A Dangerous Benefit:

Dialogue, Discourse, and

Michel Foucault’s Critique of Representation

CHARLES W. BINGHAM
Simon Fraser University

ABSTRACT: Dialogue has been analyzed by educational theorists

mainly from a perspective of representation. However, social
theory on language has long questioned whether representation is
the primary function of language. Thus, educational debates over
the uses and abuses of dialogue entail a blind spot. What if
dialogue works in ways that are not representational? What if
dialogue is, rather, to be understood as both representation and
discourse? In this article, the author argues that dialogue must be
understood in both ways. As such, dialogue may be a
representational benefit, but it is also a discursive danger.

KEYWORDS: Discourse, philosophy of language, Michel Foucault,

educational dialogue, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Educational theorizing of dialogue stands to benefit from the linguistic

turn to discourse so crucial to social theory over the past three decades.1
What I mean is that dialogue “across difference,” “communicative
dialogue,” “dialogue in teaching” – these various forms of educational
dialogue are linguistic acts (Burbules, 1993; Burbules & Rice, 1991;
Ellsworth, 1989; 1997). They will thus gain from an analysis that
considers not only the virtues, or power relations, or intersubjectivity of
speakers, but also the contradictory discursive roles that language
serves when people have dialogue. This essay looks at Michel Foucault’s
linguistics of discourse and applies it to educational dialogue. While
indeed the benefits and detriments of educational dialogue have been
richly considered, discussion has centered around the benefits or
detriments of representational dialogue with little attention being paid
to conversation as discourse. A lack of consideration of the discursive
nature of conversation has contributed to argumentative impasses over
the limits of dialogue (Jones, 1999). Taking into account language as

Interchange, Vol. 33/4, 351-369, 2002.

©Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
352 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

discourse as well as representation, the limits of dialogue can be more

richly conceptualized. These limits can be opened up into spaces for
further political and ethical work when human difference and social
power get articulated within educational dialogue.
The impasses mentioned above can be formulated as follows: On one
hand, educational theorists like Nicholas Burbules have argued that
dialogue across differences is beneficial:
Emphasizing the primacy of the dialogical relation, and situating
that relation in the web of social relations within which we feel,
perceive, and act toward one another, forces us to reconsider the
pedagogical problem of fostering dialogue as a social and political
problem, challenging the institutional and ideological contexts that
impede dialogue, and changing them, or at least creating
sustainable alternatives to them. (1993, p. 45)
Following this normative conception of the dialogical relation, dialogue
between people is a goal that deserves to be pursued. And if there are
barriers to dialogue, especially if these barriers are institutional or
ideological, then those barriers need to be broken down and changed
(Habermas, 1986). On the other hand critics like Elizabeth Ellsworth
have argued that communicative dialogue, by its very nature, is
reductive, that the sort of dialogue Burbules wants to foster is itself rife
with exclusivity (1989; 1997). Recently, Alison Jones (1999) has added
a salient addition to the case against dialogue-making as a normative
framework. As Jones points out, dialogue between white students and
students of color can serve to make white students feel better about all
they have learned about “the other,” while the same dialogue neither
creates the circumstances for social change nor benefits the students of
color about whom the white students are learning. As Jones shows, the
limits of educational dialogue are profound. Between advocates of
dialogue and its detractors, the impasse is real. Also at the point of this
impasse, dialogue goes unchallenged as representation.
In this paper I will use Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse to
provide a scaffolding for the way we think about dialogue.2 My
argument will follow these lines: First, I show how educational
discussions have considered conversation largely from the perspective
of dialogue as representation. Then, I will note how critiques of
educational dialogue, while salient, have remained within the
representational perspective on dialogue. I will next detail a model of
dialogue based on Michel Foucault’s understanding of language as
discourse. Foucault’s understanding of dialogue as discourse is a needed
addition to any project of dialogue in education. Because educational
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 353

