alice Thornton who writes after the death of her newly
born son:
1658: The weakness of my body continued so great and long
after my hard childbirth of my son that it brought me almost into
a consumption, not expecting for many days together that I
should at all recover. And when it was done, I was lame almost
a quarter of a year of my left knee, that I got in my labour. But it
was nothing to that which I have deserved from the hand of
God if he, in much mercy, had not spared my life. The Lord
make me truly remember his goodness and that I may never
forget this above all, his mighty and stretched-out hand of
deliverances to me, his poor creature, that I may extol and
praise the Lord with all my soul and never let go my hope from
the God of my salvation, but live the remainder of the life he
gives me to his honour and glory.
(Thornton cited in Graham et al., 1989: 154)
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84 FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY
In a classic Foucauldian analysis, this would be classified as a
confessional, displaying and constructing a compliant subject who
accepts all difficulties as a sign of the need for greater subjection to
the power of God. The reports which she gives of her illness and
suffering are only the vehicles for the display of her own
worthlessness in relation to this greater power, who is shown to be
supremely merciful, even when he appears to be most cruel.
However, in a feminist discourse theory analysis, there is a sense in
which this display is seen to be precarious. We can see that, in
producing accounts of this kind, the writer constructs herself as a
devout subject, i.e., as a conforming member of a religious group,
and this is already a position of some strength within the society she
lived where only ‘good’ (i.e., obedient and devout) female subjects
were revered.2 However, at the same time, we can also see that the
amount of work which is required to turn this into an account of
God’s grace is substantial; Alice Thornton’s account as a whole
details at some length the mishaps which befell her: the deaths in
the family, the loss of her child, her illness. These events could be
viewed as signs of God’s displeasure with her for sin, for example.
She gains a certain amount of personal power within discourse
through being able to force these problems to become, despite
everything, signs of God’s goodness and mercy rather than his
malevolence. The very fact of a woman ‘speaking out’, albeit within
the seemingly private sphere of the diary, is in itself, given the
constraints of the seventeenth century, highly subversive. Thus,
rather than being a position simply of the display of compliance,
there are possibilities within the discourse of the confessional to
accrue power to oneself. Through the act of writing a confessional,
it is possible to bring oneself and one’s actions into alignment with
God and hence a position of strength. These autobiographical
writings align the subject with the power of God, through displaying
herself as the object of God’s mercy. Furthermore, diaries within the
seventeenth century were often written not simply to display
oneself as a ‘good’ subject but to try to set the record straight, to tell
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 85
the truth. Whilst that notion of the truth is problematic in
Foucauldian terms, as we saw when examining the relation of truth
and knowledge in Chapters 1 and 3, it is possible for women to write
in seemingly compliant ways yet still be making powerful strategic
interventions in their own self-presentations and in their
interactions with others in the world.
Dorothy Smith’s (1990) work has made a significant contribution
to current theorising of discourse, since she sees discourse less as
something to which one is subjected than as a vehicle which is used
by subjects to work out interpersonal relationships, complying with
certain elements and actively opposing others. As I showed in
Chapter 3, whilst, for many feminists, the very anonymity of
discursive structures is a theoretical problem, since it does not allow
you to track down the cause of an action or event easily, there is a
sense in which it is still possible to locate individual agency without
submitting either to extreme interpretations of Foucault’s views of
discourse as disembodied or to naive formulations of individualism.
For, as Smith insists, texts are not somehow divorced from social
contexts and individual participants simply because we analyse
them in terms of their discursive structures. It is worth considering
a fairly lengthy quotation from Smith to explore further this sense of
the social embeddedness of discourse:
The notion of discourse displaces the analysis from the text as
originating in writer or thinker, to the discourse itself as an
ongoing intertextual process. In the context of Foucault’s
archaeology, the concept of discourse has some of the same
force as structuralism in displacing the subject or reducing her
to a mere bearer of systemic processes external to her.
Analysis of the extended social relations of complex social
processes requires that our concepts embrace properties and
processes which cannot be attributed to or reduced to
individual ‘utterances’ or ‘speech acts’. Ongoing organisation
and relations co-ordinating multiple sites are produced by
actual individuals, but the forms of organisation are not
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86 FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY
intended or fully regulated by a set or sub-set of those
individuals. Members of discourse orient to the order of the
discourse in talk, writing, creating images whether in texts or
on their bodies, producing and determined by the ongoing
order which is their concerted accomplishment and arises in
the concerting.
(ibid.: 161–162)
In this treatment of discourse, Smith wants to achieve a more
socially context-bound view of discourse, which is attentive to what
individual subjects do within and through discursive structures,
rather than assuming that discourses force us to behave in certain
ways.
DISCOURSES OF FEMININITY AND HETEROSEXUALITY
I would like here to consider the way that discourse theory has
proved useful to feminist theorists attempting to describe the
structures of femininity and heterosexuality. If we consider Dorothy
Smith’s work on femininity as discourse, where women actively
work out their subject positions and roles in the process of
negotiating discursive constraints, we can see how drawing on the
notion of discourse is a significant improvement from earlier
feminist theorising, which saw femininity simply as an imposed
ideological category and which thus tended to cast women as
passive victims of oppression (see Mills, 1992b for a more detailed
discussion of the differences between these two views of
femininity).
Let us first consider the early feminist work in order to examine
more adequately the advantages of discourse theory. Those
feminists who see femininity as an ideology to which women are
subjected tend to consider femininity as homogeneous, as affecting
all women in the same way; ideology as a structure does not allow
for relatively different effects to be experienced by different groups
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 87
of women, and it does not allow that there might be different
ideological structures for different classes or sexual orientations.
Thus, a heterosexual female who considers herself feminine might
engage in different behaviours from a lesbian who considers herself
feminine. There might also be different outcomes and
interpretations of these feminine behaviours: if a ‘femme’ lesbian
dressed in soft feminine clothes, she might be considered a ‘lipstick’
lesbian, parodying heterosexual femininity, whereas a straight
female might be interpreted as displaying submissiveness to males.
It is also not clear within this ideological theorising why women
should accept these structures of femininity, which are portrayed as
limiting them, since, within this type of theorising, it is clearly not in
their interests to do so.3 Furthermore, this model of femininity gives
no sense of how, if femininity is such a negative characteristic, it can
be resisted, rather than simply rejected wholesale. The notion of
femininity as a social construct is so rigid that it does not allow for
the possibility of change and instead portrays women as passive
recipients. It is assumed in this type of theorising that ‘stereotypes
of femininity . . . are constructs created by men’ (Palmer, 1989: 33).
However, in some sense, women as well as men are actively
engaged in maintaining these discourses in place as well as trying
to dismantle elements of them and replacing them with other more
productive elements. Finally, femininity is handled in ideological
analyses as only having one clear meaning; that is, a woman acting
in a feminine way can only be interpreted as displaying weakness
or deference.4 Thus, theorists who have attempted to counter some
of these negative views of femininity have only managed to do so
by revaluing feminine characteristics; for example, Jean Baker-
Miller argues that we should see the traits which constitute
femininity (intuition, vulnerability, emotionalness) as a way
forward for the construction of a better, more humane society
(Baker-Miller, 1978). However, there is a sense in which the
constituents of femininity are not so clearly coded in terms of their
meaning as has been assumed.
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88 FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY
Dorothy Smith (1990) has used the notion of a discourse of
femininity in order to move away from this view of social constructs
being imposed on passive female subjects. She stresses the fact that
discourse structures are discontinuous; that is, they change over
time because of women’s resistance to them and because of
changes in social structures. Also, since discourse is something that
you do (rather than something to which you are subjected),
engaging with discourses of femininity constitutes an interactional
relation of power rather than an imposition of power. Femininity
does not have a single meaning, but depends on a wide range of
contextual features, such as perceived power relations, for its
interpretation and effect. As Biddy Martin puts it: ‘power . . . is the
relation between pleasures, knowledge and power as they are
produced and disciplined’ (cited in Diamond and Quinby, 1988: 6).
Discourse theory sees power as enacted within relationships and
thus as something which can be contested at every moment and in
every interaction. Smith explains:
To explore femininity as discourse means a shift away from
viewing it as a normative order, reproduced through
socialisation, to which women are somehow subordinated.
Rather femininity is addressed as a complex of actual relations
vested in texts.
(Smith, 1990: 163)
This textual/discursive nature of femininity makes it open to acts of
reinterpretation and re-scripting.
Perhaps what makes this view of femininity as discourse so
persuasive is that rather than seeing, for example, conduct books
and advice manuals for women as being straightforward indicators
or signs of the degree of women’s oppression, instead, they can be
seen as merely an indication of the scale of the problem posed by
women and their resistance to being counselled in this way. The
fact, for example, that there were a great number of conduct books
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written in the nineteenth century assures us that there was a
fundamental and pressing problem with women’s behaviour which
these texts were attempting to overcome. It is clear that women
were not the compliant subjects these books tried to produce. For
example, if we consider the following passage from Thomas
Broadhurst’s Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the
Mind and Conduct of Life (1810), it becomes clear that the text
displays the problems just as prominently as the supposed solution:
She who is faithfully employed in discharging the various
duties of a wife and daughter, a mother and a friend, is far more
usefully occupied than one who, to the culpable neglect of the
most important obligations, is daily absorbed by philosophic
and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the
enchanted regions of fiction and romance.
(cited in Armstrong and Tennenhouse, 1987: 106)
This advice may simply be seen as an instruction to young girls to
be dutiful wives and mothers, but in the very act of encouraging
certain types of behaviour the writer includes mention of the types
of behaviour which he is trying to discourage. However, even he is
unable to make them sound wholly unattractive. This passage is
clearly an indication of the fact that literature and learning in general
exerted a strong attraction for young women at this time, perhaps
to the detriment of their performing their conventional duties as
wives and mothers. Kate Flint echoes this view in her work on
nineteenth-century women as readers, where reading itself is seen
to be a sinful, dangerous activity with the power to corrupt and
harm women. For example E. J. Tilt states in On the Preservation of
Health of Women at the Critical Periods of Life (1851) that:
Novels and romances, speaking generally, should be
spurned, as capable of calling forth emotions of the same
morbid description which, when habitually indulged in, exert a
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90 FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY
disastrous influence on the nervous system, sufficient to
explain that frequency of hysteria and nervous diseases which
we find among the highest classes.
(cited in Flint, 1993: 58)
It is clear that reading is characterised as particularly dangerous to
women because of the disruptions which were necessarily entailed
when women became active, thinking subjects and agents who
could choose whether or not to be wives and mothers. This
development of the New Woman was one which was hedged about
by a plethora of advice manuals signalling the perceived dangers to
women’s mental and physical health.
The discourses which circulated within the nineteenth century
around the question of women and reading are simply evidence of
the great difficulty which women found in inhabiting the discursive
structures laid out for them which stressed their duties and
obligations as wives and mothers and did not hold out space for
them to negotiate their own pleasures. It is only these admonitory
discourses which remind us of the fact that these discourses of
advice were not successful (Flint, 1993). Rather than seeing the
proliferation of advice manuals on women’s conduct as evidence of
women’s oppression, we can see them, amongst other things, as
indicators of women’s resistance to those discourses. As I showed
in Chapter 3, Foucault examined the discourses on masturbation
amongst children in the nineteenth century and he found that rather
than these advice manuals simply giving advice to parents as to how
to prevent their children from masturbating, we can see them as
perhaps structuring and in some cases initiating sexual behaviour
amongst children. A similar problem is encountered in drugs
education, where at the same time as warning adolescents about the
dangers of drug usage, any drugs education campaign is also
drawing the attention of those same individuals to the potential
illicit pleasures of drugs. By portraying drug use as dangerous risk-
taking behaviour, drugs education runs the risk of emphasising the
aspect of drug use which appeals to adolescents intent on rebelling
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against the status quo. Many of the black-and-white, documentary-
style posters produced by drugs education bodies to warn
adolescents that they could die if they engage in drug taking are
used by young people to reaffirm their sense of identity as drug
users. Thus, whilst drug-awareness campaigns intend to prevent
drug use, they often serve to create certain types of counter-cultural
images of drug users. Therefore, discourses should not be
interpreted at face value; individuals actively engage with
discourses in order to forge particular positions of identity for
themselves.
For Dorothy Smith, Western society is largely structured by the
texts of social actions from which we learn a given set of terms and
actions: ‘learning how to “mean” with words correctly in [a] setting
is learning how it is socially organised’ (Smith, 1990: 166). She goes
on to comment:
Rather than an image of superstructure balanced over the
layers of relations of production rather like the frosting on a
cake, the concept of a discourse of femininity . . . envisages a
web or cats-cradle of texts, stringing together and co-
ordinating the multiple local and particular sites of the
everyday/ everynight worlds of women and men with the
market processes of the fashion, cosmetic, garment and
publishing industries.
(ibid.: 167)
In this sense, discourse is not an abstract set of textual practices but
the grounds on which social relations are organised. Smith
describes the way that discourse is the means through which social
relations between individuals are negotiated. Where femininity as a
discourse becomes most crucial is where it forms the focus of group
activity by individuals – where women are not portrayed as simple
dupes of an ideology, but rather as actively constructing positions
for themselves, using discursive constructs:
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When the codes and images are viewed as women use, play
with, break with and oppose them, the discourse of femininity
appears not as a managed construct of the fashion industry
manipulating people as puppets, but as an ongoing, unfolding,
historically evolving, social organisation in which women and
sometimes men are actively at work.
(ibid.: 204)
In this way, women who seem to be displaying their femininity can
be viewed as agents rather than simply as the passive victims of
oppressive ideologies.
Femininity is thus a special form of textually mediated relation,
that is, where texts mediate or are the focus or instigator of activities,
for example, in conduct books or advice columns where the reader
examines herself from the standpoint of a text. Problem pages in
women’s magazines are displays of women finding it difficult to
negotiate discourses; these pages of problems offer solutions, but
they are also important in the sense of their foregrounding the
difficulty women often have inserting themselves ‘correctly’ within
the perceived norms of feminine behaviour (Mills, 1995b). They
negotiate relations also between women as individual subjects,
since they help to establish positions for individual women within
the reading community of the particular women’s magazine.
For Smith, a woman partakes in the discourses of femininity by
wearing feminine, soft clothes; ‘she presents herself as text to be
read using doctrines of femininity as interpretative schemata. They
are read back into her as the underlying pattern to the “documents”
of femininity she exhibits’ (Smith, 1990: 177). However, even this
analysis needs some modification, since this representation of
femininity is primarily a heterosexual one. It assumes that the
signals which the documents/clothes produce are understandable
to all the decoders of the message. If we set this message outside of
the discourse of heterosexual femininity, different messages are
possible. Consider the ‘lipstick lesbian’ who dresses in a parodic
feminine way in order to present herself as a certain type of sexual
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agent but also to destabilise heterosexual norms. In an article on gay
and lesbian space, David Bell, John Binnie, Julia Cream and Gill
Valentine state that:
The excessive performance of masculinity and femininity
within homosexual frames exposes not only the fabricated
nature of heterosexuality but also its claims to authenticity. The
‘macho’ man and the ‘femme’ woman are not tautologies, but
work to disrupt conventional assumptions surrounding the
straight mapping of man/masculine and woman/feminine
within heterosexual and homosexual constructs.
(Bell et al., 1994: 33)
They go on to suggest that ‘lipstick style thus has the potential to
make heterosexual women question how their own appearance is
read, [and] to challenge how they see other women’ (ibid.: 42).
Thus, a feminine appearance cannot be interpreted simply as
having one single meaning; femininity may have a number of
different effects and functions, dependent on context.
