We must now list the various directions that lie open
to us, and see whether this notion of 'rules of formation' - of
which little more than a rough sketch has so far been provided -
can be given real content. Let us look first at the formation of
objects. And in order to facilitate our analysis, let us take as
an example the discourse of psychopathology from the nineteenth
century onwards - a chronological break that is easy enough to accept
in a first approach to the subject. There are enough signs to indicate
it, but let us take just two of these: the establishment at the
beginning of the century of a new mode of exclusion and confinement
of the madman in a psychiatric hospital; and the possibility of
tracing certain present-day notions back to Esquirol, Heinroth,
or Pinel (paranoia can be traced back to monomania, the intelligence
quotient to the initial notion of imbecility, general paralysis
to chronic encephalitis, character neurosis to nondelirious madness);
whereas if we try to trace the development of psychopathology beyond
the nineteenth century, we soon lose our way, the path becomes confused,
and the projection of Du Laurens or even Van Swicten on the pathology
of Kraepelin or Bleuler provides no more than chance coincidences.
The objects with which psychopathology has dealt since this break
in time are very numerous, mostly very new, but also very precarious,
subject to change and, in some cases, to rapid disappearance: in
addition to motor disturbances, hallucinations, and speech disorders
(which were already regarded as manifestations of madness, although
they were recognised, delimited, described, and analysed in a different
way), objects appeared that belonged to hitherto unused registers:
minor behavioural disorders, sexual aberrations and disturbances,
the phenomena of suggestion and hypnosis, lesions of the central
nervous system, deficiencies of intellectual or motor adaptation,
criminality. And on the basis of each of these registers a variety
of objects were named, circumscribed, analysed, then rectified,
re-defined, challenged, erased. Is it possible to lay down the rule
to which their appearance was subject? Is it possible to discover
according to which non-deductive system these objects could be juxtaposed
and placed in succession to form the fragmented field - showing
at certain points great gaps, at others a plethora of information
- of psychopathology? What has ruled their existence as objects
of discourse?
(a) First we must map the first surfaces of their emergence:
show where these individual differences, which, according to the
degrees of rationalisation, conceptual codes, and types of theory,
will be accorded the status of disease, alienation, anomaly, dementia,
neurosis or psychosis, degeneration, etc., may emerge, and then
be designated and analysed. These surfaces of emergence are not
the same for different societies, at different periods, and in different
forms of discourse. In the case of nineteenth-century psychopathology,
they were probably constituted by the family, the immediate social
group, the work situation, the religious community (which are all
normative, which are all susceptible to deviation, which all have
a margin of tolerance and a threshold beyond which exclusion is
demanded, which all have a mode of designation and a mode of rejecting
madness, which all transfer to medicine if not the responsibility
for treatment and cure, at least the burden of explanation); although
organised according to a specific mode, these surfaces of emergence
were not new in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it was
no doubt at this period that new surfaces of appearance began to
function: art with its own normativity, sexuality (its deviations
in relation to customary prohibitions become for the first time
an object of observation, description, and analysis for psychiatric
discourse), penality (whereas in previous periods madness was carefully
distinguished from criminal conduct and was regarded as an excuse,
criminality itself becomes - and subsequent to the celebrated 'homicidal
monomanias' - a form of deviance more or less related to madness).
In these fields of initial differentiation, in the distances, the
discontinuities, and the thresholds that appear within it, psychiatric
discourse finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it
is talking about, of giving it the status of an object - and therefore
of making it manifest, nameable, and describable.
(b) We must also describe the authorities of delimitation:
in the nineteenth century, medicine (as an institution possessing
its own rules, as a group of individuals constituting the medical
profession, as a body of knowledge and practice, as an authority
recognised by public opinion, the law, and government) became the
major authority in society that delimited, designated, named, and
established madness as an object; but it was not alone in this:
the law and penal law in particular (with the definitions of excuse,
non-responsibility, extenuating circumstances, and with the application
of such notions as the crime passional, heredity, danger to society),
the religious authority (in so far as it set itself up as the authority
that divided the mystical from the pathological, the spiritual from
the corporeal, the supernatural from the abnormal, and in so far
as it practised the direction of conscience with a view to understanding
individuals rather than carrying out a casuistical classification
of actions and circumstances), literary and art criticism (which
in the nineteenth century treated the work less and less as an object
of taste that had to be judged, and more and more as a language
that had to be interpreted and in which the author's tricks of expression
had to be recognised).
