ABSTRACT
Discourse is one of the most frequently used terms from Foucault's work and, at the same time, it is one of the most contradictory. Foucault himself defines it in a number of different ways throughout his work and, in this chapter, I will explore the way he uses the term in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and in ‘The order of discourse’, (1981). He says in The Archaeology of Knowledge that he has used ‘discourse’ to refer to ‘the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements’ ( Foucault 1972: 80). By ‘the general domain of all statements’, he means that ‘discourse’ can be used to refer to all utterances and statements which have been made which have meaning and which have some effect. Sometimes, in addition, he has used the term to refer to ‘individualizable groups of statements’, that is utterances which seem to form a grouping, such as the discourse of femininity or the discourse of racism. At other times, he has used the term discourse to refer to ‘regulated practices that account for a number of statements’, that is the unwritten rules and structures which produce particular utterances and statements. For example, there is no set of rules written down on how to write essays, and yet somehow most students at university manage to learn how to write within the framework of the essay. For Foucault, this set of structures and rules would constitute a discourse, and it 54is these rules in which Foucault is most interested rather than the utterances and text produced.