institutions are places where raced, gendered, classed, and sexed

representations of self are necessary for social gains and personal
agency in spite of the fact that the very act of representing tends to
occlude the workings of power and oppression, Foucault’s position
contributes to a vigilant and educationally productive sensibility for
intersubjective dialogue. Foucault shows that dialogue is a dangerous
benefit.
This essay will be sustained by linguistic pragmatism. By that I
mean that I do not claim to know the true nature of language, but I do
claim that if the nature of language has some truth worth pursuing,
then that truth will rest in its usefulness. The problem with the last
decade and a half’s educational debates over conversation is that they
have naturalized a representational understanding of dialogue that is
limited in its usefulness. Educational debates on conversation have,
either unwittingly or wittingly, assumed a theory of conversing wherein
what interlocutors say is representative of individual states of mind or
habits of being. But conversation need not be construed as
representational dialogue. If a representational understanding of
dialogue is not “an idea upon which we can ride,” to borrow William
James’s phrase, then the representational model needs to be
supplemented with another (1948, p. 148). As Foucault’s work on
language has shown, there are other ways to think about dialogue than
as a representational activity. One of these other ways is to consider
dialogue as discourse. Later in this paper I will flesh out Foucault’s
notion of discourse. For now, I will point out how a representational
understanding of dialogue has been assumed within recent arguments
of educational theorists.
The representational understanding of language stems from a
modernist hierarchy that prioritizes the thing itself over its linguistic
manifestation. According to this hierarchy, words are windows onto
things. Words are important insofar as they represent things, but things
are what really count. Language is on a different plane than that which
they describe. Foucault describes this two-plane perspective as the “idea
that words are wind, an eternal whisper, a beating of wings that one has
difficulty in hearing in the serious matter of history” (1972a, p. 209).
The representational understanding of language has what language
philosopher John Stewart calls a “two-world” commitment. Language is
part of one World B while the rest of reality is part of World A (Stewart,
1995). Following the representative model of language, there is an
ontological distinction between words and things, between words and
people, between words and states of mind. Words take back-stage to real
354 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

matters of history and experience. A word is a representation, and not

a part, of reality. The logic of conversation as representational dialogue
is imbedded in recent accounts conversation across difference.
Interestingly, both proponents of conversation across difference and
critics of such dialogue betray representational assumptions.
On one hand, proponents of dialogue take up the normative
standpoint that dialogue is, at one of its most beneficial moments, a way
to have voice. That is to say, dialogue is a means for representing one’s
point of view, one’s experience, one’s beliefs, one’s thoughts, one’s habits.
Advocating dialogue and “communicative virtues” that support dialogue,
Nicholas Burbules and Suzanne Rice point out their “concern with
promoting contexts in which marginalized group members can have a
‘voice’ – and be listened to” (1993, p. 40). In this take on dialogue,
language between communicants is conceptualized as a way to reveal
who one is, to reveal how one thinks and experiences the world.
Language as voice serves to clarify one’s standpoint, but it is not the
same as one’s standpoint. Language signifies, but is not the same as,
human experience. For example, “In its purest forms dialogue becomes
intrinsic; we are carried forward in the dynamic of the to-and-fro
movement without any particular goal or end point” (Burbules, 1993, p.
50). The notion that dialogue can have a purest form points to the
representational commitments to language inherent in much
educational theorizing of dialogue. According to such a description,
dialogue is different than other human experiences (of World A). Could
a (World A) human experience be more or less pure? Can one do walking
that is more or less pure, or hand-shaking that is more or less pure?
Language is assumed to be ontologically distinct from experience. It
represents human conditions and can therefore be more or less distorted.
Critiques of communication across difference have also stayed
largely within a representational model of dialogue. Recently, Alison
Jones has pointed out the “limits of cross-cultural dialogue” (1999). In
a rich critique of the liberal demand to know the other, Jones shows how
dialogue has its limits because there are times when it is not
appropriate for one to know the other. As her classroom experience
illustrates, especially when it comes to the demands of white students
to know and understand marginalized students, it is often the case that
dialogue simply promulgates the colonizing habits that whites have
shown all over the anthropologized world: Give me direct knowledge so
that I can experience things from your perspective and thus absolve
myself from the guilt of ignorance. Explains Jones, “the problem with
empathetic knowing (and perhaps its attraction) is its offer to save us
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 355