(c) Lastly, we must analyse the grids of specification:
these are the systems according to which the different 'kinds of
madness' are divided, contrasted, related, regrouped, classified,
derived from one another as objects of psychiatric discourse (in
the nineteenth century, these grids of differentiation were: the
soul, as a group of hierarchised, related, and more or less interpenetrable
faculties; the body, as a three-dimensional volume of organs linked
together by networks of dependence and communication; the life and
history of individuals, as a linear succession of phases, a tangle
of traces, a group of potential reactivations, cyclical repetitions;
the interplays of neuropsychological correlations as systems of
reciprocal projections, and as a field of circular causality).
Such a description is still in itself inadequate. And
for two reasons. These planes of emergence, authorities of delimitation,
or forms of specification do not provide objects, fully formed and
armed, that the discourse of psychopathology has then merely to
list, classify, name, select, and cover with a network of words
and sentences: it is not the families - with their norms, their
prohibitions, their sensitivity thresholds - that decide who is
mad, and present the 'patients' to the psychiatrists for analysis
and judgement; it is not the legal system itself that hands over
certain criminals to psychiatry, that sees paranoia beyond a particular
murder, or a neurosis behind a sexual offence. It would be quite
wrong to see discourse as a place where previously established objects
are laid one after another like words on a page. But the above enumeration
is inadequate for a second reason. it has located, one after another,
several planes of differentiation in which the objects of discourse
may appear. But what relations exist between them? Why this enumeration
rather than another? What defined and closed group does one imagine
one is circumscribing in this way? And how can one speak of a 'system
of formation' if one knows only a series of different, heterogeneous
determinations, lacking attributable links and relations?
in fact, these two series of questions refer back to
the same point. In order to locate that point, let us re-examine
the previous example. In the sphere with which psychopathology dealt
in the nineteenth century, one sees the very early appearance (as
early as Esquirol) of a whole series of objects belonging to the
category of delinquency: homicide (and suicide), crimes passionels,
sexual offences, certain forms of theft, vagrancy - and then, through
them, heredity, the neurogenic environment, aggressive or self-punishing
behaviour, perversions, criminal impulses, suggestibility, etc.
It would be inadequate to say that one was dealing here with the
consequences of a discovery: of the sudden discovery by a psychiatrist
of a resemblance between, criminal and pathological behaviour, a
discovery of the presence in certain delinquents of the classical
signs of alienation, or mental derangement. Such facts lie beyond
the grasp of contemporary research: indeed, the problem is how to
decide what made them possible, and how these 'discoveries' could
lead to others that took them up, rectified them, modified them,
or even disproved them. Similarly, it would be irrelevant to attribute
the appearance of these new objects to the norms of nineteenth-century
bourgeois society, to a reinforced police and penal framework, to
the establishment of a new code of criminal justice, to the introduction
and use of extenuating circumstances, to the increase in crime.
No doubt, all these processes were at work; but they could not of
themselves form objects for psychiatric discourse; to pursue the
description at this level one would fall short of what one was seeking.
If, in a particular period in the history of our society,
the delinquent was psychologised and pathologised, if criminal behaviour
could give rise to a whole series of objects of knowledge, this
was because a group of particular relations was adopted for use
in psychiatric discourse. The relation between planes of specification
like penal categories and degrees of diminished responsibility,
and planes of psychological characterisation (faculties, aptitudes,
degrees of development or involution, different ways of reacting
to the environment, character types, whether acquired, innate, or
hereditary). The relation between the authority of medical decision
and the authority of judicial decision (a really complex relation
since medical decision recognises absolutely the authority of the
judiciary to define crime, to determine the circumstances in which
it is committed, and the punishment that it deserves; but reserves
the right to analyse its origin and to determine the degree of responsibility
involved). The relation between the filter formed by judicial interrogation,
police information, investigation, and the whole machinery of judicial
information, and the filter formed by the medical questionnaire,
clinical examinations, the search for antecedents, and biographical
accounts. The relation between the family, sexual and penal norms
of the behaviour of individuals, and the table of pathological symptoms
and diseases of which they are the signs. The relation between therapeutic
confinement in hospital (with its own thresholds, its criteria of
cure, its way of distinguishing the normal from the pathological)
and punitive confinement in prison (with its system of punishment
and pedagogy, its criteria of good conduct, improvement, and freedom).