A further advantage that feminist theorists have found in
discourse theory has been in relation to the theorising of causality.
In some senses, ideological criticism has had to posit an agency, the
State, or larger structural institutions whose interests ideological
practices served. Within this type of theorising, patriarchy – a rather
amorphous, agentless term – was used to describe the type of
society within which women are oppressed in the interests of men
(see Walby, 1990 for a fuller discussion of theorising patriarchy).
Discourse theorists find it more difficult to describe patriarchy; that
is not to say that they do not believe in a system of discrimination
which often works in the interests of males at the expense of
females, but they do not consider that systems of discrimination
work so smoothly. Discourse theorists do not deny the importance
of institutional power (the power of the State, the judiciary, the
police, and so on), since it is clear that roles are carved out for
individuals by these institutions; but perhaps they are more
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concerned with mapping out the multiple sites where power is
enacted and negotiated. Within discourse theory, it is possible to see
that the practices which oppress women are not uniform, since
women are not a homogeneous group; some women negotiate for
themselves positions of institutionalised power and others accrue
power to themselves by negotiating with the seemingly powerless
positions which they have been allotted. There are a wide range of
discursive and institutional structures which oppress women and
which women in turn are either compliant with or resistant to. Thus,
feminist analysis focuses on discourses rather than a single
discourse as the cause or one of the determining factors in women’s
subjection. And these discourses, as I mentioned earlier, will be in
conflict with other discourses, which will force them to change in
structure and content and which will make available to women and
to men spaces wherein they can resist and construct their own sense
of self.
In attempting to theorise femininity, Sandra Bartky (1989) has
addressed the question of the ‘origins’ of women’s oppression and
patriarchal power. She has used discourse theory to analyse
anorexia, which she sees as simply the logical conclusion of the
discursive structures of femininity. She sees anorexia as a discursive
pressure on the female body. She describes the way that the female
body is described in current magazines and advertisements as a
disciplinary practice, in that the female body is subject to the need
for control and work: ‘the ideal body of femininity – and hence the
feminine body subject – is constructed; in doing this they produce
a “practised and subjected” body, that is, a body on which an
inferior status has been inscribed’ (Bartky, 1988: 71). Anorexia here
is not viewed as an illness or as a mental aberration but rather as a
series of disciplinary practices: ‘The technologies of femininity are
taken up and practised by women against a background of a
pervasive sense of bodily deficiency; this accounts for what is often
their compulsive or even ritualistic character’ (ibid.: 71). What she
wants to know is ‘if what we have described is a genuine discipline
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– a system of micro-power that is essentially non-egalitarian and
asymmetrical – who then are the disciplinarians? Who is the top
sergeant in the disciplinary regime of femininity?’ (ibid.: 76). She
examines the possible options – the family, the law, the police, the
media – and suggests that none of them wields ‘the kind of authority
that is typically invested in those who manage more straightforward
disciplinary institutions. The disciplinary power that inscribes
femininity in the female body is everywhere and it is nowhere; the
disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular’ (ibid.: 76).
Thus, whilst Foucault in his work on discipline and the body tends
to locate the imposition of discipline within specific institutions –
the school, the factory, the prison – Bartky is more concerned with
the way that discursive structures are ‘unbound’, that is, not limited
to institutional sources and sites. This has certain key effects for
feminist theorising of patriarchy and for the formulation of patterns
of resistance: ‘The absence of a formal institutional structure and of
authorities invested with the power to carry out institutional
directives creates the impression that the production of femininity
is either entirely voluntary or natural’ (ibid.: 75). However, feminist
analysis can locate the discursive work necessary for the production
of femininity as ‘natural’ and can thus defamiliarise this discursive
structure.
Bartky considers some of the sanctions which operate against
women who refuse femininity or who cannot conform to the body
type and disciplinary regime of femininity. She quotes several
women whom she interviewed in the course of her work on
anorexia:
I felt so clumsy and huge. I would knock over furniture, bump
into things, tip over chairs, not fit into VWs, especially when
people were trying to crowd into the back seat. I felt I was taking
up the whole room . . . I felt disgusting and like a slob. In the
summer I felt hot and sweaty and I knew that people saw my
sweat as evidence that I was too fat.
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I feel so terrible about the way I look that I cut off connection
with my body. I operate from the neck up. I do not look in
mirrors. I do not want to spend time buying clothes. I do not
want to spend time with make-up because it’s painful for me to
look at myself.
(cited in ibid.: 76–77)
What Bartky is trying to discover is, given the problems with this
type of disciplinary structure, why it is that all women are not
feminists. Thus, she is trying to discover the parameters of
patriarchy, if she can still hold to such a unified concept, and the
possibilities of resistance.
Christine White and I have shown in an article on discursive
constraints and the construction of desire (Mills and White,
forthcoming) that the categories and narratives which discourse
constructs for subjects are not simply imposed, but are subject to
negotiation by those subjects. It is the process of engaging with
discursive structures that constitutes us as particular types of
individuals or subject positions. Heterosexuality is a set of
discursive constructs with which subjects interact, refusing certain
elements and accepting others. Subjects always feel discomfort in
their negotiations with these constructs and may interpret such
discomfort as a sign of their own inadequacy or as the
oppressiveness of society’s views of women. Feminist
heterosexuals may feel that they are critical of institutional
heterosexuality which accords privilege to heterosexuals (such as
pension rights, immigration rights), whilst denying those rights to
those who are not heterosexual. They may also find that they need
to resist assumptions made about heterosexuals by society as a
whole; for example, that the female in a couple will be responsible
for the housework and childcare, will earn less, will be less
confident, will support her husband/partner, will follow him in his
change of workplace, and so on. They may also have to counter
certain assumptions made by lesbians about their relationships; for
example, that heterosexual relationships are necessarily based on
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oppression. But they may also find that there are certain elements
within the way that they negotiate the structures of heterosexual
desire that are pleasurable. Thus, individual subjects should not be
seen simply to adopt roles which are mapped out for them by
discourses; rather, they experience discomfort with certain
elements implicit in discourses, they find pleasure in some
elements, they are openly critical about others. Individual subjects
are constantly weighing up their own perception of their own
position in relation to these discursive norms against what they
assume other individuals or groups perceive their position to be. In
this way, the process of finding a position for oneself within
discourse is never fully achieved, but is rather one of constantly
evaluating and considering one’s position and, inevitably,
constantly shifting one’s perception of one’s position and the wider
discourse as a whole.
ACCESS TO DISCOURSE
Feminist theory is intensely involved in questions over access to
discourse, since it is clear that women frequently do not have the
same access as men to speaking rights, as has been amply
documented by various studies (see Coates and Cameron, 1989;
Tannen, 1990). A simple example of this is the way that women
generally do not speak at weddings; it is very difficult for women to
insert themselves as speaking subjects in such an environment
when most of the formal speaking roles are designated as male
(men give the speeches at the reception; men generally ‘give the
bride away’; men toast the bridesmaid and the bride; men read the
telegrams, and so on) (Cameron, 1990). There are institutionalised
constraints here which serve to silence women in terms of public
speaking. This is not to suggest that women are simply incompetent
speakers, but that discursive structures are sites where power
struggles are played out. For example, it has often been noted that
in mixed-sex conversations which take place in the public sphere,
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certain discursive rules prevail and they are generally those which
are more in line with masculinist competitive norms of speech. So,
in a board meeting or committee meeting, within this style of
speech, each speaker tries to grab a turn at talk and tries to locate
themselves within a hierarchy – this hierarchy is fixed on the basis
of perceived power positions within the group (who earns the most,
who has the best job, who is employed, but also who is most able
to compete verbally and display verbal dexterity and wit). More co-
operative speech norms, such as those which are principally
engaged with in all-female friendship groups, are often not
perceived by mixed groups of speakers as having value (Coates,
1989, 1995). Within co-operative speech styles, participants
consider the ongoing flow of the talk to be more important than
their own particular contribution to that talk; they may give up their
own contribution in order to elicit a contribution from another
member of the group who does not seem to be participating. Whilst
feminist theorists such as Dale Spender (1980) have suggested that
this disparity between the speech styles and the devaluing of
women’s speech patterns is due to a male conspiracy against
women, this view of women’s speech is currently being revised
(Coates and Cameron, 1989; Mills, 1995b).
Discursive rules are always under constant negotiation and
renegotiation. For example, in university seminar groups it is
sometimes the case, in academic subjects where there are more
males than females, that male students will tend to dominate, will
speak more and will interrupt more frequently, whereas female
students may not intervene so forcefully. In other academic
subjects, where female students are in the majority, such as English
literature or cultural studies, it is clear that the norms of discourse
are being revised. In seminar groups where all of the students have
the same access to knowledge about a subject, and where it is
considered appropriate for women or men to know about that
subject, women and men will tend to intervene in roughly similar
ways. Much work on how people speak helps us to realise how
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 99
closely tied in with notions of power is the issue of who speaks. If
you alter one of the variables in the nexus of power relations, you
will change the type and form of the speech which is produced. This
revised view of power has helped feminist theorists to unravel the
complexities of the power relations between men and women, and
particularly helps us to understand differential access to discourse.
But seeing co-operative and competitive talk as discourses which
are differently valued enables us to reconsider the ways in which
women’s and men’s speech are produced as different from one
another. Thus, rather than assuming that men operate within one
set of speech norms all of the time, which is entirely distinct from
the speech norms of women, it is possible to see tendencies within
the population which will make the choice of one type of speech
appear more appropriate for one group than another. This revised
view of power enables us to question competitive talk as simply
powerful talk and co-operative talk as powerless. Perhaps we can
see competitive talk as just as inappropriate in certain contexts as
co-operative talk is in other contexts.
DISCOURSES IN CONFLICT
One final way in which feminist theorists have attempted to modify
Foucault’s model of discourse for feminist ends has been in
analysing discourses in conflictual relations rather than in isolation.
For example, in my own work, I have attempted to set discourses
of femininity in relation to discourses of feminism and discourses of
colonialism in the nineteenth century (Mills, 1991). For many
women writers in this period, their texts were produced in the
conflict of these discourses. Thus, women travel writers felt the
need to include certain details in their text about their ‘proper’
feminine behaviour, because of their perception that only by doing
so would they ensure that their audience considered them
respectable. However, at the same time, these women writers also
felt the pressure exerted by feminist discourses, which forced them
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to include mention of their position on a number of issues – thus,
texts which were ostensibly travel texts made frequent allusion to
the writer’s political beliefs on the role of women, the correct dress
for women, the oppression of women in other countries, and so on.
In this sense, the discourses of feminism in the nineteenth century
made it necessary for women writers to make their position on a
wide range of issues clear, even when they were supposedly writing
about other subjects. Similarly, discourses of colonialism/
imperialism also exerted a pressure on women writers, since their
position in relation to a range of issues had to be made explicit. In
this sense, texts are not determined by one discourse alone (note
how we often get this sense in discussions of ideology); there may
be several different discourses at work in the construction of a
particular text, and these discourses are often in conflict with one
another. I have argued that women travel writers were caught at the
conjunction of several opposing discourses and that this resulted in
texts which are far from cohesive and which are fractured by these
disjunctions. For example, if we consider Alexandra David-Neel’s
travel writing about her expedition to Tibet in the early twentieth
century, her texts are caught between an impulse to present herself
as an adventure–hero figure such as Richard Burton and T.E.
Lawrence, and the knowledge that, because of the discourses
circulating within her society about femininity, she as a woman
would be considered too weak to undergo the hardships which she
describes. She states: ‘I would find the pass; it was my duty. I knew
I would! There was no time for useless emotion’ (David-Neel, 1927:
129). David-Neel is forced constantly to include details of physical
difficulties and obstacles in her text, only to present herself
overcoming those difficulties: ‘For nineteen hours we had been
walking, without having stopped or refreshed ourselves in any way.
Strangely enough, I did not feel tired, only sleepy’ (ibid.: 131). This
phrase ‘strangely enough’ represents David-Neel’s recognition of
the strength of the discourses of feminine behaviour against which
this text is being written. In order to counter these discursive
pressures, she has thus to present herself as an exceptional woman
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who has transcended the norms for her sex, and this creates extreme
tensions within the text. It is perhaps indicative of the strength of
the discourses of femininity that David-Neel was accused of having
lied about her journey and was forced to publish documentary
evidence of her presence in Tibet. It was not thought possible,
within the constraints of the discourses of femininity, that a woman
could have endured what David-Neel claimed she had.
There are discursive conflicts for male writers within the colonial
period, but they are of a different type, since generally the subject
positions mapped out for colonial subjects are male (the adventure–
hero, the upholder of civilisation, the English gentleman). Thus, we
could expect greater cohesiveness in texts written by males within
this period, since the subject positions mapped out for males are
ones which are sanctioned and which accrue power to them. Even
here, writers negotiate with these discursive constraints in
conflictual relations with other discourses; for example, Joseph
Conrad, in his novel Heart of Darkness does not simply present a
conservative establishment view of colonialism. His account
contains within it certain elements which seem to uphold discourses
of colonialism (for example, his portrayal of Africans as essentially
inarticulate and savage), whilst there are also other elements which
are highly critical of colonialism, which seem to emanate from a
discourse of civil liberties and human rights (for example, his
depiction of the activities of the colonisers as corrupt). Heart of
Darkness would thus appear to be constructed from a range of
different discourses which makes it less cohesive as a text. It is thus
difficult to pin down Conrad’s position on the question of
imperialism.
Travel texts by women, particularly within the colonial sphere,
are clear examples of the way that discourses clash and bring about
texts which seem not to be cohesive. But there are many other
examples of this lack of cohesiveness which can be cited; they are
generally ones where there is discontinuity, where there is change
taking place. Consider, for example, a great number of
advertisements at present which appear to take on board feminist
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phrases in order to target groups of young women consumers, but
which at the same time are also signalling messages from discourses
which are pre-eminently conservative and sexist. Thus, an
advertisement for a perfume may portray a woman as being in
control of her life, as physically fit, as pursuing a career (in short,
gesturing towards feminism) whilst, at the same time, casting the
perfume as a means to initiate or enrich a relationship with a male.
This clash of discourses is not one which all individuals will notice
since it becomes naturalised; but it becomes very marked in
discourses which are in the process of change (Mills, 1995a).
CONCLUSIONS
It might be argued that it is not in feminists’ interests to use the
notion of discourse, since feminism as a whole is concerned with
questions of subjectivity and subjection, and within discourse
theory both of these terms are very difficult to use without
modification. Subjection is a complex matter within discourse
theory since it is less clear whether the position of those who are
cast in powerless roles is simply that of victim. Since the question of
agency is a vexed one within discourse theory, as I have discussed
above, and the notion of our position as individual subjects is also
one which it is difficult to describe, many people have turned to
psychoanalytic rather than discourse theory for a model of
subjectivity. Indeed, some theorists, such as McClintock, have
attempted to marry the two (McClintock, 1995). However, whilst
there is a less clear focus on the subject within discourse theory,
perhaps for feminist theory that is welcome. Whilst within the 1960s
and 1970s the notion of ‘the female self’ and the focus on the
difference of female subjectivity was important, it has become clear
that this self is produced at the expense of other less visible selves.