from considering our own systematic complicity (both individually and

collectively) in racial inequality” (p. 313). Significantly, while Jones
claims to link her own critique of dialogue in the multiethnic classroom
with postructuralist “calls to Western intellectuals and researchers to
abandon the myths of representational clarity and total accessibility to
the other,” her salient insight into white demands to know the other
serves instead to reiterate the commonplace modernist assumption that
language really is a matter of representation (p. 315). For Jones casts
“a gracious acceptance of not having to know the other” as a matter of
the limits of the usefulness of dialogue (p. 316). That is, dialogue is still
positioned as the representational process by which one comes to know
the other. Casting interethnic communication in terms of one person
learning from the representations of another, knowing the other is to be
abandoned by imposing a limit on representational dialogue. Dialogue,
a practice based on the myths of representation, is to be abandoned not
because language does not represent, but because individuals
sometimes need to abandon the problematic practice of representational
dialogue. The representational nature of dialogue is not questioned; it
is rather abandoned in tact.
Elizabeth Ellsworth’s widely read critiques of communicative
dialogue likewise provide incisive examples of the limits of educational
talk all the while remaining squarely within a representational
perspective. For Ellsworth, the main problem with communicative
dialogue is not that it represents, but that it does not represent
sufficiently. Communicative dialogue takes place mainly with “an
enforcement of rationalism” that fails to account for discontinuities,
ruptures, incommensurable experiences (1989, p. 43). It does not
adequately represent the effects of desire, power, and the unconscious.
As Ellsworth points out,
Conventional notions of dialogue and democracy assume
rationalized, individualized subjects capable of agreeing on
universalizable ‘fundamental moral principles’ and ‘quality of
human life’ that become self-evident when subjects cease to be self-
interested and particularistic about group rights. Yet social agents
are not capable of being fully rational and disinterested; and they
are subjects split between the conscious and unconscious and
among multiple social positionings. (1989, p. 60).
For Ellsworth, the rationalistic, scientistic bias of liberal dialogue fails
to capture the movements of misunderstanding, unconscious action, and
divergence of experience. There is a disjuncture between the
assumptions that guide dialogue and democracy, and the intersubjective
356 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

excesses of social oppressions. Ellsworth’s critique is right on the mark

as it points to the general limits of communicative dialogue. But it
refrains from questioning dialogue as a representational activity. One
is left with the feeling that if communicative dialogue could just take
into account rupture, then it would be more successful. If dialogue could
account for, or at least expect, the intersubjective effects of power and
the unconscious, then it would be useful. The problem about
communicative dialogue stems from a problem of coverage – it does not
cover enough. During communicative dialogue, “What gets erased and
denied, and at what cost?” (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 45). Communicative
dialogue works in favor of rationality and consciousness to the
suppression of “the unconscious, desire, conflict, uncertainty, dispute,
ambiguity” (p. 91). These other matters are simply not represented.
Communicative dialogue does not represent enough.
Interestingly, Ellsworth’s more recent work does mention the
representational qualities of dialogue. Assailing communicative
dialogue, she takes up “the mantra that reality can’t be reflected
directly through language” (1997, p. 76). But Ellsworth’s recent critique
does not investigate the workings of representation; she rather jettison
dialogue as representation wholesale because language cannot reflect
reality. By such a complete rejection, conversation as representation is
once again naturalized, as if we know how linguistic representation
would work if it could. It simply cannot.
Critics of educational dialogue thus use general postmodern meta-
critiques of representation to assail dialogue without taking into
account the more nuanced discursive positions advanced by language
theorists such as Foucault. When it comes to conversation between
participants, a general (non-linguistic) postmodern critique of
representation does not offer a sharp enough tool for unpacking the at-
stakes of conversation. A meta-postmodern critique of representation
questions whether knowledge of the other, or knowledge of the self, can
be represented during social interaction. Such a general critique of
representation takes the grand narrative of postmodernism – the
narrative that difference reigns – and maps it back onto the specific
territory of social dialogue. It goes like this: Because representation has
been proved invalid, dialogue’s usefulness has its limits. Since dialogue
is used to represent diverse feelings, attitudes, dispositions, and
experiences, and since such diversity is not always representable,
dialogue is not so good. The postmodern reign of difference means that
dialogue is not so useful.
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 357

A sharper tool for investigating educational dialogue is found in

Foucault’s linguistically inspired critique of representation. When we
speak of dialogue, we are, after all, speaking of language. What does a
postmodern crisis of representation mean for language between
speakers? What does a crisis of representation mean for the educational
practice of social dialogue? To move these questions onto terrain
theorized by Foucault, what does it mean to move from educational
dialogue to educational discourse?

