In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Mark G. E. Kelly about his article “Foucault and the Politics of Language Today,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Foucault and the Politics of Language Today
Mark G. E. Kelly
We find ourselves today in a conjuncture where the use of language has become an object of political concern to a perhaps unprecedented extent, or at least in unprecedented ways. In particular, the words used to refer to individuals and to groups, down to the use of pronouns, have come into intense question, as have the ways in which groups are represented in the media and in positions of power. In light of this situation, I want to bring the analytical tools of a thinker peculiarly concerned with the nexus of language and politics, Michel Foucault, to bear in order critically to analyze recent developments. This recent mutation of the politics of language has occurred mostly in the four decades since Foucault’s main writings on power and knowledge appeared, during a period in which Foucault’s name has become ubiquitous in academic discourse. Yet for all the ubiquity of references to Foucault, it seems to me that there has been precious little real thinking through of the implications of his analytic of power relations, and that there has been a failure to do this in relation to the use of language in politics in particular.
Much of my critique here will be directed toward what is popularly called “representation” in media and institutions, which I argue essentially treats the inclusion of types of people as a form of signification. This is meant not to uniquely privilege this vector but rather to posit it as an example of a general tendency—in spite of Foucault’s insights—to understand language as politically monovalent, to understand words as having a single possible meaning in a given context and consequently a single political valence. My thesis regarding contemporary concerns around the use of language and representation is that they are literally superficial in being addressed toward the rearrangement of the audible and visible cues of social inequality rather than anything nonlinguistic, while indeed failing properly to account for the very real political import that language and representation have.
Tactical Polyvalence
The core conceptual point from Foucault’s thought that I will use to make this case is best encapsulated in the admittedly unwieldy phrase “the tactical polyvalence of discourses.” Perhaps its ugliness explains why Foucault never thematizes this notion: he uses the phrase in only two of his works, and then only once apiece, namely, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality (as part of the title of a section in which the term is not actually used) and in the contemporaneous Collège de France lecture series Society Must Be Defended, where the phrase appears once, along with a single use of the related phrase “strategic polyvalence.” In the lectures, tactical polyvalence figures as a peculiar property of a specific discourse, but in The History of Sexuality he posits it as a general feature of all discourse, in particular in the following key passage, which I now present as axiomatic:
We must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. It is this distribution that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those concealed, the enunciations required and those forbidden, that it comprises; with the variants and different effects—according to who is speaking, his position of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be situated—that it implies; and with the shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives that it also includes. Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.
For Foucault, discourse is the concrete core of the “power-knowledge” nexus: “it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.” Power is on Foucault’s conception essentially relational, inhering in relations between people, but these relations produce regular, quasi-agential “strategies” across society, and it is here that apparently contradictory discourses cohere with one another. Foucault provides us with three prime examples of this effect in his work. In Discipline and Punish, before he formulated the concept of tactical polyvalence as such, we can nonetheless find an example of it in the way the discourse of prison reform and calls for harsher punitive measures are characterized as effectively combining with one another to support the carceral system in general. In Society Must Be Defended, he claims that discourses of “race struggle” (in the very broad genealogical sense he gives this phrase, according to which both discourses of class struggle and racism are different instances of the same trope) can be utilized either by the oppressed or against them. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he discusses how the term “homosexuality” was invented by medics to pathologize those to whom it was applied, but then turned into a badge of identity by homosexuals around which to rally to seek liberation.
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