Thus, the groundbreaking work of Judith Butler and Diana Fuss and
Queer Theory in general has been instrumental in calling into
question the ‘self’ which Western feminism produced (Butler, 1990;
Fuss; 1990). But destabilising the self is not the same as dispensing
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FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY 103
with the notion of the self, and theorists such as Butler have been
quick to point out that the decentred self is still a subject. In many
articles Foucault calls the self into question and proclaims the ‘death
of man [sic]’, since he is attempting to write history without the
subject (that is, without the liberal humanist notion of a stable,
cohesive ego). Rather than focusing on the self as a fragmented and
unstable amalgam of the unconscious and the conscious, Foucault
sees the self as an effect of discursive structures– an effect that
nevertheless interacts with those structures, but which is not
foundational in itself. This more unstable notion of the self is one
which has been exceptionally productive for current feminist
theory, in that it does not privilege one form of homogeneous self
for a group, and neither does it assume that the subject positions
which can be adopted by a particular group are adopted uniformly
even by members of that specific group. This form of feminist
theorising is very aware that the adoption of certain subject
positions is a type of action which has consequences, and it is this
setting of subject positions within particular contexts of actions
which feminist discourse theory makes possible (Mills and Pearce,
1996).
Feminist theory has thus significantly modified the notion of
discourse by setting it more clearly in its social context and by
examining the possibilities of negotiating with these discursive
structures. Using the notion of discourse has made the task of
constructing political agendas and courses of action far more
difficult, but it has enabled feminists to construct scenarios for social
change and subject positions for active women as agents.
NOTES
1 However, there are always residual traces of these earlier practices within
current discourses on law and order; whilst perhaps the reforming discourse
has been dominant within the prison service since the nineteenth century, there
are often calls, when right-wing governments are in power, for a more visible
display of punishment for those who have been convicted of crimes – for
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104 FEMINIST THEORY AND DISCOURSE THEORY
example, the short sharp shock regime instituted under the Conservative
government in the 1980s.
2 We could complicate this still further by seeing that the writer accrues a certain
amount of power to herself because of her position within the non-conformist
sect to which she belonged. She has aligned herself with these particular
religious discourses in writing this diary, and these sects accrued power to
themselves through their role within society as oppositional and subversive
(Hobby, 1988).
3 Although within ideological analysis the concept of hegemony is used to
describe the process whereby individuals act in ways which are not in their own
interests and thus in a sense bring about their own oppression, discourse
theorists would argue that this still entails a wholly negative view of the way that
individuals react against and work within ideologies to construct their own
sense of self. Feminist discourse theorists are concerned largely with the
benefits that engaging with certain discursive structures brings to women.
4 This is a simplification of the position of feminist ideological theorists, in order to
make the difference between discourse theorists and Marxist critics clear.
However, it is evident that many Marxist and Marxist feminist critics see
ideology as fractured and riven with contradictions, rather than simply imposed
in this way (Belsey, 1980; Hennessy, 1993; Landry and MacLean, 1993). Thus,
there are possibilities within ideological criticism for subjects to ‘latch on’ to
some of these contradictions, in order to formulate a position of resistance and
critique.
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COLONIAL AND
POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE
THEORY
In the previous chapter on feminist theory, I demonstrated the ways
in which discourse theory can be used with a strongly political
focus. A further area where this is possible is colonial and post-
colonial discourse theory – the critical study of, respectively, those
literary and non-literary writings which were produced within the
period and context of British imperialism, and the effect of
colonialism and colonial texts on current societies.1 An extensive
body of theoretical work has been developed, mainly building
upon the work of Edward Said (1978, 1993), who attempted to fuse
Foucauldian discourse theory with insights from Antonio Gramsci’s
political writings. Some of the work by theorists such as Peter
Hulme (1986) and Mary Louise Pratt (1985, 1992) is detailed in this
chapter to exemplify the use of the term discourse and to show the
ways in which discourse has been modified. In general, this work
is described as colonial discourse theory. That work which tries to
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106 COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY
question some of the assumptions of Said’s work on discourse and
representation, which is largely informed by psychoanalytical
theory rather than discourse theory, and which is more concerned
with the effects the colonial enterprise has had on current social
structures and discursive formations, is known as post-colonial
discourse theory, and is best exemplified by the work of Homi
Bhabha (1994a) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1990,
1993b). In this chapter, I describe colonial discourse theory, since it
is here that Foucault’s formulation of discourse is most clearly
drawn on; post-colonial theory will be drawn on principally in order
to critique some of the preconceptions of colonial discourse theory,
to arrive at a more complex notion of discourse. As in Chapter 4, an
attempt is made to show ways in which discourse can be used
productively to analyse texts, particularly in this area where the
notion of discourse has arguably been most refined in recent years.
OTHERING
As I showed in Chapter 3, Foucault has provided us with a
vocabulary for describing the surface regularities which can be
traced across a range of texts occurring within a certain context. This
is particularly useful when we consider texts written about those
countries which were colonised or which suffered a form of
imperial relation. Edward Said has shown that there are a number
of features which occur again and again in texts about colonised
countries and that these cannot be attributed simply to the
individual author’s beliefs, but are rather due to larger-scale belief
systems structured by discursive frameworks, and are given
credibility and force by the power relations found in imperialism.
Peter Hulme describes colonial discourse as:
an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified in their
common deployment in the management of colonial
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COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY 107
relationships . . . Underlying the idea of colonial discourse . . .
is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of
the non-European world were produced for Europe through a
discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions,
methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and
imagery.
(Hulme, 1986: 2; emphasis in original)
Colonial discourse does not therefore simply refer to a body of texts
with similar subject-matter, but rather refers to a set of practices and
rules which produced those texts and the methodological
organisation of the thinking underlying those texts. In Orientalism
(1978), Said described the discursive features of that body of
knowledge which was produced in the nineteenth century by
learned scholars, travel writers, poets and novelists, which
effectively produced the Orient as a repository of Western
knowledge, rather than as a society and culture functioning on its
own terms. The Orient was produced in relation to the West and was
described in terms of the way it differed from the West. Said argues
that these colonised countries were described in ways which
denigrated them, which produced them as a negative image, an
Other, in order to produce a positive, civilised image of British
society. These representations were structured largely according to
certain discursive formats which developed over time, but which
accrued truth-value to themselves through usage and familiarity.
Each new text which was written about the Orient reinforced
particular stereotypical images and ways of thinking. As Said
argues:
Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself [sic]
vis-à-vis the Orient, translated into his text; this location
includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of
structure he builds, the kind of images, themes, motifs that
circulate in his text – all of which adds up to deliberate ways of
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108 COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY
addressing the reader, containing the Orient and finally
representing it or speaking in its behalf.
(Said, 1978: 20)
This struggle over representation had far-reaching effects, in that it
informed racist knowledge and practices, constructing the grounds
within which debates about race were largely conducted and the
typologies within which indigenous people and their descendants
were forced to be categorised and to categorise themselves (Young,
1995). These seemingly linguistic and textual decisions about racial
grouping had far-reaching material consequences which affected
the rights and lives of indigenous peoples, resulting in certain
groups of people being denied human status, others being used as
slave labour, and still others being hunted and killed like animals
(see Morris, 1979a, 1979b, 1979c; Gilroy, 1987 for an overview).
These representations also determined in large measure which
countries were seen to be ‘open’ to colonial expansion, and in need
of the ‘civilising’ influence of the European powers (Pratt, 1992). I
will now describe the discursive structures which Said has identified
as constituting imperial knowledge, in order to delineate the ways
in which his definition of discourse has modified Foucault’s
discursive model.2
Said does not simply focus on the jingoistic, openly propagandist
texts which circulated within the colonial period; he also analyses
the texts which were produced in the name of scholarship: linguistic
and philological analyses, history and ethnography, together with
travel writings. Pratt argues that those countries which had been
colonised were reduced to being seen as objects of knowledge.
Their reality was not represented as being of the same order as a
Western European reality; instead, the task of colonisers, when they
wrote accounts of colonised countries, was to:
produce what they themselves referred to as ‘information’.
Their task . . . was to incorporate a particular reality into a series
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COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY 109
of interlocking information orders– aesthetic, geographic,
mineralogical, botanical, agricultural, economic, ethnographic
and so on.
(Pratt, 1992: 125)
Said argues that discursive structures circulating within the
nineteenth century in particular informed the way that knowledge
was produced, so that seemingly ‘objective’ statements were, in fact,
produced within a context of evaluation and denigration.
Valueladen statements about the inhabitants of colonised countries
were presented as ‘facts’ against which there was little possibility of
argument. Once this process begins, even anecdotal or fictitious
information begins to accrue to itself factual status because of its
production within the colonial nexus of power relations (Richards,
1993; Mills, 1994b). For Said, the colonised people are dehumanised
by the series of generalisations made about them within colonial
texts. The fact that sweeping generalisations were made about
particular cultures made them less communities of individuals than
an indistinguishable mass, about whom one could amass
‘knowledge’ or which could be stereotyped: the inscrutable
Chinese, the untrustworthy Arab, the docile Hindu, and so on.
Consider this example from Dr William Baikie’s Narrative of an
Exploring Voyage up the Rivers Kwora and Binue (1856), where a
description of a group of people encountered on a journey is
produced as objective knowledge. However, rather than simply
describing the group, the passage has the effect of representing
them as an undifferentiated mass, and judging them to be
anomalous in relation to a Western norm:
About half-past ten we entered a creek on the north side,
running nearly parallel with the river, and shortly afterwards
sighted a village, at which we soon arrived. To our
astonishment the first thing which brought us up was our
running the bow of the gig against a hut, and on looking around
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we found the whole place to be flooded. We advanced right
into the middle of the village, and found no resting-place; right
and left, before and behind, all was water. People came out of
the huts to gaze at the apparition, and standing at the doors of
their abodes were, without the smallest exaggeration,
immersed nearly to their knees, and one child in particular I
observed up to its waist. How the interiors of the huts of these
amphibious creatures were constructed I cannot conjecture,
but we saw dwellings from which, if inhabited, the natives must
have dived like beavers to get outside. We pulled in
speechless amazement through this city of waters, wondering
greatly that human beings could exist under such conditions .
. . never had we even dreamt of such a spectacle as that of
creatures endowed like ourselves, living by choice like a
colony of beavers, or after the fashion of hippopotami and
crocodiles of the neighbouring swamps.
(cited in Hanbury-Tenison, 1993)
This account stresses the homogeneity of the group – they are all
‘creatures’ and likened to animals, such as beavers, crocodiles and
hippopotami. Their human characteristics are not stressed and no
attempt is made to differentiate them one from the other. Not only
are they characterised as belonging to a subhuman group, but it is
assumed that all members of the group have always lived in this
way; they are denied a history and the possibility of change. It does
not strike Baikie to enquire whether these conditions are
exceptional, because of a flood, or whether this is how the group of
people normally live. Furthermore, they are described simply as
anomalous in relation to a Western norm, as an exotic ‘spectacle’, as
the source of ‘speechless amazement’, rather than as (even) the
object of scientific or anthropological enquiry. Because of lack of
knowledge about the group (the account is produced largely from
conjecture, from a very brief encounter where no dialogue takes
place), Baikie produces a description which under other
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COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY 111
circumstances would not have counted as knowledge or as factual;
but, because of the institutional status of imperialism and travellers
within the imperial context, his account is credited as being
objective and as part of imperial knowledge. Rather than simply
being an anecdote, it is authorised as part of a larger accretive
knowledge system which characterised colonised nations as
inferior and as subhuman.
The colonised culture was also differentiated from the colonising
culture through being represented as existing on a different time-
scale to the colonisers. For, as Johannes Fabian has demonstrated,
colonisers set the colonised country and its inhabitants in the distant
past tense, relegating them to a period which has been superseded
by the colonisers, and hence denying them ‘coevalness’ (Fabian,
1983). Fabian states that ‘there is no knowledge of the Other which
is not also a temporal, historical, a political act’ (ibid.: 1). Through
the use of terms such as ‘backward’, ‘primitive’, ‘feudal’, ‘medieval’,
‘developing country’ and ‘pre-industrial’ to describe colonised
countries, Fabian argues, the colonised country is set within a past
period of British historical development or Western progress and is
therefore not permitted to exist on its own terms; it exists only in an
underdeveloped parody of British civilisation, a state which Homi
Bhabha has described as being one of ‘mimicry’ (see Bhabha,
1994b). Take, for example, this extract from a recent advertisement
feature in a Sunday magazine supplement by Gavin Bate on Nepal,
where he describes at some length his visit to Kathmandu:
Kathmandu . . . resembles Tudor England with its dirty narrow
streets and stout poles erected between the houses to prevent
them toppling in on one another. The markets are an
experience of sound and colour, every sense being invaded by
the sheer spectacle of it all. A butcher squats in front of the
skinned carcass of a dog, weighing gross lumps of meat on
ancient scales. An elephant is led through the square laden
with baskets of scarlet chillies, while brown urchins dart about
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with laughing faces and no clothes. Yes, Nepal is too different
for anyone to prevail their own morals on what they see.
(Bate, 1992: 15)
Here, Kathmandu is explicitly located as being at an arrested stage
of development; it has not progressed beyond the Tudor era. It is
described in terms which are very similar to the way in which Tudor
England is popularly described – in terms of dirt, squalor, grossness
and spectacle. Yet, this representation of Nepal located in the distant
past has the effect of rendering the inhabitants of Kathmandu mere
ciphers who are not taking part in the ‘real-time’ world of Western
culture. The description of the ‘laughing urchins’ is particularly
telling, since ‘urchin’ is a word which is commonly used only to
describe past representations of children, and generally very
uncivilised children. In this description, Bate is forced to construct
Nepal (which has had an entirely different social and economic
developmental history to Western Europe) into a grid of Western
history and values – a process which can only result in Nepal being
viewed as deficient.3
This setting of the other country at a different time may be
explicit, as in the example above, but it may also be implicit. If we
examine the above extract from Baikie again, it is clear that although
the inhabitants are described as ‘human’ and as ‘people’, they are
placed on a time-scale which is different from that of the narrator;
by being located within the sphere of animals, they are being
categorised as having achieved only a limited degree of progress on
the evolutionary scale. In this way, inhabitants of colonised
countries are distanced from the colonisers and British superiority
is implicitly asserted.
At the same time as setting the colonised country in the distant
past, colonial texts have tended to use a particular tense which
Fabian terms the ‘ethnographic present’; he observes that ‘the
present tense is a signal identifying a discourse as an observer’s
language’ (Fabian, 1983: ix). If we examine another extract from
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Bate’s article on Nepal, we can clearly see the effect that this use of
the present tense has:
The next day I witnessed the public stoning of a politician . . .
The barbarism was shocking, yet in these places there is very
little grey area: affairs are very much black and white. Death,
for instance is regarded simply as a transition to the next world,
a station along a tram journey if you like; and the dead are
burned in order to release the soul. I watched such a ceremony
from start to finish: the ritualistic dipping of the body into the
river, the moment when a burning torch of straw is thrust into
the open mouth of the corpse and the body finally set ablaze.
(Bate, 1992: 15)
In this extract, the narrator reserves the use of the simple past tense
for his own actions (‘I witnessed’, ‘I watched’) and thus sets himself
firmly in time and place; he uses the incidents he witnessed to then
make generalisations about the culture as a whole and its beliefs,
which he assumes everyone adheres to. Statements are made about
the beliefs of the culture about death (‘death is regarded’, ‘the dead
are burned’, ‘a burning torch is thrust’, and so on) which represent
the event which Bate saw as being simply an instance of a ‘fact’
about that culture. As Fabian puts it:
at the very least, the present tense ‘freezes’ a society at the
time of observation; at worst, it contains assumptions about
the repetitiveness, predictability and conservatism of
primitives . . . (the present tense) reveals a cognitive stance
towards its object . . . it presupposes the givenness of the
object of anthropology as something to be observed.
