MICHEL FOUCAULT'S THEORISATION OF 'DISCOURSE'

In what ways has Michel Foucault's theorisation of 'discourse' forced art history to re-invent itself?

In what ways has Michel Foucault's theorization of 'discourse' forced art history to re-invent itself?

Introduction

Discourse analysis is a flexible term. What one is doing is greatly dependent on the epistemological framework being drawn upon. It seems that numerous scholars using discourse analysis inside a Foucauldian framework have taken up a 'Foucauldianistic' reticence to affirm procedure, fearful possibly of the ascribe of being prescriptive. There are those afresh who make quotations to 'doing' discourse analysis and because they roughly connection their analysis to motifs of power and sporadically cite Foucault, there is an assumption that this too is 'Foucauldian' discourse analysis. In any case, it is rather tough to find logical descriptions of how one might proceed about discourse analysis utilizing Foucault. Perhaps the adversity in pin pointing concise descriptions as to how to proceed about managing 'Foucauldian' discourse analysis is because there is no such thing (Allan, 2004, 417).

 

Discussion and Analysis

 

In Taylor's (2004) consideration, distinction is made between two advances to discourse analysis. This is principally between Critical Discourse Analysis which sketches inferences from functional and linguistic characteristics in texts and discourse analysis acquainted by the work of Foucault. The distinction between the previous, which Taylor (2004: 435) recounts as giving “close vigilance to the linguistic characteristics of texts” and the last cited, recounted as “those which manage not”, is possibly more convoluted than this (see consideration in Wetherall, 2001: 391-393). For a start, there are more than these two advances to discourse analysis and other epistemological frameworks announce them (Wetherall, Taylor, & Yates, 2001, 88).

Perhaps the widespread gist between investigates in the last cited assembly is not Foucault at all but rather than a post structural sensibility which is born of a “theorizing that rests upon complexity, doubt and question and upon a reflexivity about its own output and its assertions to information about the social” (Ball, 1995: 269). The distinction between CDA and post structural theoretical advances (using Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard amidst others) to discourse analysis may be discovered in the attribute eschewing of assertions to objectivity and reality by those in the last cited tradition; for, as Edwards and Nicoll (2001: 105) issue out, “the assertion to reality can itself be glimpsed as a mighty rhetorical practice.” Additionally, Humes and Bryce (original focus, 2003: 180) talk to the poststructuralist esteem for doubt and the leverage of key thinkers for example Derrida when they contend that, “the seek for clarity and ease of significance is glimpsed as illusory because there will habitually be other perspectives from which to understand the material under review.

To request a definitive account is, therefore, a misguided undertaking.” As such, discourse analysis acquainted by Foucauldian or other post structural idea endeavors to bypass the substitution of one 'truth' for another, identifying that “there can be no universal realities or unconditional ethical places [and ...