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THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 201

Foucault maintains that within the ‘formalist system’, language is conceived
of as an autonomous structure, with its own laws of construction and application.
The system may be constructed as total—that is to say, all possible specific uses
are embraced by the system’s general concepts, as, for example, in Saussurean or
Derridaean linguistics. Alternatively, the system may be understood in terms of a
set of more partial or particularized concepts, which describe the specific ways in
which language functions. Foucault gives as examples of these latter concepts
the ‘sentence’, the ‘proposition’ and the ‘speech act’, as conceptualized in Anglo-
American discourse analysis. The totalizing and the particularized concepts share
common criteria for specifying language as an analytical object through the
identification of certain uniform and general features. These features are formal
and universal, in that past and future uses of the language system in speech acts
can be determined from the formal concepts. Hence within a formalist theory of
language the conditions of appearance of a particular speech act are explained in
terms of general theoretical concepts, as is the case in Saussure, Barthes, Derrida
and Lacan. In Foucault’s view this approach denies or ignores the historical
specificity of the particular linguistic act and the historical determinations which
may influence its appearance.
Interpretation, which Foucault defines as the second dominant feature of
general theories of language, rests on a methodology which divides up the
written or spoken in terms of the dualism of its ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects.
It assumes that ‘beneath’ the external forms of language there is to be found an
element which is fundamental and determinate in the construction of the
linguistic system. Formalist theories are often implicitly premised on the belief
that something is concealed within language which it is the task of interpretative
analysis to discover and decipher. Foucault maintains that this ‘silent’ level can
be conceived of as ‘sovereign subjectivity’, or the denotative moment (with its
signifier in ‘the real world’) or, in philosophical terms, as the logos of reason.
In both elements of his critique Foucault stresses that the possibility of an
analysis of the particular historical conditions under which individual linguistic
formulations have appeared is ignored or suppressed in these general theories of
language. It is this insistence that language owes the forms of its appearance to
particular and not general conditions which forms the defining principle of
Foucault’s approach. In effect, the consequence of this position is an insistence
that no total, exhaustive account of the domain of language is possible. Equally,
it suggests that there can be no theoretical concepts which delineate language in
general.
In contrast, Foucault insists that, in terms of analysis, it is possible (and
necessary) to isolate a certain level at which, within a historically given moment
or continuum, there exists a radical and marked connection or difference between
individual linguistic elements. Foucault’s basic concern, particularly in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, is to conceptualize the way in which certain of these
elements, referred to as statements, are linked by a coherence to form and define
a distinct field of objects (for example, ‘madness’, ‘illness’, ‘criminality’), a