2.1: “Foucault 101 - A (Very Brief) Introduction to Discourse” | J. F. Lindsay

French philosopher Michel Foucault holds a widely influential theorization of power, one which still remains prominent in social, cultural, economic, and political critique today. The particulars of Foucault’s work can be quite complex, and much will be beyond the scope of this piece—today, the goal is to provide a general introduction to his work for students of media analysis. 

For Foucault, power is not conceptualized in terms of physical might or some kind of manipulative prowess, but instead as a larger framework to understand how society functions: how individuals, groups, and agencies are compelled into certain relationships with one another at certain moments to meet certain needs. As he writes, “power is relations; power is not a thing, it is a relationship between two individuals… such that one can direct the behavior of another or determine the behavior of another” (Power/Knowledge, 410). Power is relations; power is the force that compels individuals to act in a particular fashion, in accordance to particular mandates, beliefs, and goals; power is the untouchable, unseeable, intersected phenomena that work to establish the parameters and perimeters of the relationships between people, places, objects, and things. Power is the way by which bodies become useful bodies, bodies that accomplish certain tasks for certain goals at certain times; as Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, “the body becomes a useful body only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (26). 

To refer to how this power ‘works,’ Foucault often refers to the “discourses”—locations of knowledge that create understandings of right/wrong, normal/abnormal; spaces, places, and institutions that provide us the very frameworks and languages from which we speak. Think of the DSM-5 (the current iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), used by mental health professions to diagnose mental health challenges. On the one hand, this is an amazing, beneficial document: it helps mental health professionals and their patients put a name to their struggles and call upon specified strategies to treat them. But, at the same time, the manual inherently creates a system of knowledge that has One Way of understanding… when, as I’m sure many of us know intimately, mental health challenges are dynamic, multivalent affairs, and often require individualized understanding. And, in earlier versions, this was the same manual that declared LGBTQIA+ experiences  “disorders” and told unhappy women they were “hysterical.” Or, in more general terms: a system of knowledge that provides the language for making sense, a platform from which we speak—a discourse that informs how we make sense of the world (and, clearly, one which does not always ‘work in our favor,’ so to speak). 

Our world, Foucault argues, is always awash in many, many discourses.

There are discourses of privacy, defining what it means to be “secure,” what the boundaries of “private” are. Many of us, for instance, don’t consider ad agencies tracking our every digital move as ‘spying,’ as we consent to the process just about each and every time we use an internet-capable device. But I’d argue we would consider a peer doing the same—logging our search history, snooping through our payment records, following our daily travel, and much more—as a gross invasion. And, hm… isn’t that a rather convenient understanding of ‘privacy’ within an ever-growing technosurveillance society! Through mediums ranging from scientific papers to tech company board meetings to Hollywood blockbusters, discourses enabled that kind of understanding—one, notably, quite favorable to the digital power-holders of 21st century society. 

There are discourses in education, demarcating who is—and is not—a “good student.” Standardized tests, ‘common core’ curriculums and the like to address intelligence; larger behavioral structures like sitting still, following directions, moving to a set schedule to ensure complicity. Success within the public school system, then, tilts towards conformity to a norm rather than radical, independent thinking, being, and doing: a discourse that ensures we act in certain ways at certain times for certain reasons, made useful for our future employers. 

There are discourses around health, labeling some bodies as ‘healthy’ and others ‘unhealthy’—be it a medical condition, a difference in body weight, a particular aspect of body structure, or any other aversion from a norm. Again, the locations for these discourses are multiple: doctors’ offices, health class lessons, disability accommodation within public spaces (or lack thereof), amongst many others. Beauty, too: what is and is not beautiful, whose visage is and is not worth celebrating, fueled by agents ranging from Vogue editors to TikTokers to silicon manufactures. There are discourses around love: what kind of love is permissible, what kinds of relationships do and do not receive institutional support and recognition, how one should and should not act with a partner, supported through structures varying from U.S. law (such as anti-sodomy and anti-miscegenation laws), certain religious teachings, and the countless heteronormative romcoms that populate cinema screens year after year. 

There are discourses of economics (success, capitalism, the American Dream, ‘good’ job vs. ‘bad’ job), discourses of criminality (what’s required of you in order to remain a citizen of your state, what are the limits of the actions you can/cannot take), discourses of governmentality (what a ‘good’ government is, what a ‘bad’ government is, what political power does/doesn’t look like)—the list is endless! There are also, of course, discourses that counteract these dominant understandings, discourses that offer alternative ways of acting, speaking, and making sense. As Foucault writes, “whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say that we are dealing with a discursive formation” (Archaeology of Knowledge, 31). 

So, to recap: for Foucault, power is best understood as a series of relationships between different actors, peoples, places, and things, relationships—power is the force that compels us to act in certain ways at certain times, to think certain things opposed to other things, to approach a situation one way as opposed to another. These relationships and ways of being and acting, however, don’t just magically appear out of nowhere—they are created (and maintained) through the mechanism of discourse: locations of knowledge that ‘teach’ us to have these particular understandings, positions, and assumptions. 

As you may already begin to see, thinking discursively can be an incredibly generative way to ‘think’ media power. As Thomas S. McCoy argues, “the media shape public discourse” (“Hegemony, Power, Media: Foucault and Cultural Studies,” 71); in other words, mass media can be seen as a tool of discourse: a means of disseminating particular understandings of the world to the masses, promoting power relationships that are often most beneficial to those already in positions of outmatched political, cultural, and/or economic authority. 

For students of media studies, Foucault’s conceptualizations of power and discourse provide an opportunity to see media machinations in a new light, examining how these institutions of knowledge—television shows, social media influencers, news programing, superhero movies—set the very language by which we come to speak and make sense of the world. While some of these instructions may be tenants we agree with, it is always beneficial to have a more solid understanding of where, how, and why these values are instantiated. For those discursive alignments we may not hold as favorable, thinking in this way allows us to see not only how these beliefs are created and maintained, but also a way to begin to deconstruct, dismantle, and create a new discursive relation. As Foucault says, there is always “the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price” (The Politics of Truth, 75).  

© J. F. Lindsay, CC BY-NC-SA