Reconceptualizing the object
For Foucault, “the object does not wait in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity. It does not pre exist itself… it exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations (pp. 45).” From this, we can understand then that the object is not to be taken as something passive, existing in itself out there with an immanent constitution, rationality, norms governing it or with certain characteristics to be described. (We are not trying to reconstitute madness in itself is, forms it undertook with the proceeding of temporality) We are seeking not an explanation of the object based on the manifest appearance of its internal constitution. What enables the object to appear as it is must be found in the field of exteriority.
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Decentering of the subject
Foucault thinks that if the ground of things were placed in the subject, his transcendental consciousness, it is prone to incoherence. As he says, it will be enmeshed with “…error oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or [one’s] unconscious desire not to see and not to speak.” The subject must hence be decentered. Analysis cannot be focused upon the structures of language the subject speaks, his laws of desire, rules of action (pp. 13). What the history of thought or history has hitherto done is to make the subjectivity, the human consciousness the key to the synthesis and unity of everything making it prone to the moments of consciousness of man (pp. 12). This to Foucault is no objective knowledge. Objective and valid knowledge is not to be sought in the transcendental categorical imperatives or the original apperception of man i.e. the genius. Continuity cannot be sought based on temporality (successive phenomena of events) or based on a series of dispersed events that the subject or genius links in time. Foucault challenges this concept of continuity. He thinks that this unity is variable and relative and “as soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self evidence…” Thus, pre-made oevre that expresses the genius’s thoughts, system of languages whose locus is in the incertitude of the genius must be torn asunder. Foucault seeks to reconstruct continuity and systems of unities and order by virtue of a pure description of discursive events – the exteriority, independent of the genius’s intentions, conscious and unconscious activity etc.
The appearance of the object is not contingent on the genius’s original apperception but in the flux of rules that govern its possibilities. The old genealogy of history will only yield discontinuities. Genealogy entails a Nietzschean sense of reconstruction of rules and sense meaning anew independent of the pre-existing structures.
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Unity of discourse must be searched not in temporality (and genius) but in space the field of exteriority – the interplay of rules that make possible the appearance of the object… (pp. 33). The task is not to reconstitute chains of inference (pp. 37) back to the genius or the deductive structures he has constructed but to describe the system of dispersion.
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We must hence find for ourselves (like a true Nietzschean) discursive formations – identification of A) system of dispersion between a number of statements and B) Regularity of several types of statements, concepts or thematic choices. And then, one must find out rules of formation of these concepts, statements and thematic choices [= appearances] i.e. the conditions that allow for their existence that is not exclusive of the disappearance, modification, coexistence of these appearances.
A discursive formation will be individualized if one can define the system of the different strategies that are deployed in it; how they derive from the same set of relations. (for illustration see pp. 65-69)
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The way to look at a discourse like the psychiatric discourse is not that some privileged discursive objects characterize it but it unfolds within a space of relations that makes discursive objects possible. Discursive relations are external to discourse; not to be found in rhetorical structres between propositions, concepts etc. They are what governs the possibility they are the limit of discourse. They determine the group of relations that discourse must establish to speak to classify, analyze, speak, explain objects. Discursive relations characterize discourse itself as a practice.
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Post structuralist Foucault
Discourse is not an analysis of the lexical contents that defines elements of meaning at the disposal of the speaking subject in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken (pp. 48). It is not a linguistic analysis. It does not hide behind a language, it is not the confrontation between reality and language or how intrinsic an experience or a lexicon is.
In describing the objects of a discourse, it is synonymous to the activity of locating the relations that characterize the discursive practice.
Language structures or signs do not order reality. It is the group of rules proper to discursive practice that make the discursive possibilities of the object materialize into actuality as it is.
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On The formation of Enunciative Modalities
The enunciative modalities are not to be found in the transcendental subject. He is not the one who attributes causality to the world. Instead, it is to be found in the relations between distinct elements (institutions, systems, legal conditions, pedagogic norms, status given to the “doctor” (for instance), the status he has in relation to the society he belongs to, institutional sites [e.g. hospitals, laboratory, documentary fields], situations that is possible for him to occupy in relation to various domains or groups of objects).
“Instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifests his disposition to various statuses, various sites, various positions he can occupy or be given when making a discourse [and] to the discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks linked by a system of relations not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself but by the specifity of a discursive practice.”