Foucault and Discourse

Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse, that is, his attack on
philosophies of language-as-representation, is articulated in his College
de France essay of 1970, “The Discourse on Language.” In this work,
Foucault limns his conception of discourse, asserting that language
takes on various active roles, that language is palpable enough that it
needs to be the subject of extensive theorizing, and that language
resides on the same ontological plane as the rest of reality insofar as
language manipulates, as well as serves, the social order. In short,
discourse has as its role “to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier”
(1972b, p. 229). Discourse looks to end the reign of representational
models of language that privilege the hierarchical correspondence
between word and thing, between signifier and referent. The signifier
will not be so privileged in discursive theorizing.
The first task of de-privileging “the sovereignty of the signifier”
rests in establishing a thicker, more palpable zone of inquiry on the
word side of the word/thing pair. For Foucault, the word is not on a
different, more innocent ontological plane than things and ideas. Words
do not serve as windows onto things, but are instead active participants
in the world. Discourse works and acts. It contains contradictions and
world-effects just as other material aspects of this world do, just as
people do. Language-as-discourse has bandwidth; it is not a thin glass
pane. Describing discourse, Foucault notes that there are “barely
imaginable powers and dangers behind this activity, however humdrum
and gray it may seem” (1972b, p. 216). Within discourse, there are
“conflicts, triumphs, injuries, dominations and enslavements that lie
behind [the] words, even when long use has chipped away their rough
edges” (p. 216). Discourse does work that may include, but also far out
steps, the role of signifying. As such, language use such as dialogue
cannot be taken solely as an innocuous activity of representation.
Language is a site of where ideology, power, and representation are
358 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

contested. Language and conversation have “ponderous, awesome

materiality” (p. 216). Elaborating on his assertion that language has
materiality in the world, Foucault describes the work that even
representational models of language do. Representative language is part
of a larger discursive regime; it has discursive purposes other than
signifying the meanings, intentions, and perspectives of individuals.
Representational language has been put to work by the philosophical
themes of “the founding subject,” of “originating experience,” and of
“universal mediation” (pp. 228, 229). By these three humanistic,
Hegelian themes, language and dialogue is required to be a window onto
the more important business of being a human subject. Language is not
already there as representation; it is rather discursively employed as
representation to shore up three great themes of modernity. A
representational account of language has a symbiotic relationship with
the founding subject, originating experience, and universal mediation
insofar as language-as-window-onto-the-world helps these three themes
to make sense, and in turn the three themes help to consolidate the
window account of language. The three themes do not prove that
language is representation; they depend upon and shore up the
discursive mode of language as representation.
Discussing the interrelationship between “the founding subject” and
the reign of language’s representing role, Foucault explains,
The task of the founding subject is to animate the empty forms of
language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of
empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within
them …. In this relationship with meaning, the founding subject
has signs, marks, tracks, letters at his disposal. But he does not
need to demonstrate these passing through the singular instance
of discourse. (1972b, p. 227)
The theme of experience “plays an analogous role. Thus, a primary
complicity with the world founds, for us, a possibility of speaking of
experience, in it, to designate and name it, to judge it and, finally, to
know it in the form of truth” (Foucault, 1972b, p. 228). Also, mediation
calls upon language to act as symbol without materiality. That is,
language can be a buffer because it lacks materiality. Three
longstanding themes of modernity call upon language to act
referentially but not discursively.
Foucault unpacks representation carefully, and it is this same care
that an analysis of educational dialogue can benefit from. By careful
unpacking, I mean that Foucault is not simply out to show that
language is discursive, and that we should therefore jettison
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 359

representational sensibilities as unproductive. He is also interested in

the workings of representation because representation is discursively
situated as a prominent mode of language whether or not we agree with
a representational ‘order of things.’ For instance, when Foucault points
to “originating experience” as a cog in the representational order of
things, he is well aware that representation of human experience is, and
will continue to be, a crucial at-stake when it comes to political
movements and social change. Foucault’s own political participation in
Tunisia and during the Paris uprisings during and after 1968 are a
testament to Foucault’s awareness that political change must
sometimes be founded on experience and on a group’s demand for
recognition (Eribon, 1991, p. 193ff). Identifying the link between
prominent modern themes and representation is not undertaken in
order to follow the reductive logic of: Language is discursive and not
representative; therefore, modern themes that employ and validate
representative models – themes such as subjecthood, experience, and
mediation – these themes must be abandoned together with
representation. Foucault rather takes care to unpack the links between
modern themes and symbolic language because these links themselves
constitute a discourse that needs to be interrogated qua discourse.
Representation is itself “only another discourse already in operation”
(Foucault, 1972b, p. 228). To omit an investigation into representational
language, whether that omission is grounded in normative valuation or
postmodern dismissal, is to leave important discursive work unfinished.
Problematically, Foucault’s investigation uncovers that
representational models of language tend to cloak the very sort of
discursive investigation that he wants to inaugurate! One of the main
incapacities of representational sensibilities is that such sensibilities
tend to make imperceptible the discursive workings of desire and power.
Under the reign of the signifier, “discourse nullifies itself” (Foucault,
1972b, p. 228). It becomes hidden, “placing itself at the disposal of the
signifier” (p. 228). In a representational order of things, “discourse,
liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable
of recognizing the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth,
having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks
to reveal cannot fail to mask it” (p. 219). When language serves as a
system of revelation rather than a system of operation, when the terrain
of discourse is thinned down to a plate of showing-through rather than
a space of working-out, then the “ponderous, awesome materiality” of
discourse is hidden. This is Foucault’s main concern during this early
investigation into discourse: Representation is not only another way of
360 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

