Page 77 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

that flow from them so that, he argues, the central task for contemporary cultural
studies is to learn how to live with difference as manifested in various forms of
cultural identity. Hence the concern with the cultural politics of race, gender,
54 sexuality etc.
Links Anti-essentialism, différance, identity, poststructuralism, structuralism

Discourse The routine day-to-day usage of the term discourse simply refers to a stretch
of text or spoken utterances that cohere into a meaningful exposition. However,
cultural studies practitioners are, more often than not, using the concept of
discourse in a more technical way that derives from the work of the historian and
philosopher Foucault. Here, discourse is said to ‘unite’ language and practice and
refers to regulated ways of speaking about a subject through which objects and
practices acquire meaning. The production of knowledge through language that
gives meaning to material objects and social practices we may call discursive
practice.
Foucault is determinedly historical in his insistence that language develops and
generates meaning under specific material and historical conditions. He explores
the particular and determinate historical conditions under which statements are
combined and regulated to form and define a distinct field of knowledge/objects
requiring a particular set of concepts and delimiting a specific ‘regime of truth’ (that
is, what counts as truth). Foucault attempts to identify the historical conditions and
determining rules of formation of regulated ways of speaking about objects that he
calls a discourse.
Foucault argued that discourse regulates not only what can be said under
determinate social and cultural conditions but also who can speak, when and
where. Here, through the operation of power in social practice, meanings are
temporarily stabilized or regulated. Repeated motifs or clusters of ideas, practices
and forms of knowledge across a range of sites of activity constitute a discursive
formation. This is a pattern of discursive events that refer to, or bring into being,
a common object across a number of sites. They are regulated maps of meaning or
ways of speaking through which objects and practices acquire significance. For
example, Foucault’s study of discourses of madness included:

• Statements about madness which give us knowledge concerning madness.
• The rules which prescribe what is ‘sayable’ or ‘thinkable’ about madness.
• Subjects who personify the discourses of madness, that is, the ‘madman’.
• The processes by which discourses of madness acquire authority and truth at a
given historical moment.
• The practices within institutions which deal with madness.
• The idea that different discourses about madness will appear at later historical
moments producing new knowledge and a new discursive formation.

Discourse is not a neutral medium for the formation and transfer of values,
meanings and knowledge that exist beyond its boundaries, rather, it is