Page 213 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

202 LANGUAGE

particular repertoire of concepts, a specific ‘regime of truth’ (that is, what can be
said and what must be left unsaid) and a definite set of subject positions. Such
coherent formations are defined by Foucault as discursive practices. He
maintains that the coherence of a specific body of statements constituting a
particular discourse is governed and defined by the principle of regularity. This
is emphatically not a regularity based on formal rules of construction—a formal
understanding of regularity would imply an idealist, self-generating structure.
Regularity in the Foucauldian sense attempts to account for the ways in which
statements are combined and coexist under determinate historical conditions. It
attempts to define the conditions of formation under which specific types of
statements are consistently distributed and dispersed over a given series of places
within the discursive field.
In similar terms, Foucault’s understanding of the position occupied by subjects
within language and discourse marks a quite radical departure from the
theorization of subjectivity in the linguistic, semiological and psychoanalytic
traditions. As we have indicated, those respective traditions all rely on a general
theory of the subject in relation to language which forms the basis for the
analysis of individual speech acts. Though the understanding of the way in which
subjects are positioned within language varies considerably across the different
problematics (for example, a conscious, active subjectivity in the culturalist
tradition, as opposed to a psychoanalytic approach in Freud and Lacan), all these
theoretical traditions attempt to construct general principles of subjectivity and
language which are assumed to remain constant over time and across cultures.
Foucault’s approach, in contrast, again emphasizes the historical specificity of
the positions occupied by subjects within particular discursive practices, the
historical conditions of their appearance and their relation to the body of
linguistic statements which constitute a discourse.
As is the case with Foucault’s remarks on language, it is difficult to ‘abstract
out’ any general theory of subjectivity, or the subject from a mode of analysis,
which is directed principally against the construction of general theoretical or
universalist concepts. Foucault’s most significant statements on the position
occupied by subjects within discourse are to be found in the practical historical
analysis of the emergence and constitution of particular discursive practices: that
is, primarily in his analysis of the shifts in the organization of punitive systems in
25
Discipline and Punish and his work on an investigation of ‘modern’ sexuality
in The History of Sexuality. However, it still remains important to distinguish
26
the principal features of Foucault’s understanding of ‘subjectivity’ and to locate
the nature of his theoretical differences from the earlier traditions we have
examined.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault acknowledges the recent part
played by psychoanalysis and linguistics in the deconstruction of active and
sovereign subjectivity, ‘in relation to the laws of…desire, the forms of…
language, the rules of…action…sexuality and…[the] unconscious…’. 27
Moreover, he insists that a specific discursive practice provides a number of