thinking about language. It is a way of thinking about language that

hides the fact that language works in other, less innocuous, discursive
ways.
In addition to the nullifying effects of a representational order of
things, Foucault maps out two main discursive ways of thinking about
language, the “critical” and the “genealogical.” A critical analysis of
discourse looks into the ways that language and conversation set up
boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, the ways that speakers and their
speech, as well as writers and their texts, are positioned “within the
true” (1972b, p. 224). Throughout Foucault’s oeuvre, examples of critical
discourse analysis point to the ways that language has a delimiting role,
categorizing what is available to be said and by whom. For example, in
The Order of Things, Foucault describes the disciplinary boundaries of
philology, natural history, and political economy (1970). These social
sciences exemplify the delimiting work of discourse. A critical analysis
such as this brings to light “principles of rarefaction, consolidation and
unification in discourse” (Foucault, 1972b, p. 233). It attempts “to mark
out and distinguish the principles of ordering, expulsion and rarity in
discourse” (p. 234). Later on, in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Foucault
points to the discourse of “Bio-Power” that works to consolidate clinical
descriptions of human acts (1980). Thus in the 19th century, the category
of homosexual is reified, consolidated, ordered, and maintained within
a complex of discursive practices such as psychology, psychoanalysis,
and medicine. Whole categories of humanity are in fact sustained
through the codifying practices of discourse.3
On the genealogical side, Foucault is more concerned with the way
that certain forms of discourse get invested by power. “The difference
between the critical and the genealogical enterprise is not one of object
or field, but of point of attack, perspective” (1972b, p. 233). Foucault’s
genealogical investigation into discourse is, following Nietzsche, is
concerned with a history of effects rather than a history of causes. It is
a concern over Entstehung rather than Ursprung (Foucault, 1984;
Nietzsche, 1967). For example, in Foucault’s genealogical investigation
of pastoral power, he highlights the ways in which the practice of
“telling the truth about one’s inner self” is first invested with religious
significance, and then, with the eclipse of Christianity in the West, is in
turn invested with social-scientific significance with the emergence of
psycho-therapeutic models of the “talking cure” (Foucault, 1980). A
genealogical analysis centers on the ways that discursive practices (such
as truth-telling) become employed by various regimes of power. Rather
than analyzing how discourse patrols its borders and orders what can
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 361

be said, genealogy investigates how already-established borders of

discourse get subjected to investment and control. As Foucault puts it,
“genealogical description must take into account the limits at play
within real formations” (1972b, p. 233). Existing linguistic practices
must be analyzed according the power invested in them by various
forms of power.
Before pointing to the implications of Foucault’s discursive analysis
for educational theorizing of dialogue, I will sum up what has been said
so far. Educational theorizing on dialogue is marked by postmodern
arguments against communicative dialogue on the one side and
normative arguments for dialogue on the other. Notably, both sides of
this argument treat conversation as dialogue, that is, they rely largely
on representational understandings of interlocution. Conversation is
posited as a way that individuals represent their feelings, experiences,
and understandings to other individuals. Even when critics assail
dialogue based on a postmodern “crisis of representation,” the notion of
representation is not analyzed at a linguistic level. Instead, a general
notion of the crisis, the notion that people cannot be adequately
represented to one another, is used to critique dialogue (dialogue as
already representational) without looking into the representational
commitments of language. Augmenting these debates that remain
within the space of representation, Foucault’s discursive analysis of
language reminds us that language is not so well-defined, that language
has “ponderous, awesome materiality,” and that representation is one
linguistic mode among others, one that shores up major philosophical
problematics such as the theme of human experience (1972b, p. 216).
One severe drawback of representation is that it tends to obscure the
effects of desire and power. Furthermore, Foucault points out that
discourse must be analyzed both critically and genealogically. Critique
identifies the exclusions and inclusions of discourse while genealogy
tracks the way that discourse is infused with power.