(Fabian, 1983: 81–82)
The use of this present tense has the effect of making the colonised
country, and its inhabitants, into an object of knowledge, reifying it
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114 COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY
and thus again denying it the status which is thereby claimed for the
narrator, as a representative of the colonising powers.
Together with this use of the present tense, Fabian and Said assert
that the inhabitants of the colonised country are further
homogenised through the use of the third person pronoun ‘he’, so
that global statements about the indigenous peoples are made, as if
in fact they could be reduced to one single ‘specimen’. Fabian
observes that:
Pronouns and verb forms in the third person mark an Other
outside the dialogue. He (she or it) is not spoken to but posited
(predicated) as that which contrasts with the personness of the
participants in the dialogue.
(ibid.: 85)
Thus, for Said, Fabian and Pratt, the important element which binds
these disparate grammatical features together is that they all serve
to mark off the Other from the realms of humanity.
Said also argues that colonised countries were often described in
negative terms: the indigenous people were described as idle,
weak, corrupt, their buildings were dirty, their culture a decaying
version of a past grandeur. This negativity is a discursive feature of
writing produced within the colonial context and, as with
generalisation and time-placement, constitutes the discursive
structures available for writers within which to produce knowledge
and factual accounts . Let us examine an early example of this type
of negative portrayal, written by William Dampier in Captain
Dampier’s Voyage around the Terrestrial Globe (1697), of the
inhabitants of ‘New Holland’:
The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in
the world . . . They are tall, straight-bodied and thin with long
small limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads, and
great brows. Their eye-lids are half-closed, to keep the flies out
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of their eyes . . . they have great bottle noses, pretty full lips and
wide mouths . . . They are long-visaged, and of a very
unpleasing aspect, have no graceful feature in their faces.
(cited in Carrington 1949: 354)
The negative nature of the description is excessive; it is as if only
those features which could be framed within this derogatory system
of knowledge are included. This negative view of the other country
is ratified by other economic and social forces; furthermore, these
structures are themselves affirmed by these representations. In this
way these representations are seen by Said as playing an important
role in the maintenance and consolidation of colonial rule.
Mary Louise Pratt’s (1985, 1992) analysis of travel writing has
been important in showing the repetitiveness of certain types of
event-sequence and in this way trying to describe the discursive
structures within colonial texts. In her earlier work, Pratt describes
the way that frequently travellers describe the inhabitants of a
country not in terms of their presence but in terms of their absence.
She analyses a nineteenth-century travel text by John Barrow about
South Africa where he describes the traces which the inhabitants
have left on the landscape – their footprints, the traces that they have
left in their food-gathering. By ‘emptying’ the landscape of human
presence, the ‘native’ is erased from consideration when the
colonial powers are considering which lands to exploit. She also
notes that there are certain event-structures that occur within travel
texts which are determined by the colonial context; for example, the
surveying of land is often naturalised within travel accounts. The
narrator describes the climb to the top of a hill or mountain and
surveys the surrounding land. The terms within which the land is
surveyed are often those of potential colonial exploitation: fertile
land, lack of indigenous inhabitants, presence of water supply, and
so on. Thus, description within the travel text is never an innocent
act of merely producing information, but is always inflected by the
power relations of the colonial context.
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Colonial power enables the production of knowledge, and it also
maps out powerful positions from which to speak. The fact of being
a colonial subject, a representative of the colonising power,
enhances one’s status as a knowing subject. Even subjects who
would have been considered amateur ethnologists and
archaeologists were, because of the colonial context, considered to
be experts on the colonised country: women travellers became
knowledgeable about, for example, the flora and fauna of a
colonised country, and they produced scientific accounts of their
work, in ways which would have been more difficult for them
within the metropolitan culture. Mary Kingsley had several species
of fish named after her, Margaret Fountaine produced accounts of
butterflies, and Marianne North specialised in flowers. Even though
the type of knowledge produced by these women was of a fairly
‘safe’ type, the colonial context nevertheless enabled British women
to take on a powerful position in relation to knowledge (Mills, 1991,
1994b).
Pratt’s work is also important in that, rather than, as Said, seeing
discourses as having one dominant meaning, she allows for the
possibility of texts speaking against the grain. For example, colonial
texts often represent ‘native’ indigence, stressing the difficulty in
forcing indigenous peoples to work hard in a sustained way. Pratt
argues that this seeming laziness could be read to represent a form
of resistance, a refusal to partake in colonial rule, except at a purely
surface level. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, colonial texts
which seem to be almost entirely didactic, aiming to discipline the
‘native’ subject, simply serve to highlight the degree of resistance to
colonial rule (Mills, 1996a). If we take for an example an extract
from Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s The Complete Indian
Housekeeper and Cook (1911), whose aim was to instruct British
women on how to manage Indian servants and the household
economy, it is clear that a repeated refrain is the fact that it requires
a great deal of effort to induce servants to work for their colonial
masters and mistresses. Colonial rule is not easily achieved:
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Easy however as the actual housekeeping is in India, the
personal attention of the mistress is quite as much needed
here as at home. The Indian servant, it is true, learns more
readily . . . but a few days of absence or neglect on the part of
the mistress, results in the servants falling into their old habits
with the inherited conservatism of dirt. This is of course
disheartening, but it has to be faced as a necessary condition
of life, until a few generations of training shall have started the
Indian servant on a new inheritance of habit. It must never be
forgotten that at present those mistresses who aim at anything
beyond keeping a good table are in the minority, and that
pioneering is always arduous work.
(Steel and Gardiner, 1911: 2)
Whilst the text is clearly attempting to state that Indian servants are
lazy and therefore constant vigilance is required in order to ensure
they continue to perform their duties according to British high
standards of cleanliness, the text also demonstrates the
precariousness of colonial rule. Even after several centuries of
British presence in India, the ‘mistress’ has only to be absent for a
few days and the servants revert to their own forms of subversive
behaviour. Thus, texts can be seen to be the nexus of a range of
different discourses; ‘native’ resistance can be figured within texts
even when it is directly contrary to the intentions of the author.
Peter Hulme (1986) has attempted to draw on Said’s work and
discourse theory in general to theorise the complexity of colonial
discourse. Rather than assuming, as Said has, that there is only one
colonial discourse, he considers there to have been various
discourses circulating within the colonial period, not all of them
characterising the indigenous subject in negative ways. He draws
attention to stereotypes such as the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘exotic
paradise’ as examples of positive representations within colonial
discourse, and shows that certain other cultures were considered to
be ‘civilised’. Rather than simply representing the other culture as
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deficient in relation to a Western norm, many travellers, for
example, found that the confrontation with a different culture made
them question the seemingly self-evident superiority of Western
civilisation, and many of them found that other cultures were less
‘barbaric’ than their own. Alfred Wallace, an English naturalist
travelling in the Malay archipelago in 1872, noted that
Western civilisation had failed since:
the wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not
constitute civilization, and do not advance us towards the
perfect social state. Our vast manufacturing system, our
gigantic commerce, our crowded towns and cities . . . create
and maintain an ever-increasing army, whose lot is the more
hard to bear by contrast with the pleasures, the comfort and the
luxury which they see everywhere around them, but which
they never hope to enjoy; and who, in this respect, are worse
off than the savage in the midst of his tribe.
(cited in Hanbury-Tenison, 1993: 62; emphasis in original)
Thus, even though there is reference to ‘the savage’, the more
egalitarian cultures Wallace encountered forced him to re-evaluate
the exploitation of the working classes in Victorian Britain.
CHALLENGING OTHERING
In his analysis of the variety of discourses of imperialism, Hulme
focuses on the discourse of Oriental civilisation and the discourse
of savagery which he locates in texts about the Caribbean. At the
same time as there are accounts of cannibalism and barbaric
practices, there are also positive evaluations of certain aspects of the
other culture. Hulme argues that these differences are motivated by
differences of context; those cultures which resisted colonial
incursions were described as barbaric cannibals, and the colonial
powers felt justified in their attempts to exterminate them. Those
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cultures which accepted colonial rule, and perhaps collaborated
with the colonial authorities in establishing settlements, were
generally characterised as civilised and peace-loving. Hulme tries to
describe the differences within discursive structures in texts which
deal with colonised countries and those where the countries
maintained their own independent governments and yet traded
with the West. Discourses change over time and depending on the
economic and social conditions within which they are generated;
thus, a text about settler life within the security of the Civil Lines in
Delhi during the colonial period will differ markedly from a
description of the exploration of West Africa (McClintock, 1995;
Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall, 1996).
This is perhaps one of the greatest criticisms which has been
levelled against Said’s work on discourse: that he characterised
colonial discourse as a homogeneous group of texts, bearing one
simple message about the colonised country. This has the
disadvantages both of suggesting that ‘Orientalist’ knowledge is all-
powerful and of erasing all resistance to discursive structures.
Dennis Porter has criticised Said for assuming a continuous history
of oppressive representational practices from the eighteenth
century through to the present day, arguing that this leads to
colonial knowledge, in one form or another, being ‘not only what
we have but all we can ever have’ (Porter, 1982: 180). This view of
discourse also assumes a certain stability of representational
practices, so that rather than the moments of tension or disjuncture
within colonial discourse being located, it is assumed that these
texts simply represent power relations. Porter gives two examples
of texts which he considered to be counter-hegemonic, that is to
say, which challenge imperial knowledge about other cultures.
These texts, Marco Polo’s Travels and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars
of Wisdom should be, strictly speaking, Orientalist or colonialist in
Said’s terms. Porter argues that there is no unified vision of the East
in these texts; writing about another culture entails a heterogeneous
discourse, marked by gaps, contradictions and inconsistencies. This
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120 COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY
view of the text as troubled by undercurrents from a range of
different discourses allows us to read the text as containing
destabilising elements, rather than as being simply a powerful tool
in the oppression of another nation. Instead of searching for a
unified discourse of colonialism, we should be prepared for the fact
that in examining colonial texts ‘no smooth history emerges, but
rather a series of fragments, which read speculatively, hint at a story
that can never be fully recovered’ (Hulme, 1986: 12). Within Said’s
view of colonial discourse, we get the sense that Orientalist
representations are being criticised in relation to a notion of the
‘truth’ of these countries. What post-colonial discourse theory is
concerned with is that the ‘truth’ of those cultures is not recoverable.
We will never know what those cultures were really like; all we have
is our interpretations of a set of heterogeneous texts, which had
effects in the real world of the time.
Gayatri Spivak is one of the post-colonial theorists whose work
has been important in challenging Said’s notion of the homogeneity
of colonial discourse; although she has located herself theoretically
more within deconstruction and Marxist feminism, her focus on the
possibility of alternative voices being recoverable within discourses
which seem on the surface to be simple colonialist texts has been
instrumental in forcing many critics to rethink their interpretations
of colonial texts (Spivak, 1993a, 1993b, 1995; see also Mills, 1994b,
1996c). In her work on the ‘subaltern’ subject, that is, the non-elite
colonised subject, she notes that colonial texts tend to represent
only certain sectors of the ‘native’ population. In the case of India,
it is very often the elite Brahmins who are represented, particularly
when they can ‘be shown to have the same intentions as (thus
providing legitimation for) the codifying British’ (Spivak, 1993a: 77).
What interests Spivak, and other theorists who form the Subaltern
Studies group, is those indigenous voices which do not form part of
the ‘native’ elite (Guha and Spivak, 1988). She suggests that,
although the elite subject might be the one whose voice most
approximates to colonial notions of what the Other is, it is necessary
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to ‘insist that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably
heterogeneous’ (Spivak, 1993a: 79). Thus, Spivak is calling for a shift
of theoretical position, from a concern with the voice of the
coloniser or the voice of the elite colonised subject (a focus which
has paradoxically only reaffirmed the position of the West) to a
concern with those whose voices are often effaced by colonialist
texts. The Subaltern Studies group analyses documents not simply
to accept the dominant message at face value, which in many ways
entails the analyst in a straightforward collusion with the logic of
colonialism; rather, as Chakrabarty has shown in his analysis of the
conditions of working-class Indians in the nineteenth century,
‘ruling class documents . . . can be read both for what they say and
their “silences”’ (Chakrabarty, 1988). By refusing to accept the
surface of discourse as representing the sum total of statements on
a particular situation, it is possible to analyse discursive structures
as much for what they exclude as for what they determine. As I
showed in Chapter 3 on discursive structures, this is very much
taking Foucault’s position on exclusion to its logical extreme (see
Mills, 1996b, 1996c).
Mary Louise Pratt has also moved on to a more complex
theorisation of discourse, since, for her, rather than colonialist texts
being seen as straightforward embodiments of colonial power, they
should be seen as indicative of the effect of what she terms ‘the
contact zone’, that is, ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet,
clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical
relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 1992: 4). Pratt
does not simply examine the way that the colonisers represented
the other cultures, but instead she is more concerned with the way
that, although imperial writers often tried to maintain distance and
differentiation between themselves and the colonised country, in
fact the lived experience of colonialism was invaded by the
presence of the colonised Other.
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While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as
determining the periphery . . . it habitually blinds itself to the
ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis –
beginning perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present
its peripheries and its other continually to itself.
(ibid.: 6)
And, in fact, as Neil Whitehead observes, one of the striking features
of colonial writing is that the knowledge which is so central to the
maintenance of colonial rule could only have been produced
through interaction and dialogue with ‘native’ guides and
interpreters (Whitehead, forthcoming). Even though the
knowledge which is produced from these indigenous sources is
often manipulated by the colonisers, and the aim of this knowledge
is often to make clear differentiation between colonised and
colonising cultures, the source of this information does have a
profound effect on the type of information structures which are
constructed.
A further difficulty which many post-colonial theorists have
found with Said’s theorisation of colonial discourse is that by
making discursive structures anonymous, beyond human agency, it
is almost impossible to blame any individual agent for their part in
imperialism. A politicised analysis of colonialism is therefore
impossible. Whilst it is clear that individuals cannot be held
responsible for the larger-scale organisation of imperialism, it is also
clear that individuals differed in the degrees to which they
championed, acquiesced or challenged imperialism. Some
presented representations which destabilised British colonial
involvement, whilst others affirmed colonial rule in their writings.
Bernard Porter shows that many writers were openly critical of
colonial intervention, and in my analyses of female travel writers it
is clear that critique of colonialism and specific colonial practices is
just as evident as affirmation of colonial rule (Porter, 1968; Mills,
1991). Whilst Foucault’s work is important in that it allows us to
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focus on the way that larger-scale discursive frameworks played a
role in colonial activity, it is clear that it is necessary to be able to
reinscribe individual agency at some level, as I showed in Chapter
4 on feminist theory. Dennis Porter argues that the failure to take
into account resistance to Orientalism by colonialists
not only opens Said to the charge of promoting Occidentalism,
it also contributes to the perpetuation of that Orientalist
thought he set out to demystify in the first place. . . . Even when
he praises an occasional scholar for a rare objectivity, he does
not show how, within the given hegemonic formation such an
alternative discourse was able to emerge.