These are the relations that, operating in psychiatric discourse,
have made possible the formation of a whole group of various objects.
Let us generalise: in the nineteenth century, psychiatric
discourse is characterised not by privileged objects, but by the
way in which it forms objects that are in fact highly dispersed.
This formation is made possible by a group of relations established
between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification.
One might say, then, that a discursive formation is defined (as
far as its objects are concerned, at least) if one can establish
such a group; if one can show how any particular object of discourse
finds in it its place and law of emergence; if one can show that
it may give birth simultaneously or successively to mutually exclusive
objects, without having to modify itself.
Hence a certain number of remarks and consequences.
1. The conditions necessary for the appearance of an
object of discourse, the historical conditions required if one is
to 'say anything' about it, and if several people are to say different
things about it, the conditions necessary if it is to exist in relation
to other objects, if it is to establish with them relations of resemblance,
proximity, distance, difference, transformation - as we can see,
these conditions are many and imposing. Which means that one cannot
speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new;
it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, or to
be aware, for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of
the ground. But this difficulty is not only a negative one; it must
not be attached to some obstacle whose power appears to be, exclusively,
to blind, to hinder, to prevent discovery, to conceal the purity
of the evidence or the dumb obstinacy of the things themselves;
the object does not await 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, held back by some obstacle at the
first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of
a complex group of relations.
2. These relations are established between institutions,
economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of
norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterisation;
and these relations are not present in the object; t is not they
that are deployed when the object is being analysed; they do not
indicate the web, the immanent rationality, that 'deal nervure that
reappears totally or in part when one conceives of the object in
the truth of its concept. They do not define its internal constitution,
but what enables it to appear, to juxtapose itself with other objects,
to situate itself in relation to them, to define its difference,
its irreducibility, and even perhaps its heterogeneity, in short,
to be placed in a field of exteriority.
3. These relations must be distinguished first from
what we might call primary relations, and which, independently of
all discourse or all object of discourse, may be described between
institutions, techniques, social forms, etc. After all, we know
very well that relations existed between the bourgeois family and
the functioning of judicial authorities and categories in the nineteenth
century that can be analysed in their own right. They cannot always
be superposed upon the relations that go to form objects: the relations
of dependence that may be assigned to this primary level are not
necessarily expressed in the formation of relations that makes discursive
objects possible. But we must also distinguish the secondary relations
that are formulated in discourse itself. what, for example, the
psychiatrists of the nineteenth century could say about the relations
between the family and criminality does not reproduce, as we know,
the interplay of real dependencies; but neither does it reproduce
the interplay of relations that make possible and sustain the objects
of psychiatric discourse. Thus a space unfolds articulated with
possible discourses: a system of real or primary relations, a system
of reflexive or secondary relations, and a system t of relations
that might properly be called discursive. The problem is to reveal
the specificity of these discursive relations, and their interplay
with the other two kinds.
4. Discursive relations are not, as we can see, internal
to discourse: they do not connect concepts or words with one another;
they do not establish a deductive or rhetorical structure between
propositions or sentences. Yet they are not relations exterior to
discourse, relations that might limit it, or impose certain forms
upon it, or force it, in certain circumstances, to state certain
things. They are, in a sense, at the limit of discourse: they offer
it objects of which it can speak, or rather (for this image of offering
presupposes that objects are formed independently of discourse),
they determine the group of relations that discourse must establish
in order to speak of this or that object, in order to deal with
them, name them, analyse them, classify them, explain them, etc.
These relations characterise not the language (langue) used by discourse,
nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself
as a practice.
We can now complete the analysis and see to what extent
it fulfils, and to what extent it modifies, the initial project.
Taking those group figures which, in an insistent but
confused way, presented themselves as psychology, economics, grammar,
medicine, we asked on what kind of unity they could be based: were
they simply a reconstruction after the event, based on particular
works, successive theories, notions and themes some of which had
been abandoned, others maintained by tradition, and again others
fated to fall into oblivion only to be revived at a later date?
Were they simply a series of linked enterprises?
We sought the unity of discourse in the objects themselves,
in their distribution, in the interplay of their differences, in
their proximity or distance - in short, in what is given to the
speaking subject; and, in the end, we are sent back to a setting-up
of relations that characterises discursive practice itself; and
what we discover is neither a configuration, nor a form, but a group
of rules that are immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity.
We also used, as a point of reference, a unity like psychopathology:
if we had wanted to provide it with a date of birth and precise
limits, it would no doubt have been necessary to discover when the
word was first used, to what kind of analysis it could be applied,
and how it achieved its separation from neurology on the one hand
and psychology on the other. What has emerged is a unity of another
type, which does not appear to have the same dates, or the same
surface, or the same articulations, but which may take account of
a group of objects for which the term psychopathology was merely
a reflexive, secondary, classificatory rubric. Psychopathology finally
emerged as a discipline in a constant state of renewal, subject
to constant discoveries, criticisms, and corrected errors; the system
of formation that we have defined remains stable. But let there
be no misunderstanding: it is not the objects that remain constant,
nor the domain that they form; it is not even their point of emergence
or their mode of characterisation; but the relation between the
surfaces on which they appear, on which they can be delimited, on
which they can be analysed and specified.
In the descriptions for which I have attempted to provide
a theory, there can be no question of interpreting discourse with
a view to writing a history of the referent. In the example chosen,
we are not trying to find out who was mad at a particular period,
or in what his madness consisted, or whether his disturbances were
identical with those known to us today. We are not asking ourselves
whether witches were unrecognised and persecuted madmen and madwomen,
or whether, at a different period, a mystical or aesthetic experience
was not unduly medicalised. We are not trying to reconstitute what
madness itself might be, in the form in which it first presented
itself to some primitive, fundamental, deaf, scarcely articulated'
experience, and in the form in which it was later organised (translated,
deformed, travestied, perhaps even repressed) by discourses, and
the oblique, often twisted play of their operations. Such a history
of the referent is no doubt possible; and I have no wish at the
outset to exclude any effort to uncover and free these 'prediscursive'
experiences from the tyranny of the text. But what we are concerned
with here is not to neutralise discourse, to make it the sign of
something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach
what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain
it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity.
What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify'
them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which
we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become
divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or
the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious
desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic
treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation
of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects
without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by
relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects
of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical
appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not
plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys
the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.
However, to suppress the stage of 'things themselves'
is not necessarily to return to the linguistic analysis of meaning.
When one describes the formation of the objects of a discourse,
one tries to locate the relations that characterise a discursive
practice, one determines neither a lexical organisation, nor the
scansions of a semantic field: one does not question the meaning
given at a particular period to such words as 'melancholia' or madness
without delirium', nor the opposition of content between psychosis'
and 'neurosis'. Not, I repeat, that such analyses are regarded as
illegitimate or impossible; but they are not relevant when we are
trying to discover, for example, how criminality could become an
object of medical expertise, or sexual deviation a possible object
of psychiatric discourse. The analysis of lexical contents defines
either the elements of meaning at the disposal of speaking subjects
in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the
surface of a discourse that has already been spoken; it does not
concern discursive practice as a place in which a tangled plurality
- at once superposed and incomplete - of objects is formed and deformed,
appears and disappears.
The sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from
the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately
absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is
as lacking as any reference to the living plenitude of experience.
We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse - in which
nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning
to emerge out of the grey light; and we shall not pass beyond discourse
in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind
it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse
itself. Since it is sometimes necessary to dot the 'i's of even
the most obvious absences, I will say that in all these searches,
in which I have still progressed so little, I would like to show
that 'discourses', in the form in which they can be heard or read,
are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and
words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, Coloured
chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slender
surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language
(langue), the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would
like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses
themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so
tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules
proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence
of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering
of objects. 'Words and things' is the entirely serious title of
a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own
form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day,
a quite different task. A task that consists of not - of no longer
treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring
to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically
form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are
composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs
to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible
to the language (langue) and to speech. it is this 'more' that we
must reveal and describe.
Source: The Archaeology
of Knowledge (1969), publ. Routledge, 1972. First 3 Chapters , by
Foucault.
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