From Normativity to Genealogical Skepticism:

Toward a Crisis of Dialogue
What Foucault’s analysis of representation, together with the
educational critiques that I have outlined so far, point to first and
foremost is the importance of abandoning a normative framework for
educational dialogue. Unlike in the Habermasian ideal, dialogue cannot
be a standard by which to judge non-normative forces such as
institutional power, materialist power, and psychic interference
362 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

(Habermas, 1972). For, language is itself is a site of power. To borrow

a phrase from Hans-Georg Gadamer that dovetails with Foucault’s
discursive understanding of language, even though Gadamer has not
proven himself to be much concerned with social change as has
Foucault, “there is no social reality, with all its concrete forces, that
does not bring itself to representations in a consciousness that is
linguistically articulated. Reality does not happen ‘behind the back’ of
language” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 292). Dialogue is not as innocent as a
representational understanding indicates. Even if it is difficult to get
away from a framework of innocence from within representation; even
if conversation seems, primarily, to convey feelings, experiences, and
attitudes; even if assailing conversation seems akin to assailing people
themselves; even if common sense notions of dialogue affirm that
dialogue is a good thing; even so, it must be recognized that dialogue
carries with it the baggage of the reign of the signifier.4 While Foucault
is concerned that “at the heart of the problem of truth there is
ultimately a problem of communication, of the transparency of the
words of a discourse,” he is skeptical about the Habermasian project of
making this transparency power-free (Foucault, 1994a, p. 297). As
Foucault notes, “the idea that there could exist a state of communication
that would allow games of truth to circulate freely, without any
constraints or coercive effects, seems utopian to me” (1994a, p. 298).
Dialogue cannot be a normative goal because it will always be
ponderous and awesome, always rife with effects.
But Foucault’s project differs quite a bit from projects that either
recommend a wholesale abandonment of dialogue or that find concrete
limits to dialogue. His project also differs from a general critique of
dialogue based on the postmodern meta-narrative of a “crisis of
representation.” For Foucault, the crisis of representation is far from a
wholesale abandonment of communicative dialogue. The crisis of
representation should be taken to mean, in Foucault’s case, that
representation (and representational dialogue) causes crisis and is now
in crisis. But such a crisis is not one to run away from as much as it is
one to address, to analyze, to deal with.
Of what does the crisis consist with regard to these two questions?
The crisis is first of all that there is no apparent crisis! For Foucault, a
major danger in questions like these is that phrases like “speaking one’s
mind” and terms like “dialogue” serve to make participants forget the
very possibility that communication is full of power relations. It is
oppressive if communicants do not go into a communicative scenario
with knowledge that power is at work; it is even worse – it is a crisis –
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 363

if the communicative practices tend to preclude the very possibility that

communicants can have access to such basic knowledge. During cross-
cultural dialogue in educational settings, communicants need to realize
that their speech, their learnings, and their teachings are not
automatically gainful just because that comes from the heart. While the
discursive positioning of speaking from the heart may lend a sheen of
innocence to the conversation, speakers are well advised to be aware
that conversational innocence may be an ill-founded feeling. The reign
of the signifier creates an aura of dialogic innocence.
The crisis consists secondly in a recognition that the central social
problems of this century continue to be organized around
representational speech. Who has voice and who does not continue to be
integral to social change, personal change, and struggles to end
oppression. Because linguistic representation, telling of one’s
experience, is so much a part of “what’s going on now,” Foucault’s
discursive perspective on dialogue recognizes that the dangers of
omission inherent in experience sharing do not negate the fact that
individual and group struggles are now organized around “the speaker’s
benefit” (Foucault, 1980). As Foucault’s studies of sexuality show, our
current positions, our current oppressions, and our current possibilities
for progress continue to be worked out by variations of what one can say
about oneself and what freedoms can be attained as a result. The
current struggle against the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in the United
States Military is a telling example of the ways in which speaking for
oneself is so vitally at stake in military institutions. Interestingly, the
insightful studies of Allison Jones and Elizabeth Ellsworth to which I
alluded earlier, while they have ostensibly pointed to the limits of
representational dialogue, also use the tactic of representation in order
to critique representational dialogue. In Jones’s work, Maori students
in her course articulate their disappointment with educational dialogue.
Jones’s conclusions stem from what Maori students say about
themselves. In Ellsworth’s article “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?”
students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they become
inhibited in the dialogic classroom. My point here is that the very
project of pointing to the limits of representation itself often relies on
the sovereignty of the signifier. Excavating the problematics of
representation itself relies upon representational strategies. And this
is a manifestation of another facet of the crisis of representation to
which Foucault’s work points: Representation is dangerous insofar as
it hoodwinks dialogic participants to the discursive workings of power,
yes; but, representation also remains as a major tactic for freeing
364 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

