This chapter looks at the laws operating behind diverse statements, and in fact asks:
a) Who is speaking? Who uses this language and is qualified to do so? How does he/she presume that what she says is right and true? Who is permitted to proffer such a discourse? The title of doctor, for example, involves criteria of competence and knowledge, pedagogic norms, legal conditions. There are systems of differentiation and relations - for example attributions, hierarchical subordinations, functional complementarities, exchanges of information.
b) From what institutional sites has this individual made their discourse? Is it a place of constant, coded systematic observation (like a hospital) or is it a field where background and environment can be acknowledged (the documentary field)
c) The enunciations of the subject are also in part determined by the relations between the various domains she occupies. These grids of explicit or implicit interrogation give the subject a certain stance – she asks certain questions, perceives certain things within the boundaries of relevant information, occupies particular places in information networks. These enunciations, allowed to the subject by certain social discourse, thus changes substantially in availability and optimality over time.
It can be imagined then that there is substantial disparity regarding the types of enunciation possible in a field of discourse. These cannot be reduced to a single founding act or to a founding consciousness. Enunciative modalities allow space for the occupation of many perspectives – the modalities show up the field of dispersion, and it is not by recourse to a transcendental subject nor to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of enunciations should be defined.
Ref:
Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
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