(Porter, 1982: 181)
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE THEORY
Within the study of colonial discourse, there has developed a split
between those theorists who have drawn on discourse theory and
those who have turned to psychoanalysis as a framework, and the
two schools of thought have differed fundamentally on their
theorising of agency. Post-colonial critics such as Robert Young
(1995), Homi Bhabha (1994a) and Anne McClintock (1995) have
used psychoanalytic theory to describe the process of ‘Othering’ of
colonised nations; they have described colonialism as a form of
pathological disorder at a State level. The relations between the
colonising State and the indigenous inhabitants are seen as
characterised by paranoia: intense desire on one hand and intense
fear on the other. The colonised country is invested with sexuality
and becomes the object of sexual fetishism and exoticism; but at the
same time, it is also the repository of irrational fears. If we consider
reports of the 1857 Mutiny/Uprising in India, it is clear that the
events in which women and children were killed by insurgents
were reacted to by the British military and government in ways
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which can only be described as pathological; whilst it is clear that
hundreds of British men, women and children were killed, endless
stories circulated about the nature of their deaths which derived
from fantasy rather than actuality. Babies were reported to have
been ripped from their mother’s wombs or tossed onto bayonets.
Women were said to have been subjected to brutal torture and rape.
The British reaction to these events was to massacre thousands
upon thousands of Indians, whether connected to the uprising or
not, in the most barbaric ways imaginable – firing them from
cannons, forcing them to abase themselves before killing them, and
so on (Sharpe, 1993).
Whilst it is occasionally useful to be able to describe the
pathological behaviour of individual agents of the government, it is
debatable whether the pathologising of a nation-state is
theoretically productive. The attributing of the individual facets of
ego-development to a nation or a government can mask the agency
of individual participants in colonialism. Thus, if we attribute certain
actions of Britain in the colonial period as being due to a rather ill-
defined ‘desire’, we may be led to ignore or mask the sense in which
those actions were determined by very clearly defined material,
economic and social factors. It is clear that fantasy played a major
role in the representing of other countries within the colonial
period, but it seems necessary to develop a form of theorising which
does not describe this process simply in terms of psychoanalytic
concepts more suited to the description of individual psyches.
Homi Bhabha’s work on mimicry and ambivalence can prove
useful in the theorising of discourse, even though he locates himself
fundamentally within psychoanalytic theorising (Bhabha, 1994a).
His work has been used by other theorists to try to map out the
discursive structures which have developed under colonialism
within specific historical contexts, and this work as a whole has
served to question some of the assumptions about discourse (Low,
1996). Bhabha has stressed that, despite seeming to represent the
Other solely in relation to a Western norm and therefore finding the
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Other lacking in relation to this norm, this strategy in fact exposes
an ambivalence at the very heart of colonialism, which he concludes
is due to the ambivalence inherent in mimicry:
colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but
not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is
constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective,
mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its
difference. . . . Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation;
a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which
‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also
the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or
recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of
colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an
immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and
disciplinary powers.
(Bhabha, 1994b: 86)
Presenting the Other as a lacking Self is here theorised as a form of
complex desire on the part of the coloniser, rather than simply as an
act of oppression and appropriation. The coloniser here is just as
much at the mercy of these forms of representation as the colonised,
and is simply caught in the play of desire and fantasy which the
colonial context produces.
Anne McClintock (1995) has tried to address some of the
criticisms which have been levelled against such psychoanalytic
theorising, and has attempted to develop a form of theorising which
is more able to deal with the specificity of colonial contexts;
however, she herself analyses representations in broadly
psychoanalytic terms (see also, Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall
1996). Take, for example, her analysis of a treasure map in Rider
Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1881). She considers that
the map in fact resembles a female body; there is a
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triangle of three hills covered in ‘dark heather’. This dark
triangle both points to and conceals the entrances to two
forbidden passages: the ‘mouth of treasure cave’ – the vaginal
entrance into which men are led by the black mother, Gogool
– and, behind it, the anal pit from which the men will eventually
crawl with the diamonds, in a male birthing ritual that leaves the
black mother, Gogool, lying dead within.
(McClintock, 1995: 3)
Whilst this type of analysis may seem to hold some advantages over
a more literal Saidian reading, since the text is not taken at its literal
meaning, but rather it is interpreted in terms of fantasy and desire,
nevertheless, this type of psychoanalytic analysis of colonial texts
and the process whereby one nation subjugates another in terms of
sexuality, desire and fantasy does not seem productive. A discourse
theorist would be interested that sexual metaphors were used to
describe landscape features, but such a theorist might also remark
that perhaps these features are ones which become more noticeable
once one draws upon psychoanalysis when examining texts. What
a discourse theorist would be interested in would be the fact that
the power relations implicit within sexual relations at the time were
used as a form of metaphor to describe other types of power
relations. Figuring colonial relations through the analogy of the
development of the individual psyche, as psychoanalytic analysis
does, simply ratifies colonial expansion, seeing it as a ‘natural’ part
of the subject’s construction of its sense of self. The political agendas
and power relations of nation-states are therefore erased.
Let us consider a textual example which might help us to
demarcate the differences in the view of discourse as used by
colonial discourse theorists such as Said, Pratt and Hulme and the
views put forward by post-colonial theorists such as Bhabha and
McClintock, who have used psychoanalytic theorising. Here is the
final passage in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) where
Fielding and Aziz go riding together:
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COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY 127
“India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab
nineteenth century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the
world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy
Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium
perhaps!” Fielding mocked again. And Aziz in an awful rage
danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and he cried:
“Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out you
fellows, double quick I say. We may hate one another, but we
hate you most. If I don’t make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if
it’s fifty and five hundred years we shall be rid of you, yes, we
shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then,”
he rode against him furiously – “and then”, he concluded, half
kissing him, “you and I shall be friends”.
“Why can’t we be friends now ?” said the other, holding him
affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want”.
But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart – the earth
didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which the riders must
pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the
birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as
they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t
want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet”, and the
sky said, “No, not there”.
(Forster, 1924: 316)
Many critics who have drawn on psychoanalysis to analyse colonial
discourse have focused on desire and the intense sexual
relationships which are figured within colonial texts. Here the
relation between England and India, figured through the characters
of Aziz and Fielding, is seen to be one of homosexual desire, which
is thwarted by seeming external factors – the sky, the horses, all of
the landscape are working against this desire (Bakshi, 1994; Mills,
1994c). A psychoanalytical reading of this passage would see this
process of thwarting as being one of repression and displacement
of the constraint on homosexual desire. In fact, the book itself could
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128 COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY
be read as a displacement of this desire between men onto the
bodies of women: the incident whereby Adela Quested is sexually
‘attacked’ in the caves could be read as a displacement of male
homosexual desire, the process of displacement resulting in the
indeterminacy of the event itself. However, a discourse theory view
of this passage would be less comfortable with simply seeing these
representations as one of desire. In order to read the passage as
being about desire, it is necessary to foreground those elements
which clearly refer to desire and minimise those which refer to other
features. Thus, the elements within the passage which describe the
implacable opposition of Britain and India on political terms have
to be ignored; Fielding’s mocking of Aziz and Indian nationalism
equally has to be ignored in this presentation of the scene, as does
Aziz’s determination that Indians will overthrow colonial rule. A
discourse theory analysis would be more concerned with the fact
that questions of sexuality are seen to be central to colonial rule; as
I mentioned above, this view of colonial texts would see the power
relations entailed in sexual relations being used analogically for
other power relations. In a sense, a discourse theory perspective
would take more of a position of meta-commentary. It would see
the imbrication and, in some senses, the eliding of the political and
the sexual as of importance – the process whereby sexual relations
between subjects were seen to stand for relations between nations.
CONCLUSIONS
Thus, colonial discourse theory and post-colonial theory have both
found the notion of discourse useful in characterising the systematic
nature of representations about colonised countries. Although early
work stressed the way that colonised countries were Othered by the
colonial powers, and saw its task as charting the strategies used by
colonisers to produce representations of indigenous peoples as
deficient in relation to a British norm, more recent writing has
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attempted to characterise these texts as less homogeneous and
more traversed and troubled by conflicting discourses. This has
changed the definition of discourse and has altered the way that
discourse is used as a term. Instead of referring to a group of
statements or modes of knowing, discourse is now characterised as
being open to different interpretations and thus open to resistance,
even when at its most seemingly powerful. Thus, within current
analyses of discourse, it is no longer assumed that the dominant
meaning of the discourse is the only meaning that is available within
the text; instead, the knowledges which are excluded by the
colonial discourses are just as important as those which are figured
within the text. Thus, colonial discourse theory and post-colonial
theory have troubled Edward Said’s homogenising views of
colonial texts, so that it is possible to characterise the relations of
power between the colonised and the coloniser not simply in terms
of master and slave, and not simply in terms of their success in
affirming colonial power. Instead, the involvement of indigenous
people in the production of colonial knowledge and in colonial
resistance is now acknowledged, and a more politically productive
model of discourse has been developed.
NOTES
1 Colonialism is generally used to refer to a situation where the representatives
of one country invade and settle in another country, and impose a legal system,
a government and other institutional structures; imperialism is the more general
term which is used to signify other exploitative relations, such as when there are
enforced trading relations, the imposition of an alien religion, interference with
the legal system or government by a foreign body, and so on, but when there is
no large-scale, planned settlement by civilians. However, since there is great
variety in imperial and colonial relations (over time and within a particular
context), there is not a clear-cut distinction to be made between imperialism and
colonialism. The study of colonial discourse does not generally make a
distinction between these relations, and I shall be using the term colonial
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130 COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY
discourse to refer to texts which are about imperial and colonial contexts. One
of the differences which should perhaps be more clearly articulated is the
difference between white settler cultures, such as Canada, South Africa and
Australia, and non-white colonised countries, such as India and parts of Africa
(McClintock, 1995). Post-colonialism is an equally problematic term, but it is
generally taken to refer to the socio-economic and cultural crises caused by
colonialism, amongst other factors (see Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989;
McClintock, 1995 for two conflicting views of the term).
2 In Orientalism, Said is mainly concerned with the construction of knowledge
about the Orient in the nineteenth century. However, his work has been
extended by other critics to other contexts, such as Africa and India (see
Williams and Chrisman, 1993 for an overview of these critics). Inevitably, such
extension has created difficulties for the theoretical framework within which
Said was working and it has been greatly modified to deal with these new
contexts (see McClintock, 1995 for an example of a theorist attempting to
engage with some of these difficulties of context).
3 It could certainly be argued that there is some difficulty in using this text for
analysis, since Britain does not have a colonial relation with Nepal. Said argued
that the discursive structures of colonialism in fact inform the way that current
societies are described.
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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, CRITICAL
LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
Within those areas of study which draw on linguistics as a method
of analysis, the term discourse is often used in ways which contrast
sharply with definitions used by cultural and literary theorists. I
examine three groups of theorists in this chapter, each of whom
defines discourse slightly differently: discourse analysts, social
psychologists and, finally, critical linguists. Each of these fields of
study has approached the question of how to analyse
communicative acts in context, using a form of analysis which is
rigorous and based on scientific principles. Each of the fields of
study is also concerned with how to analyse text in its broadest
terms, which although it has been a factor within cultural/literary
theory, has not been a primary concern. I deal with each of the
different uses these fields have made of the term discourse briefly
here, before going on to a more detailed examination of them in
turn.
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132 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Within linguistics, particularly within discourse analysis,
discourse is used to describe a structure which extends beyond the
boundaries of the sentence. Using the analogy of sentence structure
and its internal constituents (such as subject, verb, object, or noun,
verb, complement), there is an assumption that elements above the
level of the sentence contain similar structures. This use of the term
has gained wide currency within linguistics and is used by those
who would describe themselves as discourse analysts. This
meaning of discourse has been developed mainly by linguists,
many of them associated with English language research at
Birmingham University, for example, Malcolm Coulthard, David
Brazil, Martin Montgomery, Michael Hoey and Deirdre Burton, who
developed a particular type of discourse analysis; that is, the
analysis of the structures in spoken utterances or written text above
the level of the sentence ( Coulthard, 1977, 1992, 1994; Brazil,
Coulthard and Johns, 1980; Burton, 1980; Coulthard and
Montgomery, 1981; Hoey, 1983). These analysts have been
concerned to analyse language use in context, rather than focusing
on idealised abstract versions of language. I will be terming this type
of work discourse analysis, to distinguish it from the discourse
theory of Michel Foucault and others.1
Social psychologists, such as Jonathan Potter, Margaret
Wetherell, Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson, have drawn upon the
analytical methods developed within this type of discourse analysis
and linguistics in general to develop a form of analysis which is
concerned to analyse talk and particularly the structure of argument
(Wetherell and Potter, 1992; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1995). Like
discourse analysis, this approach has been concerned with
structural units above the level of the sentence whilst at the same
time trying to deal with the type of questions with which post-
structuralist theory has engaged, most notably by focusing on such
issues as power relations and the production of knowledge. As
Wetherell and Potter put it:
What post-structuralism has not done is address everyday
discourse – people’s talk and argument – nor has it been
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CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 133
concerned with materials which document interaction of one
kind or another. In some ways, therefore, our general aim is to
pursue post-structuralist questions with the analytic fervour of
social psychologists, but in a domain of materials which have
been most thoroughly explored by ethnomethodologists and
conversation analysts.
(Wetherell and Potter, 1992: 89)
This type of integrated study differs from both discourse analysis
and cultural theory in its use of the term discourse, in that, whilst it
concerns itself with questions of power (which discourse analysis
does not), it is also focused on the analysis of text, and because of
its disciplinary position within social science, it is concerned with
questions of data collection and analysis (which cultural theory is
not necessarily). Because of this concern with methodological
issues as well as wider socio-cultural factors, the definition of
discourse is significantly different, since it draws elements both
from Foucauldian discourse theory and more linguistics-based
discourse analysis definitions. Potter and Wetherell have shown in
their analysis of the discursive structures of racism that this marrying
of two different views of discourse, one entailing a concern for
scientific methods of analysis and the other asking larger questions
of socio-cultural import, has caused great difficulty for the
production of a working method of analysis which does not
undermine its own claims to truth (ibid., 1992: 101).
The third definition of discourse which I examine is that of
another group of linguists who use the term discourse in a slightly
different way to the two previous definitions and to cultural theory
as a whole. These linguists are broadly categorised as critical
linguists; that is, those linguists who wish to analyse texts for
political purposes. Because they argue that language is a central
vehicle in the process whereby people are constituted as
individuals and as social subjects, and because language and
ideology are closely imbricated, the close systematic analysis of the
language of texts can expose some of the workings of texts and, by
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134 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
extension, the way that people are oppressed within current social
structures. They, like social psychologists, such as Wetherell and
Potter, are largely attempting to integrate post-structuralist
questions of power, truth and knowledge within their linguistic
analytical methods. This group includes critical linguists such as
Norman Fairclough, Tony Trew, Gunther Kress, Robert Hodge,
Roger Fowler and Terry Threadgold, who have found the term
discourse useful to describe structures above the level of the
sentence, but who are more influenced by Michel Foucault’s work
and by Marxist linguistics and political theory than are the discourse
analysts (Fowler et al., 1979; Trew 1979a, 1979b; Hodge and Kress,
1988; Thread-gold, 1988, 1997; Fairclough, 1989, 1992a, 1992b,
1995). Their definition of discourse is more indebted to Foucault’s
definition, although they provide a substantial modification of the
term because they are concerned with a more ground-level
approach to language than Foucault; they thus provide more
working models and concrete examples of how texts work to create
inequalities of power, and are more concerned with the mechanics
of discursive functioning. Although they share this concern with
social psychologists, they tend to differ methodologically, since
their frame of reference is current linguistics (rather than, as is the
case with social psychologists, rather outmoded discourse analysis)
and they tend thus to have adopted slightly more complex models
of interpretation and meaning. Their form of analysis is usually less
concerned with content-analysis or thematic analysis and more with
questions of the possible meanings of different discourses used by
participants in speech and in text.
