Page 217 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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become acute if the terrain of analysis is shifted to include written or verbal
statements which do not clearly belong to a discursive practice—for example,
statements which are formulated within the field of popular culture, common
sense and so on— and which may in fact be the matrix or point of condensation
of a number of social and cultural practices—linguistic, educational, familial,
religious. In such an instance a theory of discourse analysis presents itself as
rather too ‘pure’ to address the multi-accentuality of statements within what
Laclau, in a different though related context, has referred to as ‘popular
ideological discourse’. 37
A similar set of problems is raised by the more general question of the
relationship between a Foucauldian understanding of the discursive and the ‘non-
discursive’. There is a sense in which Foucault’s specifications for the
constitution of discursive practices can tend to produce a type of ‘history from
above’: that is, a history of ‘official’ practices, institutional sites and academic
bodies of knowledge, which are understood to be operational without the
possibilities of struggle and contestation. Foucault is insistent that ‘where there is
power there is resistance’, in that resistances ‘are the odd term in relations of
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power’ within a discursive formation. Further, at points in his historical
analyses, particularly in Discipline and Punish, Foucault does attempt to trace
the effectivity of popular and localized points of resistance to traditional forms of
the exercise of power in influencing the formation of the new penal code
(particularly in the account of the spontaneous resistances to the power of the
king at public hangings and executions). However, the point of focus specified
by discourse analysis—that is, the regularity of its organization and its field of
effects—tends to militate against any examination of the interrelation between
the emergence and continuity of a discourse and forms of resistance, struggle and
contestation. We still need a more complex model for conceptualizing the
possible field of relations and effects between the discursive and the non-
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discursive, which holds, in something of the Gramscian sense, to an
understanding of the continual formation and recomposition of power relations in
a process of struggle.
Finally, Foucault’s understanding of discursive subject positions can lead to the
assumption that discourse constructs passive and unresisting subjects, who are
only interpellated within the discursive realm. It presupposes a neat and
functional relation between the empty discursive subject positions and the
individuals who occupy them, rather than allowing for the possibility of
resistances to those subject constructions, which could draw on a history of
previous interpellations from other discursive or non-discursive social and
cultural practices. There are, for example, moments in Discipline and Punish
where Foucault’s theory of discursive subjectivity has many of the same problems
as ‘labelling theory’ in the sociology of deviance or Althusser’s theory of
‘subjectification’ in the essay ‘On Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. 40
Subjects are ‘automatically’ assumed to consent to their subjugation: