Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

     Language obfuscates into every social aspect, for not only is one no longer conscious of one’s words to convey ideas, but one thinks one expresses the ideas themselves.  Given language’s pervasive boundaries, discourse, as a form of the language technique becomes problematic.  Through time, the meaning of discourse decentralized and incorporated various conceptions; Michel Foucault uses the word to deconstruct its connotation, causing an expansion of its meaning in which one explores power dynamics.

     Perpetual use of a word causes assumption of its meaning. Inquiring into its meaning passes for a continuation of reading. One only knows around the word. When one pauses and attempts to define the word, momentary silence persists until a process begins which shifts from assumptions to actually looking at the word.  Discourse describes dialogue, academic analysis, fields of study, the act of conversation, speech, the use of reason and rationality, and a path for knowledge.[1]  Given its variance in meaing, Foucault shapes the word, discourse, into an inclusive, complex concept, which not only describes the term but also explores the background, the depth of its function in society.

     Foucault provides one to interact with discourse as controlled chaos, typified language, a structure, a construct in which power dynamics are expressed, along with various isolated and categorized vocabularies revolving around a central conception.  Discourse exists simultaneously as a description of language, and as a technique, which augments the body into various fields of study (particularly of the scientific realm).  The obfuscation of discourse provides the lack of awareness in how various fields use the same technique to produce a certain outcome.  It is not only a matter of what discourse does, but also of how and why it holds such a function.

     Every categorized field (philosophy, science, religion, etc.) exerts a continuum in which to perpetually captivate the body.  The fields’ expansive nature never deletes a concept, but continues cramming more and apparently different ideas onto the scene.  The effect is that “by speaking about it so much by discovering it multiplied, partitioned off and specified precisely where one had placed it, what one was seeking essentially was simply to conceal sex: a screen-discourse, a dispersion-avoidance.”[2]  Each introduction of another concept attempts to clarify, but just as with the meaning of discourse itself, it confines the subject to classification. In other words, nothing new is added, but a different explanation arises.  Foucault wades through the murky pond of discourse in the attempt to find the interrelated flow, to examine the concept of power machinations.  Along with perpetual dialogue, importance lays in what is spoken and what remains unacknowledged.

     Discourse achieves its descriptions not only through what it is, but also what it is not.  In other words, if the concept of discourse expresses typified language, it confines what remains unclassified to the outer limits of dialogue.  Discourse exists in dichotomous tension between what is applicable and inapplicable: “areas were thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of tact and discretion…constituted a whole restrictive economy, one that was incorporated into that politics of language and speech.”[3]  The tension in the discursive field between verbal and nonverbal establishment, the acknowledged and unacknowledged, can be explored by analyzing the underlying constructs, which establish a dialogue.[4]   Foucault takes the issue of sexuality beyond the tension that establishes discourse, and examines the techniques in which knowledge-power establishes value.  Discourse, it seems, acts as the way in which power obfuscates, categorizes and establishes the body.

     Life is unimaginable without discourse; it pervades every mode of thought.   Thus, the inquiry is not what is discourse (given its existence as a power technique), but in examining its tools.  Perhaps confession is an obfuscating mechanism of discourse (just as discourse is an obfuscating tool of language), for “the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface…”[5] In the shift between confession as something that was said and then gone, into a statement which aggregates an identity, we engage in the tension between repression and expression.[6]   If confession is speaking about a concept and the opposite of confession is silence, what is the space between the two?  What is it in congruence as being a tool?

     Perhaps my obsession with confession exists in the lack of a follow-up question. Confession is discourse.  It is how we make sense of life:  a “pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches, out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it.”[7]  The concept of confession is overwhelming for its macro-technique as a form of discourse and the micro-use as the body’s identity (attaining labels).  The issue of confession is that it just is. There’s nothing more to it, although there seems to be more, but which is currently unknowable - quite typical to the discursive power, where a portion of the confessional technique exists as silence, inexpressible by language. 

     Through the concept of discourse, we find ourselves in a trap of meanings perpetuating more meaning, which Foucault slowly incorporates into a spatial environment.  Discourse is the manner in which the technique of power establishes various segmentations and classifications of power within intersecting fields, most notably the pervasiveness of the scientific realm.  Foucault uses discourse to complicate granted ideas in order to examine the space in which things come to be and augment society.