As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, all of these theorists
are concerned with the rigorous analysis of written text or speech,
and thus their definitions of discourse differ from those of cultural
and literary theorists. However, because of difference in degree in
their theoretical affiliations with linguistics, social science and/ or
literary and cultural theory, their definitions of discourse differ
significantly, and the types of analyses which they produce vary
greatly one from another.
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CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 135
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis can be seen as a reaction to a more traditional
form of linguistics (formal, structural linguistics) which is focused
on the constituent units and structure of the sentence and which
does not concern itself with an analysis of language in use.2
Discourse analysis, in contrast to formal linguistics, is concerned
with translating the notion of structure from the level of the
sentence, i.e., grammatical relations such as subject–verb–object, to
the level of longer text. Since it is rare for anyone to communicate
with others through single sentences alone, these discourse analysts
are critical of the tendency for linguists to concentrate solely on
sentence structure. As Michael Hoey states:
Conversation involves an interchange between two or more
people in which each contributor may produce more than one
utterance and each contribution builds (normally) upon the
previous contributions either directly or indirectly. We know
immediately if, for example, the subject matter of a
conversation changes and will comment on it appropriately if
it appears to have been for ulterior motives or because of
some misunderstanding. Similarly, in writing, sentences
bunch into conventional units called paragraphs, paragraphs
into chapters, and chapters into books. In short, in our
everyday speech and writing, the sentence is only a small
cog in a normally much larger machine.
(Hoey, 1983: 1)
Thus, this type of discourse analysis has developed out of a desire
to analyse these larger units and structures which are implicitly
recognised by speakers and hearers at the level of discourse, rather
than at the level of the sentence. These larger structures may be
more difficult to analyse, precisely because of their largely
unanalysed and taken-for-granted nature. However, conversations
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136 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
can be seen to be structured, and can be analysed in terms of the
moves which participants make to signal that, for example, they are
initiating a new topic of conversation or that they are reviving an
older topic of conversation; these moves which ‘chunk’ speech into
functional segments and which participants recognise as
segmented, are signalled clearly by the use of discourse markers
with phrases such as ‘well’, ‘OK’ and ‘anyway’. These discourse
markers only function at the level of discourse, signalling the end of
an exchange or the initiation of a new topic, and they do not have
a function at the level of the sentence. Thus, a marker such as
‘anyway’, signals clearly to participants in a conversation that a
transitional moment has been reached and that a change of topic or
a leave-taking is about to be introduced. It is hard to say that
‘anyway’ has any other meaning or function, than as a discourse
marker. It is these higher-level organisational features of
conversation and text, and the higher-order structuring and
segmenting of text, which are of interest to discourse analysts.
Discourse analysts such as Malcolm Coulthard and John Sinclair
(1975) assume that there is a ranking of structures within discourse;
thus, just as there is a hierarchical relation between sentences and
clauses (sentences are made up of clauses), so there is a hierarchical
relation between transactions, exchanges, moves and acts, with acts
being the lowest unit of analysis. When Sinclair and Coulthard
analysed the discourse structures within the classroom, they were
interested in ‘the level of the function of a particular utterance, in a
particular social situation and at a particular place in a sequence, as
a specific contribution to a developing discourse’ (Sinclair and
Coulthard, 1975: 13). They saw their task as isolating and describing
the workings of a limited number of these functional units. A
transaction, such as a teacher–pupil interaction, consists of
exchanges, and they classified them as eliciting, directing,
informing, and so on. In this sense, they were more concerned with
what the participants were actually doing with words (the
functional value) than with the meaning of the words or utterances.
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CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 137
An exchange, such as an eliciting exchange, is seen to consist of
smaller units, which they termed ‘moves’, and they classified these
using terms such as initiating, response, and so on. Let us examine
an example from their analysis of an interaction within a lesson:
1 Teacher: Can you tell me why do you eat all that food? Yes.
2 Pupil: To keep you strong.
3 Teacher: To keep you strong. Yes. To keep you strong. Why
do you want to be strong?
(ibid.: 107)
Sinclair and Coulthard analyse this as part of an eliciting exchange,
since its primary function is to elicit information. The exchange is
made up of moves: the first utterance in line 1 by the teacher is an
initiating move; the pupil then makes a responding move in line 2,
and the teacher then makes a feedback move in line 3, when s/he
repeats the pupil’s utterance to confirm that this was the answer s/
he was seeking. S/he then goes on to make another initiating move
which constitutes a new exchange. Moves are described as
consisting of acts, which are not necessarily coterminous with
sentences, but which could be said to be composed of groups of
words within an utterance/text which have a recognisable function.
In line 1 the teacher says ‘yes’, which could be classified as a
nominating act, in that the teacher clearly chooses a pupil to answer.
In line 3, the same word ‘yes’ has a different function and could be
classified as a confirming act, in that, like the repetition of the pupil’s
utterance by the teacher, it serves to indicate to the pupil that the
answer is acceptable.3 Fairclough states that this is one of the
strengths of Sinclair and Coulthard’s analysis, since ‘it draws
attention to systematic organizational properties of dialogue and
provides ways of describing them’ (Fairclough, 1992b: 15).
As well as being concerned to describe the structural units within
a text or utterance, discourse analysis is concerned with language
in use; rather than examples which have been invented by the
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138 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
linguist or which have been found in textbooks, discourse analysts
are interested in ‘real’ naturally occurring language, usually either
tape-recorded speech (for example, the interaction between a
teacher and a class of students, or a dialogue between a doctor and
patient), or texts such as instruction manuals, books for children,
newspaper editorials, and so on, which have a communicative
function and are not therefore invented for the purpose of analysis
(Coulthard, 1977, 1994; Brown and Yule, 1983).4 Take for example
this extract from a conversation analysed by Brown and Yule:
A: so father was making up a big..sort of remembrance book
B:
aha
A:
to give him and he was writing just at the
beginning he was writing.. writing the whole..for each year
of his life he wrote something in that had..had been
invented or..
B:
oh yes
A: ah a book that had been written or a piece of music that had
been written or a painting or a...
B:
very interesting yes
A:
or
whatever you know and..within his lifetime the telephone
had been invented..
B:
had it.. really.. fancy.
(Brown and Yule, 1983: 92;..represents a pause)
This extract differs quite markedly from examples used within
traditional linguistics, in that it is a transcription of a conversation,
displaying all of the false starts, hesitations and incoherences of
naturally occurring conversation. Brown and Yule in their analysis
are not concerned with the meaning of the exchange, but rather
they are interested in the functions of particular items within the
larger discourse as a whole. Here they are interested in topic
control, and they comment ‘Speaker B stops trying to take turns in
the negotiation of topic and waits for speaker A to make it clear how
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CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 139
what she is saying has some connection to the existing topic
framework’ (ibid.: 92). Thus, B’s utterances (which are classified as
‘backchannel behaviour’ – those noises which are made by
someone in a conversation, such as ‘hmmm’, ‘yes’, ‘mmm’, but
which do not interrupt the speaker) indicate to the speaker that s/
he should continue to speak, and that the hearer understands what
is being said. They also indicate to speaker A that speaker B is
prepared to have speaker A define the topic of conversation at this
point and make clear to him/her how it relates to the overall topic
of talk. Once this has been established, speaker B will be able to
contribute to the talk. This type of analysis, like Sinclair and
Coulthard’s, is interested in the function of particular items within
the ongoing speech or text as whole, rather than their meaning or
interpretation in isolation from one another.
As well as analysing conversations, discourse analysts have also
examined written texts. Deirdre Burton has applied the types of
descriptive frameworks developed for analysing exchanges in
conversational interactions to dialogue in drama, and has produced
a model for describing the way that certain types of modernist
drama dialogue contain violations of discursive norms (Burton,
1980). Michael Hoey, and Gillian Brown and George Yule have also
demonstrated the way that discourse analysis can be applied to
written text (Brown and Yule, 1983; Hoey, 1983). Brown and Yule
discuss the way that cohesive relations function across discourse –
thus, they analyse the way that chunks of text ‘stick’ together. In this
example, they analyse the way that information is structured in a
recipe for chicken korma:
Slice the onion finely, brown in the butter and then place in a
small dish. Put the ground spices into a breakfast cup of water,
add to the fat in the pan and cook for 3 minutes, stirring the
while. Now add the chicken, mix well, see that the meat is just
covered by water and boil for 20 minutes with the lid on the pan.
(Brown and Yule, 1983: 175)
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140 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
What interests Brown and Yule here is the way that an ideal reader
makes sense of this passage, partly because of their knowledge of
the structures usually found in the genre of recipes, but also partly
to do with the way that readers have internalised a set of models of
discourse organisation; the reader thus knows that, in the first
sentence when the writer says ‘brown in the butter and place in a
small dish’, the object which is implicitly referred to is ‘the onion’,
and the onion which has to be placed in the small dish must have
already been browned in the butter. These rules of making sense of
ellipted items within a text are not usually analysed explicitly, but
they perform a major role in the discourse information structures
within written texts. As Brown and Yule state, in this type of textual
analysis:
Our interest does not lie simply in describing the form of the
expression, which is obviously of prime interest to the
sentence grammarian. Our interest lies in observing the forms
in the context in which they are used. We want to know how
speakers, having a given quantum of information to impart,
identify and package that information.
(ibid.: 176)
Thus, discourse analysis of written text aims to make explicit those
implicit norms and rules for the production of language, and is
particularly interested in the way that discourse consists of sets of
hierarchical units which make up discursive structures.
Discourse analysis has been very important in opening up new
areas of analysis: initiating the analysis of systematic organisational
properties of language and attempting to develop a system of
notation and description for these organisational units. However, it
has been criticised for a number of reasons. Firstly, even though it
considers language in use in ‘real’ language contexts, discourse
analysis does not concern itself with questions of the way that social
relations impinge upon the production of speech or written texts
and on the power relations between participants, nor does it
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CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 141
concern itself with questions of interpretation, or whose view of
what the function of a particular item is taken by the analyst.
Norman Fairclough has been very critical of this type of analysis,
terming it ‘non-critical’. Of Sinclair and Coulthard’s work analysing
teacher–pupil interaction he states:
its limitations are the absence of a fully developed social
orientation to discourse, and insufficient attention to
interpretation. These limitations can be related to their choice
of data; they concentrate on a traditional teacher-centred
mode of classroom discourse, and their data does not reflect
the diversity of current classroom practices. This makes
classroom discourse seem more homogeneous than it
actually is, and naturalises dominant practices. It presents
them as simply ‘there’, rather than as having been put there
through processes of contestation with alternative practices,
and as having been ‘invested’ with particular ideologies (e.g.
views of learners and learning), and as helping to sustain
particular relations of power within society. In short, the Sinclair
and Coulthard approach lacks a developed social orientation
in failing to consider how relations of power have shaped
discourse practices, and in failing to situate classroom
discourse historically in processes of social struggle and
change.
(Fairclough, 1992b: 15)
The problem of interpretation is not one which concerned
discourse analysis at first; the text was viewed as a simple product
which could be interpreted by the analyst. What Sinclair and
Coulthard failed to recognise was that their interpretation and
analysis of the text was very much that of the speaker in power in
the discourse situation, i.e., the teacher. More recent work in
discourse analysis and in critical linguistics (most notable
Fairclough’s (1992b) work) has shown that utterances do not simply
mean one thing and that they cannot therefore be interpreted from
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142 CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
the standpoint of the speaker or hearer alone; there is a sense in
which utterances are ambivalent and are interpreted by participants
according to hypotheses and working models that they develop in
the course of the conversation (Mey, 1993). This can be seen clearly
in the contrast between the type of discourse analysis of doctor–
patient interviews undertaken by David Brazil (1975), and the form
of critical linguistic analysis carried out by Fairclough, discussed
later in this chapter. Briefly, Brazil assumes that the function of
particular utterances is transparent, and that the position of the
analyst in allocating each act or move to a particular categorisation
is one of scientific disinterestedness, whereas Fairclough assumes
that each of the participants will view the functioning of utterances
from a standpoint made up of different interests and preoccupations
– the analyst has therefore to be careful not to elide his/her position
of analysis with that of one of the participants.
Thus, discourse analysis has provided a range of tools for
describing the structures and functioning of language within
utterances, and it has forced many mainstream and traditional
linguists to shift their attention from words in isolation to words
within context. It has been highly influential in psychology and
sociology as a method for analysing stretches of interaction rather
than isolated phrases. Its methodology has been adopted by many
analysts in different fields, but perhaps it is the methodology itself
which is open to criticism more than any other aspect of the
analysis; in examining the way that social psychologists have made
use of discourse analysis these methodological difficulties will be
made apparent.5
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS AND DISCOURSE
Social psychologists, as I mentioned in the introduction to this
chapter, are concerned to integrate questions raised by post-
structuralist theory and more broadly sociological analysis, with a
methodology which is rigorous and replicable. Thus, the definition
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of discourse which they use tends to be largely that formulated by
Foucault, but because their methodological framework is drawn
from discourse analysis, where a different model of discourse is
used, their own use of the term discourse vacillates rather
disconcertingly from one to the other. I examine two types of
discourse analysis undertaken by social psychologists, each of
which aims to consider questions of power and oppression,
drawing on the type of discourse analysis detailed in the previous
section.
Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter’s Mapping the Language
of Racism demonstrates very clearly the way that discourse analysis
can aid the investigation of discourses such as racism. They have
chosen the area of racism because they found Foucauldian
theorising of discourse ran the risk of seeming rather abstract and
separate from the lives of real people. They liken discourse theory
analysis to the analysis of plate tectonics in geology:
a patchwork of plates/discourses are understood to be
grinding violently together, causing earthquakes and
volcanoes, or sometimes sliding silently one underneath the
other. Discourses become seen as potent causal agents in
their own right, with the processes of interest being the work of
one (abstract) discourse on another (abstract) discourse. . . .
In contrast to this, we wish to place much more emphasis on
discourse as social practice, on the context of use and thus on
the act of discursive instantiation.
(Wetherell and Potter, 1992: 90)
Rather than assuming that there is one single discourse of racism,
and challenging it on a moral basis, as many analysts have done,
they attempt to chart the constituent elements within a set of extracts
taken from the racist utterances of a group of white (Pakeha) New
Zealanders. They see racist discourse as having outcomes in the real
world in that it has the effect of categorising and discriminating
between certain groups, and it legitimises the practices which keep
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the Pakeha New Zealanders in their positions of power. They aim
to separate out the argument structures within discourses of racism
which cast Maoris as different and inferior to Pakehas. For example,
in this interview they analyse the rhetorical work which goes into
making racist statements without being heard as racist:
Wetherell: Do you think New Zealand can be described
generally as a violent society ? In terms of crime
rate and
Jones: Yes, it has got a very high crime rate. um. yes I
think so. It’s not as bad as some places though,
but the crime rate is going up
Wetherell:
Uhm. Why do you think, what’s
responsible there and what could be done about
it? (pause)
Jones:
To
really answer that you’d have to look at. the types
of crime you’ve got. ah. and who’s committing
them
Wetherell:
Yes. Uhmm
Jones:
There have been you know
ideas put out what it is, that the majority of rapes
are committed by Islanders or Maoris and a lot of
house burglaries I would imagine are committed
by kids and the majority of the kids that are
hanging around the streets are Islanders, they’re
not the Maoris, well, it’s unfair to say the Maoris
because the Maoris I know are quite nice really.
Yes. Maoris. are quite good. It’s the Islanders that
come here and can’t handle it.