oneself from domination. Representation and representational dialogue

cause a crisis because they are both dangerous and necessary.
Returning now to Foucault’s College de France essay of 1970, and in
particular to his distinction between the critical and genealogical
aspects of discourse analysis, I will explain how the addition of a
genealogical skepticism affords a way to avoid current impasses
between theorists who either extol or decry the benefits of educational
dialogue. Recalling that both the critical and genealogical projects seek
to keep our analytic eyes open to the power-laden reality of language,
that both projects aim to destabilize the normative versions of
communicative theory that would strive for a language that can be
disinfected and perfected into a signifying system, I will focus mainly on
genealogical skepticism as a dialogic tactic. Genealogical skepticism
offers a way to approach representational dialogue without
normativising, but without balking either.
Going into conversation with genealogical skepticism reminds us of
three things. First, it reminds us that at any given historical moment,
certain forms of discourse will be invested with power and with truth
value. At this point in time, given modern forms of society that valorize
speaking one’s mind in public spaces, representative discourse is highly
invested with truth value and emancipatory clout. Genealogy, with its
Nietzschean roots, is a practice that looks at effects rather than causes.
When Nietzsche tracked the self-important self-loathing of the early
Christian period, he was able to point out that social practices are most
often infused with moral import, and not the other way around – moral
leanings do not create social practices (Nietzsche, 1967). Representative
speech is one such social practice. And right or wrong as Nietzsche’s
myth turns out to be with regard to early Christianity, Foucault’s
adoption of such genealogical skepticism is very useful. For what
Nietzsche took as a form of critique pure and simple, Foucault takes as
a basis for political change. Representative discourse is not just
something to scoff at because it has blind-spots. It is rather a practice
that must be put on a critical map of what’s going on now. Foucault’s
insights into the discursive nature of representation, that
representation is one discourse among others, lends historical
perspective to the reign of the signifier. And the skepticism here lies in
an acknowledgment that, at this moment, we might not be able to do
any better than representational dialogue in spite of all its
shortcomings.
Approaching dialogue with genealogical skepticism also reminds us
that representational conversation is likely to have outcomes that are
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 365

sometimes emancipatory and sometimes not. Discourses such a “telling

speech” can be infused by power in various ways. While Jones illustrates
the latter case very clearly when she points to the colonizing impulses
of coming to know the other, there is no reason to assume that all
communicative acts of representation will be oppressive. There will be
times when political acts of expression need to be about being heard.
The protests in Seattle, Washington against secretive global trade
agreements have been doubly significant in that regard. We who were
in solidarity against backroom dealings needed to be heard, to begin
with; and this needed to happen so that global financiers might, in turn,
be forced to be heard so that their dealings could be understood by the
general public. This second genealogical skepticism stems not so much
from the fact that representative dialogue can do only so much, but from
the uncertainty one must face knowing that such dialogue will
inevitably oscillate between being emancipatory and being oppressive.
Foucault’s analysis of the signifier’s reign offers a sharper tool for
unpacking just how representational conversation can become
oppressive. Its oppressiveness lies in its tendency to hide its own nature
as a power-laden discourse among others. With Foucault’s analysis in
mind, I do not think it is enough to warn students that “sometimes, you
are being oppressive when you want to know the other. You must
therefor be willing not to know sometimes.” The advice is good, but it’s
not very well explained. Given our modern valorization of truth and
knowledge, and of telling all, students can benefit from a sharper,
discursive analysis such as the one Foucault offers. A discursive
understanding of dialogue offers scaffolding for learning the drawbacks
that sometimes result from representation in language. It reminds both
students and educators that telling all and understanding the other are
things that we do when we talk, but those are not the only things.
Sometimes when we talk, language causes us to incriminate ourselves,
or it causes us to oppress the other. Language is dangerous enough that
we cannot get away from these ill-effects.
A third genealogical skepticism requires that one approach dialogue,
asking all the while, Is representation really what is going on here? This
is different from questions like, Is representation oppressive? or Does
representation have limits? or Is it possible to represent at all?
Following Foucault’s discursive critique of language, representation
may be just one discursive manifestation of communication. Language
between communicants can be discursively thought of as a form of
palpable contact as well as a form representation (Stewart, 1995). Just
as light acts as a particle under one description and as a wave under
366 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

