Page 216 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 205

subject positions will be dependent on the overall state of the discursive field,
together with the structure of related practices and apparatuses in any given
historical instance. Although Foucault’s theory of discourse analysis does
necessarily rely on a series of methodological and theoretical protocols, it is
defined against the notion of a general theory of language and subjectivity, which
is the principal focus of the other theorists we have examined. Foucault’s mode
of analysis is consistently historical in a sense that, for example, Freud’s,
Lacan’s or Saussure’s is not. For Foucault concepts are formulated in relation to
the analysis of a historically specific object or continuity— they are not the
formally derived concepts of a general system or theory.
Further, his theory of discourse analysis alerts us to the specificity of power
relations within a particular practice or institutional site. In his critique of
particular variants of Marxism Foucault insists that the conditions of possibility
for the emergence of a particular discursive practice, together with the power
relations which are integral to it, are not derived from any single or primary
cause. We cannot, for example, ‘read through’ the structure of the field of
medical discourses, or discourses addressing sexuality (that is, their particular
manifestations of subjectivity, and the organization of their linguistic statements)
to any single contradiction at the level of the mode of production. Foucault’s
understanding of discourse analysis, though it implies attention to
particularization and specificity, is not a methodology which excludes the
possibility of tracing articulations and effects from one discourse to another or
examining the relation of specific discourses to other social and cultural practices
and institutions. An attempt to locate the conditions of formation for the
emergence of a particular discursive practice would, for Foucault, involve an
examination of the overall state of the discursive field in its relation to other
practices and institutional sites, rather than a search for the causal and
determinate relation between the constitution of a discourse and the ‘basic’
political and economic class contradictions.
However, despite certain real advantages to be gained from the use of
Foucauldian concepts in historically specific analyses, his theory of discourse
analysis does present major difficulties which have particular implications for an
adequate theory (and a politics) of the role of language and subjectivity in
ideologies. First, we would insist that, despite Foucault’s general protocols for
defining a discursive practice, it nonetheless remains unclear how the boundaries
or parameters of a discourse are delimited and, more specifically, how a given
body of statements are assigned a place within a particular discursive practice.
Thus discursive analysis seems most pertinent in examining those bodies of
knowledge which are relatively tightly defined as theoretical disciplines (for
example, medicine, psychoanalysis, political economy) and where there is little
possibility of statements remaining ambiguous in relation to their discursive
location. Yet even here we may be in danger of merely taking over and
reproducing the traditionally defined boundaries of a consistent body of
knowledge rather than reading for any underlying problematic. The problems