(ibid.: 96)
What Wetherell and Potter find of interest in this extract is the effort
which the speaker expends to manage a dilemma – how to express
racist beliefs without being condemned. They state:
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the dilemma is managed by constructing evaluations as part of
the world, as a bad thing which is simply described, rather than
an expression of personal negative attitudes to this group.
(ibid.: 97)
Thus, rather than being open about his racist attitudes, the speaker
here attributes the high crime rate to particular groups of Maoris or
Polynesian migrants (Islanders) and this is posited as simply factual.
He distances himself from this particular view in some ways
because he states that the Maoris he knows are ‘quite nice’; thus he
presents himself as someone who is not prejudiced at the same time
as detailing views which are racist. Attention to discourse here is
manifested in the concern with power relations which an analysis
of racism demonstrates. Thus, Foucault’s analysis of power relations
is exemplified in the types of speech which are analysed; but this
type of rhetorical and argument analysis draws on and modifies the
methodologies of discourse analysis, in that what Wetherell and
Potter are interested in is the structures which this stretch of talk
shares with other similar interactions.
Where perhaps this type of analysis could be criticised is in its use
of a rather outmoded form of discourse analysis. Much of the form
of the analysis is content analysis, whereby an example of an
interaction is transcribed, and then parts of the conversation or
argument are glossed as belonging to certain types of structural
groupings. Thus, much of Wetherell and Potter’s analysis of racism
consists of separating out the different functions and values
attributed to the key terms such as ‘culture’ in racist discourses.
Consider this example where one participant states:
I think it’s important they [Maoris] hang on to their culture
because if I try to think about it, the Pakeha New Zealander
hasn’t got a culture. As far as I know he hasn’t got one unless
it’s rugby, racing and beer, that would be his lot!
(ibid.: 129)
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Wetherell and Potter gloss this in the following terms: ‘Maoris in this
formulation become museum keepers. Theirs is the privilege and
burden of heritage’ (ibid.). Thus, discourse analysis here simply
seeks to rephrase at a more general level elements of rhetorical
structure which consistently appear within a discourse and which
seem to define that discourse. In essence, this is simply a form of
analysis of the meaning of particular key terms within racism.
Thisapproach shares with discourse analysis a problematic eliding
of the position of the speaker with that of the analyst, which I
discussed in the previous section. Thus, in this discussion of racism,
the utterances of white New Zealanders are considered to be
transparent in meaning; the opinions of Maoris or Polynesian
migrants are not sought and nor are their interpretations of these
utterances considered.
A similar concern with questions of power relations occurs in the
collection of essays edited by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger
Feminism and Discourse (1995). These essays attempt to use the
concerns of discourse theory (here largely restricted to power
relations and truth/knowledge) with the methodology of discourse
analysis for feminist ends, examining such issues as sexual
harassment, menstruation, anorexia and heterosexual desire. In an
essay attempting a feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis of
menstruation, Kathryn Matthews Lovering demonstrates how she
moved from a fairly conventional psychological analysis of
menstruation to a discourse view of the subject, whereby she tried
to chart the way that menstruation is discursively constructed for
and by young girls approaching the menarche. She is further
concerned with the way that these discursive structures then map
out subject positions for adolescent girls and boys. She analyses
some of the answers to a question she asks some school girls about
physical changes during adolescence:
A: They [school teachers] don’t talk about the boys very much,
only the girls.
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A: It doesn’t seem fair. They are laughing at us. Not much
seems to happen to the boys.
A: Girls all go funny shapes.
A: Because the boys they don’t really . . . change very much.
They just get a little bigger.
(Lovering, 1995: 23)
From her analysis of similar statements made by a number of
different girls she is able to make generalisations about the
discursive positions available to them to express themselves on the
question of menstruation: she comments that ‘the female body has
become the reproductive and sexual body, and the object of
fascination and regulation . . . these constructions of the female and
male body as essentially different, always already sexed, and
private, regulate the knowledge that children (and adults) have of
the body and the menstrual cycle’ (ibid.: 23–24). Thus, the
discursive construction of menstruation as a separating of male and
female bodies has a profound effect, not only on the way that
menstruation is viewed but on how these adolescents view their
relations with males and with other females.
Analyses such as those contained in the essays on feminism and
discourse are important in investigating the discursive construction
of knowledge about women. However, as I mentioned in my
discussion of Wetherell and Potter’s work, they have not sufficiently
criticised the use of discourse analysis and its compatibility with
discourse theory. It is only when we turn to the work of critical
linguists that such an integration seems to be more fully worked
through.
CRITICAL LINGUISTS/DISCOURSE THEORISTS
Because of these difficulties in analysis, critical linguists/discourse
theorists have developed a radically different form of analysis,
which inflects the term discourse slightly differently. This group of
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linguists have been concerned to develop a political analysis of text
and, particularly in the case of linguists such as Norman Fairclough,
they have integrated Michel Foucault’s definition of discourse with
a systematic framework of analysis based on a linguistic analysis of
the text (Fairclough, 1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1995; see also, Fowler et
al., 1979; Hodge and Kress, 1988). Early work in this area is best
exemplified in the collection of essays by Fowler et al. entitled
Language and Control (1979), especially Tony Trew’s influential
essay, where he demonstrates that small-scale linguistic choices
result in particular messages for the text as a whole. For example,
he analysed a series of South African newspaper headlines where
the overall message of the text seemed to depend on choices over
the use of the passive or active voice. Thus, one newspaper
headline read:
RIOTING BLACKS SHOT DEAD BY POLICE AS ANC LEADERS MEET
(The Times, 1975, cited in Trew, 1979a: 94)
Trew argues that choosing the passive voice (Blacks [are] shot by
police) has the effect of making the actions of the Black people
more salient than the actions of the police. Furthermore, choosing
to place the term ‘rioting Blacks’ first has the effect of minimising the
actions of the police. He contrasts this with a phrase like ‘Police
shoot Blacks’, where it is clear who is responsible for the unrest. By
modifying the term ‘Blacks’ by the word ‘rioting’, Trew argues, a
value judgement is implicit in the headline as to who is responsible
for the unrest. Trew is concerned with the systematic choices of
elements like passive rather than active voice over a stretch of text,
and is thus moving towards an analysis of text which is concerned
not with individual language items, but with the effect of repeated
choices on the meaning and force of the text as a whole. However,
this type of analysis tended to suffer from the same theoretical
problems as discourse analysis; for example, viewing the text as a
product, assuming that language items had a single meaning which
all analysts could agree on, and so on. However, in later work, the
theoretical questions which Foucault’s work elicits are more fully
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integrated in small-scale analytical contexts; discourse as a term
begins to be used in a systematic way so that the constituents of
discourse can be described. As Fairclough puts it, discourse is often
used by recent critical linguists to:
refer to the different ways of structuring areas of knowledge
and social practice. Thus the discourse of ‘medical science’ is
currently the dominant one in the practice of health care,
though it contrasts with various wholistic ‘alternative’
discourses (e.g. those of homeopathy and acupuncture) as
well as popular ‘folk’ discourses. . . . Discourses do not just
reflect or represent social entities and relations, they construct
and constitute them.
(Fairclough, 1992b: 3)
These linguists have therefore been concerned with inflecting
Foucault’s analysis of discourse with a political concern with the
effects of discourse; for example, the way that people are
positioned into roles through discursive structures, the way that
certain peoples’ knowledge is disqualified or is not taken seriously
in contrast to authorised knowledge, and so on. In this way, critical
linguists such as Fairclough can be seen to be providing working
models and forms of practice from Foucault’s theoretical
interventions, together with a description of the effects of discursive
structures on individuals. In contrast to ‘non-critical’ linguistics,
critical linguistics does not just describe:
discursive structures, but also [shows] how discourse is
shaped by relations of power and ideologies, and the
constructive effects discourse has upon social identities,
social relations and systems of knowledge and belief, neither
of which is normally apparent to discourse participants.
(ibid.: 12)
It is this shift away from mere description to a more analytical and
critical perspective which is a significant reinterpretation of
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Foucault’s work through the matrix of linguistics’ concern for
replicable, verifiable analyses.
In order to illustrate this particular use of discourse I will focus
on Norman Fairclough’s work, because he is one of the few theorists
who openly acknowledges his debt to Foucault and Pecheux, whilst
stating clearly that his is not a simple application of their work. He
argues that, because his form of critical discourse analysis
developed solely in relation to the structure of spoken and written
language texts, his concerns will inevitably be different to
Foucault’s. But why he believes that Foucault is so important to
linguistics is because of his work’s emphasis on the ‘major role of
discourse in the constitution of social subjects’ (Fairclough, ibid.:
44). Linguistics has largely ignored questions of the role of language
in the constitution of subjectivity and selfhood, and it is for this
reason that Foucault’s notion of discourse can allow for this type of
analysis to be integrated into linguistic study.6
Fairclough argues that Foucault’s work on discourse can be
usefully drawn on by linguists for two main insights: ‘1. the
constitutive nature of discourse – discourse constitutes the social,
including “objects” and social subjects; 2. the primacy of
interdiscursivity and intertextuality – any discursive practice is
defined by its relations with others, and draws upon others in
complex ways’ (ibid.: 55). By this he means that he is concerned
with the way that what we consider to be the social is largely
constructed through the operations of discourse; and secondly he
is interested in the way that there are relations between and within
discourse structures. What Fairclough adds to Foucault’s work is
close linguistic analysis and reference to ‘real’ texts in context, and
also this notion that discourses refer to each other and are
constituted in that process of reference. He finds problematic
Foucault’s lack of reference to real practice by individuals and also
his lack of address to the practicalities of struggle and change. I will
deal with these two elements of Fairclough’s work in turn. Firstly,
the notion that discourse constitutes the social and thus social
subjects: he focuses on the discursive construction of social
relations and ‘the self’ within particular contexts, most notably in the
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medical sphere. He gives several examples of dialogues between
doctor and patient, where the doctor controls the turn-taking
system (who speaks, for how long, on what topic, and who
comments on the foregoing speech and glosses it for its overall
meaning). Fairclough demonstrates that in these interactions the
patient attempts to foreground her own concerns in her medical
condition, but they are ignored by the doctor who only wishes to
address those elements of her condition which relate to his
diagnosis. For example a patient is describing a stomach pain that
she has:
Patient: It’s all right up here in the front
Doctor:
And when do you get
that?
Patient: Well, when I eat something wrong
Doctor:
How soon after
you eat it?
Patient:
Well, probably an hour . . . maybe less
Doctor:
About an hour?
Patient:
Maybe
less . . . I’ve cheated and I’ve been drinking which I
shouldn’t have done
Doctor:
Does drinking
make it worse?
Patient: Ho ho uh ooh yes . . . especially the carbonation and
the alcohol
Doctor:
How much do you drink?
Patient:
I don’t know . . . enough
to make me go to sleep at night . . . and that’s quite a bit
Doctor: One or two drinks a day?
(Mishler, cited in ibid.: 139)
In this extract from the interview, one has ‘the sense of the doctor
shifting and constraining topic in accordance with a pre-set agenda,
which the patient is not being allowed to disturb’ (ibid.: 141).
Fairclough is concerned with the way that the doctor focuses only
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on the things which he feels are relevant. Thus, the patient is clearly
trying to inform the doctor that she has a number of problems, with
sleeping, for example, which alcohol seems to alleviate; the doctor
focuses only on the amount of alcohol and disregards the
information which relates to problems of sleeping. What makes this
type of analysis different to standard discourse analysis is that
Fairclough is interested just as much on the failed attempts of the
patient to assert her speaking rights as he is in the more successful
doctor’s interventions. Furthermore, Fairclough does not assume
that he knows what the patient means or what motivates her. When
she hesitates at certain points of the medical examination (using
‘well’, ‘hmm’) and displays a low affinity in her modal choice (i.e.,
showing a low degree of commitment to the probability of truth
value of one of her statements; for example, when she answers, ‘I
don’t know’ to a question which she then goes on to answer)
Fairclough comments:
It is difficult to disentangle factors of propositional truth and
social relations in the patient’s motivation for [this choice];
does she select low modality because she is not sure how
accurate the gloss is, or because she is reluctant to claim
anything resembling medical knowledge in an interaction with
a legitimized medical expert? Propositional truth and social
relations, knowledge and power, seem to be intricately linked
in such cases.
(ibid.: 142)
Thus, Fairclough is not content simply to describe the constituents
of the interaction, nor does he simply describe the imposition of
power within a particular setting, as has been done frequently by
ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts before; rather, he is
more concerned with the way in which this type of interaction
displays the complexity of the workings of power relations within
the society as a whole. He is not solely concerned with analysing
the way that the doctor asserts his control, but by focusing on the
patient’s often ambivalent responses and interjections, he is able to
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see the interaction as more fragmented and less well ordered than
it at first appears. He sees the interventions of the patient and the
doctor constituting different discourses which clash in this
encounter: the voice of technological medicine (‘a technological
rationality which treats illness in terms of context-free clusters of
physical symptoms’) and the voice of the patient’s ‘lifeworld’ (‘a
“commonsense” rationality which places illness in the context of
other aspects of the patient’s life’) (ibid.: 144)). The discourse of
technological medicine consists of a series of seemingly
unconnected questions which focus only on certain aspects of the
patient’s life and behaviour; the discourse of the patient’s lifeworld
focuses on the illness which the patient has in relation to all other
aspects of the patient’s life. Fairclough contrasts this type of medical
interview with one between a homeopath and his/her patient and
is thus able to set the technological medical interview alongside a
type of discourse which challenges its fundamental bases. These
two types of medical discourse do not simply coexist; they are in
conflict. He comments: ‘In struggles between varieties of medical
interview, it is boundaries within orders of discourse, such as the
boundary between counselling and medical interview, and the
interdiscursive articulation of elements within orders of discourse,
that are at issue’ (ibid.: 148). In this way, Fairclough is able to show
that social relations are not simply the imposition of one discourse
type or another (i.e., that of the doctor on the patient), but are rather
constituted by the clash of different discourse types for ascendancy
within interactions.
The second element which Fairclough focuses on – the relational
nature of discourse – is dealt with particularly in his treatment of
Julia Kristeva’s term ‘intertextuality’, which, in its original usage,
could be defined broadly as the propensity of texts to refer to others
and to be constructed by that reference to other texts. This term is
not generally employed in discussions of discourse, but here
Fairclough is trying to deal with the specific constituents of
discourse, rather than its abstract constitution. Fairclough modifies
Kristeva’s definition, setting it more within a Foucauldian
framework, locating this intertextual reference within a social
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context and stressing the fact that intertextuality is one of the
discursive mechanisms which brings about change within
discourses. Fairclough links intertextuality with hegemony, that is,
the manner in which individuals collude in their own oppression:
The concept of intertextuality points to the productivity of texts,
to how texts can transform prior texts and restructure existing
conventions (genres, discourses) to generate new ones. But
this productivity is not in practice available to people as a
limitless space for textual innovation and play: it is socially
limited and constrained, and conditional upon relations of
power. The theory of intertextuality cannot itself account for
these social limitations, so it needs to be combined with a
theory of power relations and how they shape (and are shaped
by) social structures and practices.
(ibid.: 103)
In short, Fairclough has added Foucault’s interest in power relations
to Kristeva’s purely textual concept in order to be able to describe
some of the mechanisms whereby discourses have an effect on
individuals as social subjects.
