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was his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, where he was appointed in 1970
serves as a kind of introductory essay for the work he proposed to do, which appears later as The
Archaeology of Knowledge
Foucault’s Hypothesis
Prohibition
We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, when we like or where we like.
There are three types of prohibition:
o objects (what can be spoken of)
o ritual (where and how one may speak), and
o the privileged or exclusive right to speak of certain subjects (who may speak).
The Control of Discourse
These prohibitions interrelate, reinforce and complement each other, forming a complex web, continually
subject to modification.
The prohibitions surrounding speech reveal its links with desire and power.
That helps to show the "rules of exclusion" that govern discourses and do not-cannot-recognize a
whole range of thoughts or speech that do not conform in terms of object, ritual, or right to speak.
Will to truth - the final rule of exclusion, and one becoming increasingly central is the division into
true and false.
§ The will to truth, a changing system of inclusion into truthfulness that governs scope and use of
knowledge.
§ The will to knowledge determines what truth is and what kind of truth is important.
§ Foucault documents the shift from truth being manifest in the speaker to being manifests in the content
of speech and the subjects to be discussed.
§ The will to truth exerts constant pressure on discourse but yet is invisible.
PART II:
Internal Systems
o Discourse employs a system of internal rules dealing with classification, ordering, and distribution in the
control of events and chance. Although Foucault calls them rules, they are best understood as forms.
o One such rule is commentary.
i. Commentary, commenting on a primary text, allows new discourse while controlling the
content of the discourse.
ii. Foucault discusses the myths and stories that color or shape our national discourses; at the
same time, the discourse shapes the ways in which we understand the stories, the
"commentary" on the seminal stories like The Odyssey, for instance.
iii. Ultimately commentary is nothing but recitation as commentators are merely announcing what
has already been stated, albeit less explicitly, in the primary text.
for the control & delimitation of discourse
Here, discourse exercises its own control, rules regarding principles of classification, ordering and
distribution. It is as though we were now involved in the mastery of another dimension of discourse: that of
events and chance.
Internal Systems
i. The author also is directed at chance events by imposing the limit of individuality (the author’s ‘I’).
ii. While the function of the scientific author as an index of truthfulness has declined over time, the
author is increasingly important in literature.
iii. Thus the literary author is lead to consider what to write, less in relation to the individual work
under construction, but instead in relation to an oeuvre, or life’s work.
The principle does not deny the existence of individuals who write, however when they write, they put on
the author-function, and texts are organized respectively around the function, not the individual.
Disciplines
Discourse is also controlled by rules governing “the conditions under which discourse may be employed.”
Education is the means whereby discourse is appropriated by society as educational systems maintain the
divisions within society (disciplines, fellowships of discourse, etc.).
o Furthermore, only some speaking subjects may deploy certain discourses: "none may enter into
discourse on a specific subject unless he has satisfied certain conditions or if he is not, from the outset,
qualified to do so.
Conditions of Deployment
Conditions under which discourse can be employed
Who is qualified to enter into the discourse on a specific subject?
Not all areas of discourse are equally open & penetrable.
Moreover, exchange and communication probably cannot operate independently of complex but restrictive
systems.
1. Ritual defines the qualifications and role of the speaker, lays down the gestures to be made, the
behavior, circumstances and a whole range of signs, and the supposed or imposed significance of the
words, their effect on those addressed, the limitation of their constraining validity.
2. Fellowship of discourse, whose function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it
should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession
being dispossessed by this very distribution. It functions through various schema of exclusivity and
disclosure.
------Most of the time these four conditions are linked together, constituting great edifices that distribute
speakers among the different types of discourse, and which appropriate those types of discourse to certain
categories of subject
PART III:
Philosophical Themes
conforming to & reinforcing the activity of limitation and exclusion: i.e. eliding the reality of discourse
--------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.
-------conforming to & reinforcing the activity of limitation and exclusion: i.e. eliding the reality of discourse
2. The theme of originating experience
-------This asserts, in the case of experience, that even before it could be grasped in the form of a
cogito, prior significations, in some ways already spoken, were circulating in the world. i.e. there is
meaning out there which we find
3. The theme of universal mediation
------The logos is already discourse, or things and events which insensibly become discourse in the
unfolding of essential secrets.
The result of any of these is that discourse is seen only as an activity, or writing
1. Reading
2. or exchange
3. involving only and exchange of signs.
Elucidation of Discourse
Logophobia
o The apparent supremacy given discourse in our culture masks a fear; all our forms of discourse
serve to control it, to relieve its richness of its most dangerous elements; to organize its disorder.
o This logophobia is a fear of the mass of spoken things, the possibility of errant, unrestrained
discourse.
Methodological Demands
Reversal: rather than thinking we can identify the source of a discourse and its principles, we must rather
"recognize the negative activity of the cut-out and rarefaction of discourse.”
Discontinuity: we must not imagine that as an alternative to the negative activity of discourse there is some
kind of place of "limitless discourse, continuous and silent, repressed and driven back" which it is our task
to restore. Rather, we must recognize discourse as a "discontinuous activity."
Specificity: we must not imagine that we can make sense of or decipher a particular discourse by a "prior
system of significations" that is more true to reality, one that will reveal all and make sense of everything;
the world does not present us with "a legible face." Rather, discourse is "a violence that we do to things, or,
at all events, . . . a practice we impose upon them.”
Exteriority: there is no center, no core, no heart of a discourse where true meaning resides. Rather,
discourses must be understood by their "external conditions of existence.
Through the mechanisms and rules just described, the true nature of discourse is concealed. “It would have
appeared to have ensured that to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between
speaking and thinking” (p. 227).