Discourse, knowledge, and power

While the word “discourse” is often referred to as a taken-for-granted concept in research, it can refer to several different meanings from intertextuality to the language in use, among others. In a critical sociolinguistic approach, discourse is about the use and subjectivity of language especially as a form of social practice that covers speech, text, images, gestures, and audio-visual content. Language is both a societal product and its producer. Language use can both create and maintain practices and ordered knowledge networks such as socio-spatial identities. Discursive positions can seek to maintain and strengthen the structures of the prevalent discursive order, or challenge

communication according to their contextual rational meaning-making order – for example, professional, private, or media discourses.

Social scientists have adopted discourse from linguistics. Michel Foucault (e.g. 1986a; 1995; 2005) developed an interpretative approach to discourse analysis, focusing on the development and functions of scientific discourse that shape what it is to be human into an imaginable and manageable form.

In my research I have adopted a perspective on discourses that is especially inspired by Foucault. “Foucauldian discourse” is often defined as particular networks of effective knowledge (i.e. devices, ideas, beliefs, and perceptions with the authority of truth), manifested in formations of interrelated and rule-based statements about socially constructed entities such as nation-ness. Discourses are networked, because they are always interconnected, and it is difficult to distinguish their beginnings and ends. Discursive practice is an entity of nameless, historical, and always temporally and spatially defined rules about the conditions for the function of a statement in each era, and social, economic geographic, and lingual field (ibid., 155). Goswami characterises the Foucauldian view of discourse as follows:

Mad speech is outside discourse, neither true nor false within any ac-cepted discourse, but inhabiting a void. That helps to show the rules of exclusion that govern discourses and do not/cannot recognize a whole range of speech that do not conform in terms of objects, ritual, or right to speak. (Goswami 2014, 13)

This discourse is a way of representing the knowledge about a particu-lar topic at a particuparticu-lar historical moment. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and use to regulate the conduct of others. (ibid., 14)

Foucauldian analysis includes problematisation, turning a thought from a given familiarity to an uncertain question. As ad hoc responses to problematisations, productive formations of common networks of knowledge technology may form that Foucault called an “apparatus”, or

“dispositif”. It may later be forgotten or reappear as an applicable technology

(Rabinow & Rose 2003, 7–14). Using the archaeology of knowledge, one can describe conditions constituting the occurrence, constraints, dispersion, and disappearance of discursive formations (see Chapter 5.2.). However, Foucault (2005) emphasises that these “monuments” cannot be fully reconstructed in their objective originality, because they can only be interpreted from the temporal perspective of presence. He highlights the role of media as one of the few privileged, albeit not exclusive, technologies or apparatuses producing and disseminating knowledge. In this regard Foucault (e.g. 1995, 27) suggests that struggles of power and knowledge should not be examined

“in favour” of truth or its liberation from power, but the economic and political efficiency of its use.

Dominant or hegemonic discursive formations are rarely problematised.

In such cases, Foucault spoke of a “regime of truth”, and within it the “games of truth and error”. What is socially accepted in the essence of “truth” forces people to submit to it. The truth is therefore not external to power, social ordering, and struggle. Each society has its own regime of truth, its criteria, political ecosystem, and more field-specific games of truth. In relation to this, ideas and language as discourse constitute only a limited part of the Foucauldian investigation of games of truth, where techniques of knowledge, institutions, and practices with truth authority enable and constrain people’s ways of being (Rabinow & Rose 2003, 15–16; see also Lorenzini 2015). Among others, this has inspired a critical approach to essentialising bodily, and hence spatially, productive gender normativity discourses of who defines knowledge and who is not represented (Butler 1990). Critical geography, on the other hand, challenges the subjugation of human agency to visualised representations of geographical power-knowledge about material conditions, scrutinising the social constitution of global space and subjectivity (Ó Tuathail

& Agnew 1992; Gregory 1994). For example, Paasi notes that national borders are “expressions of territoriality – normally crucial to what can be called the discursive landscape of social power” (Paasi 2011, 22).

On the basis of the most recognised theories of power presented by Weber, Habermas, Parsons, and others, Castells calls attention to the legitimisation and relativeness of, and the distinction between, its coercive, persuasive, and

is not always straightforward. Power is not an attribute but an asymmetrical relationship. For example, the state’s monopoly of violence and the sovereign right to decide on its exception are based on a social contract between the state and its subjects (Castells 2009 13, 31–34). Power is also a constant theme in Foucault’s work, famously going beyond the classical definition of A’s ability to convince B to do something against their will (Hänninen 2010). Governmentality (Fr. La gouvernementalité) is Foucault’s (1986b, 338) conceptualisation of a liberal power technology, indirect techniques of governing that arose in early modern times against the backdrop of sovereign and disciplinary power.

In liberal discourse, power needs to constantly legitimise itself for society, that is, the “We” who are subjected to it. The acknowledging, reflexive, and productive relationship of the self to the self and selves of a certain kind refers to subjectification (Rabinow & Rose 2003, 5, 14). The institutionalisation of “society” between subjects as individuals and the sovereign state enables the formation of normative techniques by which subjects self-sufficiently govern themselves. Iver Neumann notes that the de-territorialised power of governmentality plays a growing role in the emergence of the global society, although it is in contention with the national sovereign power. In the mutually complementary dynamics of power relations, the object of knowledge for the (national) sovereign power is territory, whereas for pastoral (liberal) power it is citizens or the population. Similarly, while in liberalism the subject is individual, in nationalism it is the nation (Neumann 2010, 27, 30, 41–42, 45). National subjectification usually entails a spatial socialisation in which

“individual actors and collectivities are socialized as members of specific territorially bounded spatial entities and through which they more or less actively internalize collective territorial identities and shared traditions” (Paasi 1996, 8).