Where Fairclough differs most markedly from discourse analysts
is in his concern with ambivalence. For discourse analysts such as
Sinclair and Coulthard, the meaning of discourse units is clear and
unambiguous; Fairclough stresses that textual meaning is
sometimes indeterminate and that units within a discourse are
subject to different interpretations. For him, intertextuality is one
aspect of textual construction which brings about ambivalence
within a text; if a statement from one text is integrated into another,
it creates some sort of disjunction: ‘if the surface of a text may be
multiply determined by the various other texts which go into its
composition, then elements of that textual surface may not be
clearly placed in relation to the text’s intertextual network’ (ibid.:
105).
Let us consider an example which Fairclough gives of the way
that intertextuality manifests itself in texts, and the way that this can
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be a focus for an analysis which is concerned with the way that
discourse structures have an effect on power relations. He takes a
report in the Sun newspaper in 1985 about drug dealing with the
heading ‘Call up forces in drug battle!’ This is an extract from the
article:
The armed forces should be called up to fight off a massive
invasion by drug pushers, MPs demanded yesterday. Cocaine
pedlars are the greatest threat ever faced by Britain in
peacetime – and could destroy the country’s way of life, they
said. The MPs want Ministers to consider ordering the Navy
and the RAF to track down suspected drug-running ships
approaching our coasts. On shore there should be intensified
law enforcement by Customs, police and security services . . .
In one of the hardest hitting Commons reports for years, the
committee – chaired by Tory lawyer MP Sir Edward Gardiner –
warned gravely: ‘Western society is faced by a warlike threat
from the hard-drugs industry. The traffickers amass princely
incomes from the exploitation of human weakness . . .’ The
Government is expected to bring in clampdown laws in the
autumn.
(cited in ibid.: 106)
In his analysis, Fairclough is concerned with the intertextual relation
and transformation between the original document – the report
from the all-party Home Affairs Committee – and the newspaper
article. He notes that, in formal terms, the segments of the text which
‘belong’ to the Sun reporter, David Kemp, and those which ‘belong’
to the chair of the committee are clearly demarcated: Gardiner’s
words are placed within direct quotation marks, and MPs’ words are
placed in indirect speech marked by phrases such as ‘MPs
demanded’ and ‘they said’. However, by referring to the original
committee document, Fairclough is able to show that the article on
the whole is a blending of the voice of the Sun with that of the
committee report, so that it is often not clear who is speaking. He
takes as an example the headline: ‘Call up forces in drug battle!’ The
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headline itself is not marked by inverted commas, but because it
contains an exclamation mark, a marker of speech, we are led to
believe that the Sun is here reporting someone’s words; there is thus
a fundamental ambivalence as to who is speaking. Fairclough cites
a section of the original report and compares it to the Sun article:
The Government should consider the use of the Royal Navy
and the Royal Air Force for radar, airborne and ship
surveillance duties. We recommend therefore that there
should be intensified law enforcement against drug traffickers
by H. M. Customs, the police, the security services and
possibly the armed forces.
(ibid.: 110)
Fairclough shows the way in which the article transforms the
original report, by translating vocabulary items and substituting
words like ‘pusher’ for ‘trafficker’, but also setting the report within
a metaphorical framework of war and battle, which entails the use
of phrases like ‘call up’, ‘invasion’, ‘fight off’, and so on. In this
example of intertextuality, Fairclough finds that there is ambiguity
as to whose voice is being represented, and also he finds that the
voice of the committee report becomes merged with the voice of the
Sun so that the cautious recommendations which the report makes
become the Sun’s own clearer, more polarised demands. Fairclough
tracks down this tendency in newspapers to act as mediators
between official bodies and the people at large, in effect translating
these documents into a form which they feet more closely
approximates the language usage of their intended readers. In this
process they effect:
the ideological work of transmitting the voices of power in a
disguised and covert form. Translating the language of official
written documents into a version of popular speech is one
instance of a more general translation of public language . . .
into private language: a linguistic shift which is itself part of the
rearticulating of the relationship between the public domain of
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the political (economic, religious) events and social agents,
and the private domain, the domain of the ‘lifeworld’, of
common experience.
(ibid.: 110)
In this type of analysis, Fairclough is thus able to connect very
careful, detailed, close textual analysis with discourse processes
occurring within the larger social community and larger social
changes affecting the relationship between the public and private
domains. Thus, whilst there have been innumerable linguistic
analyses of texts which have been informed by political concerns,
Fairclough is one of the few analysts who have attempted to map
out the connection between a close textual analysis and wider
discourse structures.
CONCLUSIONS
Within this chapter I have tried to distinguish between those
linguists who use discourse to mean the analysis of the structures of
a piece of extended text, an analysis which will focus on the higher-
level organisation of that piece of text, and those linguists and social
psychologists who have used Foucault’s work to develop a
politically inflected form of analysis. Discourse analysts are
concerned with the internal structures of interactions in their
immediate context, but are not overly concerned to relate these
individual dialogues to larger social structures. A concern for the
relation between the individual interaction and the wider discursive
and social structure not only makes for a form of analysis which is
more complex and more finely nuanced, but also makes for an
analysis which is self-critical in terms of its own claims to ‘truth’, and
is aware of the dangers of naively ascribing meaning to texts. It is
this type of fusion of larger social questions with smaller-scale
analytical questions which holds the greatest potential for future
work in this field.
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NOTES
1 A useful introduction to this type of discourse analysis, together with other
analyst’s work, is Brown and Yule (1983).
2 Formal linguistics is concerned largely with syntax (word order) and grammar
(the structures and possibilities of combination of language items). Some also
take formal linguistics to include a concern for semantics (word meaning). This
type of study of language is at a fairly abstract level and is focused on the
language system as a whole rather than particular utterances or particular texts.
You might see it as concerned with Saussure’s notion of langue (system) rather
than parole (particular instances of language).
3 This labelling of discourse units has proved very helpful but it is also
problematic: there seemed to be no particular justification for some of the labels
chosen. As I point out later, the very fact of naming a discourse unit means that
you have already decided that the unit has one particular function – you have
therefore adopted a particular position in relation to that unit. Furthermore,
whilst Sinclair and Coulthard in their early work developed a very limited
number of terms to label discourse units, over time these terms proliferated, so
that it became very difficult to decide which function a particular unit had. For
more recent work in this area, see Coulthard (1992 and 1994) and Caldas-
Coulthard and Coulthard (1996).
4 As well as being used by these analysts to refer to larger segments of text,
composed of moves and exchanges, the term discourse is also used by some
linguists to refer to a particular type of language usage or to describe a particular
grouping of texts which occur within a particular setting, for example,
‘newspaper discourse’, ‘religious discourse’, ‘classroom discourse,’
‘advertising discourse’ (Cook, 1992). Here, it seems that the context of the
production of the texts is what defines a discourse, and the term is here used
almost interchangeably with words like ‘genre’. This should not be confused
with the Foucauldian definition of discourse, which is not limited to the context
of production or the subject matter of a group of utterances. Nor should it be
confused with the type of definition used by discourse analysts as a whole,
where discourse is seen to mean a definable stretch of structured spoken or
written text.
5 Certain linguists, such as Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and Deirdre Burton, have
attempted to integrate a feminist analysis into discourse analysis, but their work
tends to pull them more in the direction of the critical linguists, even though their
definition of discourse is largely that of discourse analysis (Caldas-Coulthard,
1995; Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard, 1996; Burton 1982).
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CRITICAL LINGUISTICS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 159
6 Valentin Volosinov’s work is also very useful in this context and has significantly
influenced many of the critical linguists’ work, since he starts from the premiss
that language is not an expression of the self but rather that the social manifests
itself in the individual consciousness through the vehicle of language. In this
way, the values and ideologies of a society, embedded within the linguistic
choices of the knowledge which is taken as self-evident within a culture,
become the views and feelings of the individual, which that individual imagines
are his/her own (Volosinov, 1973).
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INDEX
access to discourse 14, 97–9
agency 30, 42, 85, 91, 93, l02, 122
Althusser, Louis 11, 32, 34, 38, 43
ambivalence 124, 154
archaeology 26, 49, 61, 75, 85
archive 49, 63
Austen, Jane 74
Austin, John 28, 61
author 72–5
author-fiction 74
Bacon, Francis 74
Baikie, William 109, 112
Baker-Miller, Jean 83, 87
Bakhtin, Mikhail 7, 9, 11
Bakshi, Parminder 127
Baldick, Chris 25
Balibar, Renee 14
Barrow, John 115
Barthes, Roland 9, 48–9, 55–6, 72,
75
Bartky, Sandra 94
Bate, Gavin 111
Bell, David 92
Belsey, Catherine 59
Bhabha, Homi 106, 111, 123,
124–5, 126
Binnie, Jonh 92
Benveniste, Emile 4–5, 9
Brazil, David 132, 142
Broadhurst, Thomas 89
Brown, Gillian 138–40
Burton, Deirdre 132, 139, 159
Butler, Judith 102–3
Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen 159
Cameron, Deborah 45, 97, 98
capitalism 36
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 121
class 78–9
Cliff, Tony 78
Coates, Jennifer 97, 98
colonialism 100, 101, 129
colonial discourse 10, 22, 27,
105–30
commentary 67–8
competitive strategies 98–9
confessional 80–6
Conrad, Joseph 101
contact zone 121
cooperative strategies 98–9
Coulthard, Malcolm 132, 136,
138, 139, 141, 154
Cream, Julia 92
critical linguistics 9, 10, 27, 131–
59
critical theory 8
critique 32–3
Crystal, David 3–4
cultural theory 8, 10
Dampier, William 114
Darian-Smith, Kate 119, 125
David-Neel, Alexandra 100–1
Davis, Lennard 66
Diamond, Irene 77
discipline 69, 80–1, 94–5
discontinuity 26, 59
discours 2, 6
discourse analysis 10, 27, 131–59
discourse markers 136
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discourse theory 16, 33, 77–104,
147–57
discursive constraints 51, 86, 96
discursive field 50
discursive formation 49
discursive frameworks 33, 49, 106
discursive structures 12–15, 17–
18, 48–76, 85–6, 89, 97, 115,
149, 154
disidentification 15
dominant discourse 19
Doyle, Brian 25
Dreyfus, Herbert 28, 60–1
Dunant, Sarah 43
Eagleton, Terry 25, 32, 46
Eichenbaum, Luise 83
episteme 56–60
ethnographic present 112
ethnomethodology 152
exclusion 12, 24–5, 63–7
Fabian, Johannes 111–14
Fairclough, Norman 10, 18, 46,
134, 137, 141, 142, 148, 149,
150–7
false consciousness 32–3, 43
femininity 80, 86–93
feminist theory 10, 12, 42, 68, 77–
104
Flint, Kate 89–90
Forster, E.M. 126
Foucault, Michel 6–7, 8, 10, 13,
16–22, 30–47, 48–76, 77, 78,
79, 81, 85, 90, 95, l03, l06, 122,
132, 134, 143, 145, 148, 149,
150, 154, 157
Fountaine, Margaret 116
Fowler, Roger 6, 134, 148
Frow, John 19, 50
INDEX 175
Fuss, Diana 102–3
Gardiner, Grace 116
genealogy 35
Gilroy, Paul 108
Gramsci, Antonio 105
Guha, Ranajit 42, 120
Hacking, Ian 26
Hawthorn, Jeremy 4
hegemony 30, 104, 154
Hennessy, Rosemary 46
heterosexuality 86–93
Hindess, Barry 10
Hirst, Paul 10
histoire 5
history 26
Hodge, Robert 134, 148
Hoey, Michael 132, 135, 139
Holmes, Janet 41
Hulme, Peter 105, 106, 117–19,
126
ideology 4, 6, 27, 29–47, 54, 78,
86, 91, 100, 157
imperialism 106, 129
intertextuality 153–5
Jones, Peter 72
Kingsley, Mary 116
Kitzinger Celia 132, 146–7
knowledge 22, 53, 58, 75, l09,
115–16, 122, 132, 146, 149,
152
Kress, Gunther 134, 148
Kristeva, Julia 153–4
Laclau, Ernesto 50
language 42–6, 133
Lawrence T E 119
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176 INDEX
Laws, Sophie 12
Leech, Geoffrey 4
linguistics 9, 10, 131–59
literary texts 73
literary theory 8
literature 22–7
Low, Gail Ching-Liang 124
Lovell, Terry 51
Macdonnell, Diane 10–12, 42, 56,
73
Macey, David 30
Macmillan, Margaret 65
Martin, Biddy 88
Marxist 26, 27, 29–32, 34–6, 38,
39, 42, 54, 59, 60, 78, 134
Matthews Lovering, Kathryn 146
McNay, Lois 77
Mey, Jacob 142
mimicry 124
Moi, Toril 34
Montgomery, Martin 132
Morris, James 108
Morris, Meaghan 78
Mouffe, Chantal 50
non-discursive 54
North, Marianne 116
objects 52
Othering 106–18, 125
Orbach, Susie 83
Palmer, Paulina 87
patriarchy 93, 95
Patton, Paul 36
Pearce, Lynne 103
Pecheux, Michel 10–11, 13–15,
150
political 77, 79–80, l05, 133, 148,
157
political correctness 43, 45
Polo, Marco 119
Porter, Bernard 122
Porter, Dennis 119, 122
post-colonial discourse 10, 105–
30
post-colonial theory 27, 42, 105–
30
postmodern 59
postmodernism 76
post-structuralism 8, 34, 56, 76,
132, 143, 146
Potter, Jonathan 132, 133, 143–7
power l0, 17–20, 36–9, 78, 88, 93–
4, 98, 133, 142, 145, 152, 154
power/knowledge 21–2, 23
Pratt, Mary Louise 53, l05, l08,
115, 116, 121, 126
psychoanalysis 34, 102, 123–9
Quinby, Lee 77
Rabinow, Paul 28, 60–1
race 78–9
racism 9, 44, 108, 133, 143–7
rarefaction 70
real 49–53
Redgrove, Peter 13
repressive hypothesis 19, 37, 39
resistance 42, 116, 128
rhetoric 145–6
Richards, Thomas 109
Said, Edward 105, 106, 107, 108,
113, 116, 117, 119, 120, 126,
129, 130
Sawicki, Jana 77
Searle, John 28, 61
sexism 9, 43–6
Sharpe, Jenny 123
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Short, Michael 4
Showalter, Elaine 69, 81
Shuttle, Penelope 12
Sinclair, John 136, 139, 141, 154
Smith, Dorothy 77, 82, 85, 86, 87,
91–3
social psychology 9, 27, 131–59
Sokal, Alan 72
speech acts 61, 67
Spender, Dale 43–4, 98
Spivak, Gayatri 42, 106, 120
statement 6, 13, 27–8, 32–3, 48,
56, 60–1, 62, 66
Steel, Flora Annie 116
structuralist 8, 49, 75
structures 7, 12, 48–76
Stubbs, Michael 4
subaltern 120
subject 33–5, 42, 102–3
subject-in-crisis 34
Sunderland, Jane 43
Tannen, Deborah 97
Taylor, Charles 26, 50
text 3, 4, 49, 133
INDEX 177
text analysis 3, 133, 140, 157
Thornton, Alice 83
Threadgold, Terry 134
Trew, Tony 134, 148
truth 18–19, 32–3, 66, 69, 84, 146,
158
Valentine, Gill 92
Vetterling-Braggin, Mary 43
Vice, Sue 34
Volosinov, Valentin 11, 159
Walby, Sylvia 93
Wallace, Alfred 117
Walzer, Michael 26
Wetherell, Margaret 132, 133,
143–7
White, Christine 96
Whitehead, Neil 121
Wilkinson, Sue 83, 132, 146–7
will to truth 66–7
Young, Robert 58, 108, 123
Yule, George 138–9