Common questions

What is the order of discourse?

What is the order of discourse?

Foucault argues though, in The Order of Discourse, that the ‘will to truth’ is the major system of exclusion that forges discourse and which ‘tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses’, and goes on further to ask the question ‘what is at stake in the will to truth.

What is Foucault’s definition of discourse?

Foucault adopted the term ‘discourse’ to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. He notes that discourse is distinctly material in effect, producing what he calls ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’.

What is discourse Fairclough order?

Orders of discourse concern the “totality of discursive practices of an institution and relationship between them” (Fairclough, 1993, p. 138). They are usually associated with particular institutions or domains of social life.

What does Michel Foucault mean by the Order of discourse?

Foucault ‘The Order of Discourse’ (note 1 above), 53. One of the ways in which this is achieved is through the commentaries of discourse: the statements or texts which continually reaffirm the meanings enacted by the discourse, without ever breaching the discursive paradigm.

What does Foucault mean by archaeology of knowledge?

Foucault Archaeology of Knowledge (note 1 above), 221. In his later work Foucault discusses how subjects internalise the order of discourse and reproduce its meaning and truth outwardly through confession or even through their own discourse.

How are Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault different?

In this aspect, Foucault and Jacques Lacan’s ‘discourses’ on discourse overlap, although their focus diverge. Whereas Lacan considers discourse from the point of view of psychoanalysis and, thus, the inter-subjective setting, Foucault considers discourse from the structural point of view of institutions and power.

What does Michel Foucault mean by the will to truth?

Furthermore, while the will to truth “exerts a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint… on other discourses” (213), it is also the procedure least noticed, for “‘true’ discourse, freed from desire and power by the necessity of its form, cannot recognise the will to truth which pervades it” (214).

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