(pp. 54-55)
This quoted paragraph is very telling for it once again makes the assertion that order and regularity cannot be found from within the subject and therefore, the meaning of discourse cannot be a phenomenon of expression that emanates and is contingent on the subject which unfolds and manifests itself in thinking, knowing speaking etc. Such a discourse is a Kantian Enlightenment discourse. Discourse is redefined by Foucault to mean then an exterior space or totality that orders, determines and gives possibilities to the subject. The enunciative modalities, relations, sites condition the possibilities of the subject’s thought, thinking and perhaps, all other forms of actualities that are forthcoming. This is so significant because it is I think the most direct pillory and inversion of Kantian thought. It is no wonder why Foucault is seen as “post-structuralism” and “post-Kantian” for he has decentered and estranged the concept of discourse from the subject to the specifity of the discursive practice.
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Kant’s concepts or perhaps more specifically put, pure transcendental concepts can I think be considered as ‘preconceptual.’ Foucault to me is trying to inverse the notion of the ‘preconceptual’ from its genesis in the subject’s transcendental synthetic activity to the preconceptual in the sense of the pre-discourse level – the rules that characterize a particular discursive practice; the group of rules that operate within it. There is thus, a sense of some uniform anonymity totally distinct from the association with the genius. The latter in Kantian philosophy presages an indefinite possibility but Foucault says that this notion of indefinite possibility is gibberish and what one can do is only to make a systemic comparison between regions or fields that is situated in the atemporal. He thus effaces the empirical progress of ideas (refer to Kant on analogies… and the transcendental aesthetic) and the Kantian sense of concepts in the transcendental (in Foucault’s terms: the horizon of ideality).
For Foucault then, the Formation of concepts or the system of conceptual formation lies in a group of relations that one “stands back in relation to this manifest set of concepts and one tries to determine according to what schemata the statements maybe linked to one another in a type of discourse… how the recurrent elements of statements can reappear, dissociate, recompose, gain in extension or determination…” Such conceptual formation can then explain for the a posteriori or a parte posteriori “anonymous dispersion through texts, books, oeuvres.” One does not and cannot aim to explicate the whole architecture or totality because that is quite an impossible task. A total exhaustive classification, observation of this and that and of their internal coherence, compatibility etc. is not possible.
Herein I think lies a critique that we can make of Foucault because what undergirds this act of analysis at a preconceptual level? What is essential to the “system of conceptual formation” he wants to set up? Who then is the one who cast judgments and re-strings teleological connections? Foucault must have found himself constantly spiraling back to the genius, the transcendental subjectivity that is indispensable in casting re-tracing such “atemporal” links. Kant is right in that the subject is the one who gives order to the world. A world of coherence cannot be possible without the subject. All attempts at analysis to extricate the subject and temporality must find itself in an awkward position. It must play blind…
On Foucauldian conceptual formation:
“This entails the way in which, for example, the ordering of descriptions or accounts is linked to the techniques of rewriting; the way in which the field of memory is linked to the forms of hierarchy and subordination that govern the statements of a text; the way in which the modes of approximation and development of the statements are linked to the modes of criticism, commentary etc… (pp. 60)”
On Foucauldian pre-conceptual level
“The preconceptual field allows the emergence of the discursive regularities and constrains that have made possible the heterogeneous multiplicity of concepts, and, beyond these the profusion of the themes, beliefs, and representations with which one usually deals when one is writing the history of ideas.”
The preconceptual here also underscores Foucault’s want to obliterate any sense fixism or structuralism in unchanging “natural taxonomies,” theories or even the subject once again. Hence, in the chapter of ‘The formation of Strategies,’ I got the impression of Foucault trying to illustrate a system of systematicities that functions as a preliminary guide as to how one should go about treating objects of discourse, arranging forms of enunciation (choosing, placing, constituting series, composing them into great rhetorical unities), manipulating concepts etc (pp. 69-70). One must like a Nietzschean, uncover the possibilities of discourse on his own. To sieve through the mess and bring together a whole new unity that springs forth from structures.
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Foucault notes that there exists a vertical system of dependencies (pp.73) in which not all the positions of the subject, all the types of coexistence between statements, all the discursive strategies are equally possible, but only those authorized by anterior levels that gives rise to of certain modalities of enunciations whereby there can be the coexistence of statements, specific implications of statements, exclusion of statements. Levels imply that there is not an illusory unlimited autonomy of the subject (as given by Kant). As Foucault says, “between the primary differentiation of objects and the formation of discursive strategies, there exists a whole hierarchy of relations.”
What then governs the formation of the concept? It is the set relations and specific rules for the formation of concepts.
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