Page 36 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Foucault, in whose work one finds an even more radical attempt to break with
any model of a hierarchy of determining factors through the concept of
‘discursive practices’. Foucault’s name must be taken here as ‘personifying’ a
whole set of theoretical developments based on the critique of the early models of
language promulgated in the first phase of semiotic theory and structural
linguistics. In his notion of ‘discourse’ Foucault goes some way to breaking
down the dichotomy, which most other positions appear to retain in some form,
between the signifying (‘discursive’) and the ‘extra-discursive’ aspects of any
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practice. This work privileges, but in a new way, the study of textual archives
and the sites through which the ‘discursive’ practices of a society are constructed.
His analysis of the practices of sexuality or of punishment examines the rules and
regularities through which, at different moments, the objects of these practices
are formulated and elaborated. Foucault, following the lead of Lévi-Strauss,
though in a very different way, directs attention to the internal relations and
regularities of any field of knowledge. He remains agnostic about their general
determining conditions and about their ‘truth’. He examines them largely from a
‘topographical’ or genealogical vantage point— studying their arrangement,
their disposition, their interventions on each other, their articulation and
transformation. This, once again, skirts the difficult question of determination,
but it has provided the basis for extensive, concrete studies of different fields of
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knowledge and practice. He has helped further to break down that dichotomy
between social practices and the ways they are represented in ideologies, in
discourse and in particular regimes of knowledge. He has opened up again the
problem of ‘representation’ itself, on which so many theories of ideology and
symbolic representation have been based.
We have deliberately not attempted here to resume the entire theoretical
spectrum of the Centre’s recent work in this period. We have referenced some
major turning-points through a selection of representative instances. This
abbreviated account should not be taken as marking a steady and unified ‘long
march’ through the theoretical continents. Different theorists and positions
outlined above have been more or less influential in different areas of the
Centre’s work. While maintaining a consistent level of debate and discussion
about and between them, a certain theoretical ‘pluralism’ has been both
necessary and inevitable. Thus, to give an example: the Centre’s work on
language (see below) explored very fully the post-Saussure critique of semiotic
models and has worked fairly consistently on terrain staked out by Derrida,
Foucault, Kristeva, the ‘Tel Quel’ group and Lacanian psychoanalysis (the
contribution to this volume amply demonstrates this in detail). By contrast the
media group has been critical of the ‘autonomy’ it saw implied in those positions
and the universalism entailed by the revisions of psychoanalysis advanced by
Lacan (see below). Despite these real differences in theoretical perspective, the
two groups have learned much from each other. Another example: analysis in the
Work Group has always retained an earlier stress on the importance of
observational methods and the accounts actors give of their experience: