I think Greg and Colin have departed somewhat from the Decearteau -
Foucault thing, but, hey, that's cool. I think I'll call this thread
subject: F&D, so if people want to respond to it, they won't get mixed up
with G&C's lively debate.
Last thing I knew, Davikar wrote:
"a very good summary of DC's intent vis-a-vis F. How would you define
narratives versus discourse ?"
divakar
Hmmmmm.......
well, it's always difficult to compare terms across theoretical systems, so
I'll try to define some key problems that might make support a more careful
comparison. (please colin don't flame my ass)
generally speaking, discourse, for F is about power, while narrative in DC
is about subversion. So these are not even corresponding terms paired up
nicely across a two theoretical models, but instead DC is adding
narrativity to F's model. Where for F, discourse is a function of
institutional and procedural regulation, inscribing order and discipline on
spaces and practices without any vestige of subjective intention, the
possible resistances to discourse are considered only in the form of
"marginal discourses. The primary rules of discourse are its delimitation
of interior and exterior...... and the resistances to discursive formations
are found in those (equally subjectless and intentionless) exteriors:
"Within it's own limits, every discipline recognizes true and false
propositions, but it repulses a whole teratology of learning. The exterior
of a science is both more and less populated than one might think:
certainly there is immediate experience, imaginary themes bearing on and
continually accompanying immemorial beliefs; but perhaps there are no
errors in the strict sense of the terms, for error can only emerge and be
identified with a well-defined process; there are monsters on the prowl,
though, whose forms alter with the history of knowledge." (discourse on
language, 224)
Again, on a very general level, to the extent that F relegates these
"monsters on the prowl" to the status of intentionless, authorless traces
of discourse formations, DC wants to rehabilitate marginal discourses, and
instill them with a quality of tactical resistance. For DC, F does not
spacialize and temporalize the conditions under which such monsters might
develop, and he leaves out the ways in which the tensions between
institutional power and individual resistance develop in a dialectical way
in spaces themselves. Space is for DC understood not as something
inscribed through regulation and discipline, but as something developed and
produced through lived habitation practiced in DC's words. This practice
of space is one which entails its own moment of narrative inscription (not
institutional discursive inscription) as individuals use spaces and assign
them meanings, link spaces together into their own syntactical structures,
etc.
(perhaps an expert of DC can tell me if I am giving too much weight to the
pragmatic, functional, utilitarian dimension of this practice of space....
).
in summary: discourse in F is compared with narrative in DC along thise
lines: narrative takes us away from discourse as normative inscription, as
a self regulating rule system, and towards the active practice in time and
space of spacial narratives DC writes: "narrative structures have the
status of spatial syntaxes"
describing F's panoptic thesis:
"Foucault's analysis of the structure of pwer...moved in the direction of
mechanisms and technical procedures, 'minor instrumentalities' capable,
merely by their organization of 'details' of transforming human
multiplicity into a 'disciplinary' society and of managing,
differentiating, classifying and hierarchizing all deviances concerning
apprenticiships, kealth, justice, the army, or soforth. [these techniques]
draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space
that they redistribute in order to make an operator out of it. But what
"spatial practices" [DC's counter-term] correspond, in the area where
discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary
space? in the present connjuncture, which is marked by a contradicition
between the collective mode of administration and an indivicual mode or
reappropriations, this question is no less important, if one admits that
spatial practices in fact secretely structure the determining conditions of
social life." (practice of everyday life,96)