other circumstances, language is a highly motile activity that need not

be pinned down as either representation or discursive contact. Accepting
this ambivalent discursive understanding of communication, one must
approach dialogue with a greater conceptual openness than ever. One
must be prepared to find out, for example, that there are things going
on other than representation when one speaks and listens. While I, as
a white man, ask simple questions while listening to, and trying to
understand, an African American student’s point of view, the effect of
my questioning and listening may be on another plane altogether than
representation. It is very possible that the social act of dialogue is itself
a stage for racist hierarchies to be played out, for example. If the effect
of speech is oppression, then a genealogical skepticism toward dialogue
causes me to wonder if representation really took place at all. Let us say
that my questioning and listening enacted racist codes that I do not
condone, but that were in the air none the less. Even if I have been
honest about my listening, hasn’t the effect been to have contact. And
hasn’t that contact been oppressive? At such a point, it is not so useful
to make up a convoluted description of the limits of representational
dialogue. It is more useful to follow Foucault’s linguistic pragmatism
and admit that what just happened was a discursive act. And that act
was oppressive. This last example of genealogical skepticism requires
one not to be so confident that representation is at the root of dialogic
effects. Such skepticism requires an openness to the non-
representational operations of conversation, an openness often either
overlooked in discussions of educational dialogue, or used to denigrate,
wholesale, the benefits of conversation.

A Dangerous Benefit
In sum, I have argued along with Michel Foucault that educational
dialogue is most usefully considered as discourse. For Foucault,
considering dialogue as discourse means acknowledging that language
is a complex social experience that performs multiple functions, only one
of which is representation. And while representation currently prevails
as the assumed task of language, while representational dialogue is a
necessary strategy for many projects of social justice, still,
representational applications of language cloak the workings of power
and privilege. To enter a conversation assuming that people will be able
to speak their minds freely already makes it more difficult to
acknowledge that there are institutional, social, and power-laden
prohibitions from speaking freely, and it already makes it more difficult
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION 367

to acknowledge that such speaking might itself be prohibitive. Dialogue

will perform hierarchies at the same time that it exposes them.
Foucault’s discursive notion of language shows just how educational
dialogue is a human action that can be good or bad. But it is neither for
sure. A normative metaphysics of the word is debunked. Educational
dialogue may be either virtuous or limiting, and it depends upon human
vigilance to identify the times when it is beneficial rather than harmful.
Foucault’s discursive understanding of language is a conceptual tool
that helps one to have such vigilance. When entering dialogue with an
other, it helps to know that our conversation will not be innocent. It
helps to know that our words may oppress as well as liberate. It helps
to remember that the spoken word is like any other human act. Like
walking or running or hitting with a hammer, the human act of dialogue
can serve either constructive or destructive ends.
Foucault’s words during a 1983 interview at Berkeley can well be
applied to the scaffolding of discourse. As he puts it,
Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasure of
devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot
exactly be reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute,
a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for
analyzing what’s going on now – and to change it. (1994b, p. 261)
A discursive scaffolding is such a “device.” It can help to change
educational sensibilities on dialogue. Describing how these sensibilities
will be changed following such a discursive lead, one can look to that
same interview: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that
everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad”
(Foucault, 1994b, p. 256). As a comment on dialogue, Foucault’s words
remind us that a (World A) experience such as conversation is neither
an admirable norm for cultivating humanity nor is it a relic of
modernist myth. Representation is part of a potentially dangerous
discursive regime and people can benefit from representational
dialogue. Dialogue is a dangerous benefit.

NOTES
1. While discursive perspectives are widespread in educational
ethnographies and text analyses, I will make the link in this essay between
discourse and the spoken word, using Michel Foucault’s conception of
discourse as a framework. For a related framework of discourse, see the
work of Norman Fairclough (1992; 1996).
2. The discursive perspective to which I am referring is most explicit in
Foucault’s early works, especially in The Order of Things (1970) and The
368 CHARLES W. BINGHAM

Archealogy of Knowledge (1972a). While Mark Ollsen, in Michel Foucault:

Materialism and Education (1999), has argued that Foucault’s project is
less discursive than it is materialist, I consider all of Foucault’s work –
from the more structuralist early projects all the way to the ethics and
technologies of self – to be indebted to his fundamentally discursive
perspective.
3. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin in his “The Problem of Speech Genres”
(1986) offers an important conversational analogue to this critical side of
Foucault’s discourse theory.
4. Elizabeth Ellsworth alludes to the danger of “common sense”
valorizations of dialogue in her Teaching Positions, noting “that everyday
senses of the term dialogue eclipse all critique of dialogue” (1997, p. 102).
While it is true that the term dialogue has positive connotations that
preclude general critique, I am trying to be more particular by critiquing
the specific connotation that dialogue is representation.

Author’s Address:

3575 Emerald Drive

North Vancouver, British Columbia
CANADA V7R 3B6
EMAIL: cwb@sfu.ca

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