It Ain't Rocket Science

Not all talk is equally interesting. Certain "themes" (or theories) occupy the attention of discourse at various times; they come up, or are taken up, and its objects, modes and concepts are given the opportunity to develop. But in order to do this, the themes themselves must find support somewhere and this support will have effects that can be registered within discourse. This interiority is worth emphasising because in analysing discourse we are analysing always the surface of what is being said; to be "inside" a discourse is always to be "outside" things, people and languages. While we may suspect that somewhere "out there" (beyond discourse) there are real things "as such", real people being "themselves" and a deeper meaning to it all, in analysing what we know of these entities all we have to work with (i.e., pay attention to) is our talk about them. Here, as elsewhere, our concern is with what turns up in discourse.

We have already noted the sense in which the conceptual machinery of a discourse is part of its rhetoric, i.e., how it conditions the way arguments (determinate arrangements of statements) are formed and presented, and which of them will be persuasive. Strategies are also constituted by rhetorical sensibilities, but this time at the broader level of what is worth talking about in the first place. Foucault accordingly wants us to understand

(1) that discourses are formed by the processes that render objects, modes and concepts first incompatible, then equivalent, and finally ordered into a system, all of which together opens a field of options for discourse. These options provide discourses with its "points of diffraction", i.e., pivot points, obstructions, solidities, stabilities, around which the trajectories of various statements are bent.

(2) Next, Foucault points out that there are processes that ensure that not all of these options are realized. Not every possible trajectory will see a statement travelling along it. There is a certain "economy" to discourse that ensures that not everything is tried, often this has to do with the fact that discourses offer alternatives to each other, so that different research programmes vie for the same resources. (Today, we can add, this competition is played out within funding agencies of various kinds.)

(3) Finally, Foucault draws attention to those "non-discursive practices" that make use of the results of a particular discourse and therefore grant it a kind of authority. He uses the relationship of grammar to pedagogy as an example. "Non-discursive" should be understood in the sense of practices that are not particular to discourse being studied, for they will of course involve discourse in their own right. It is at this level also, that Foucault locates the role of desire in discourse.

Foucault, as always, cautions us not to think of these strategies as unambiguous or univocal or, as it were, total(itarian). Strategies derive their force from their variety, and there is no (discernable) overarching tendency in the progress of theoretical choices in discourse. We should therefore neither think of strategies in terms of some "fundamental project" (like Western civilization) nor in terms of the "secondary play of opinions" (which will be evident in the popular or journalistic writing on a particular field in its own time).

Indeed, many of the conflicts about science in society oscilate helplessly between these two poles. Thus, today, for example, the discursive formation about GMOs (genetically modified organisms) is sometimes related to the fundamental benevolence or fundamental malevolence of Western culture (it will be saviour of mankind or will bring its downfall) and is sometimes to the particular interests of major biotech companies and their economic "interests". Somewhere between these two poles, we will find Foucault's strategies. And as we shall see, there is a good deal of research going on today that tries to track them.