Page 260 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes on a more dynamic sociological approach, as opposed to a usually held 'static' discourse. Said's
approach to knowledge Like Foucault, Said sees language as a battleground where speakers and
societies compete for power and domination. Foucault argues that the formation of discourse is
subject to the use of power which yields both repressive and generative effects at the same time.
Nevertheless, with the strong influence of structuralism and the cult of the death of the author, to
entrust discourse, which is theoretically deprived of agents, with a generative function seems an
awkward business. This problem can be seen in Foucault's concepts of "archaeology" and
"genealogy."
Foucault explains the repressive control of discourse as a feature of archaeology which we can see
in statements that attempt "to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and
rarity in discourse" (Foucault 1969: 234). We understand discourse as a 'limited system of presence'
in which only enunciations or the rarity of statements give meanings to discourse and not the
unsaid. While archaeology refers to the formation of objective structure, Foucault develops another
concept called genealogy to account for the generative effects of discourse. In his later essay
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1977), he explains how his use of 'genealogy' is derived from
Nietzsche's view of the development of morals through power. While the word tends to suggest
the idea of 'tracing back to the origin', Foucault's genealogy does not seek to establish a linear
development of historical events. On the contrary, Foucault uses genealogy to deconstruct that
very linearity that is central to the traditional way of writing history-as he puts it, genealogy
"seeks to makes visible all of those discontinuities that cross us" (1977: 162). However, Foucault's
notion of genealogy, as David Eick points out, remains a 'hazy' distinction from the concept of
archaeology. It is questionable that genealogy really has a generative function that archaeology
does not offer, when, in fact, one can argue that archaeology can pinpoint the same problem of
historical discontinuity. Furthermore, Foucault does not explain if one needs to venture into the
realm of the unsaid, the absent, the unannounced, in order to reconstruct genealogy. If so, it
would also call into question the need to inquire into the subjective mode of the absent, which is
what Foucault excludes in theorising discourse and archaeology for "[t]he analysis of statements
operates therefore without reference to a cogito" (Foucault 2004: 138). Simon During raises the
same problem in his article "Genealogy, Authorship, Power":
Where does this system of constraint end? Where does the positive programme of enabling the
"unsayable or unsaid" to speak, begin? To give prisoners, gays, the colonized or the marginal a
voice is also to demand of them their "truth," to suppose that they are the originating subjects of
a specific, more or less univocal, "voice," and therefore, to some degree at least, to call them into
that de-centred centre which constitutes the (post)modern world. (During 1992: 127) In effect,
Foucault's critics, such as Dreyfus and Rabinow, see the concepts of archaeology and genealogy as
incompatible, with archaeology encapsulated by the statements and governing rules of discourse
and genealogy seeking to trace the root of power and deconstruct precisely the discursive rules
which situate it (Eick 1999: 88).
Following Foucault's archaeology, Said bases his argument on a network of texts which forms a
web of interrelated discourse. Orientalism is a concept which works through its textual re-presence
in which stories, accounts and memoirs reenact the presence of thoughts and concepts about the
Orient as a textual presence, which in turn marks itself as representation in written format. Said's
Orientalism, together with the subsequent book Culture and Imperialism (1993) which is a
postcolonial expansion of his thesis in the former, are an archaeological project that attempted to
map out the discursive representations of the Orient and the colonies by the West and the empires.
In the Foucauldian manner, Said traces how the images of the West's other are constructed and
distinguished through a rarefaction and objectification of statements that provides a ground for
investigating the representations of the Orient and the colonies. Wolfgang Iser (2006) notes the
strong influence of Foucauldian discourse in Said's Culture and Imperialism: Edward Said's
postcolonial discourse, as developed in his book Culture and Imperialism, works as an imposition
in the Foucauldian sense on both colonial and anticolonial discourse. These are the "objects" to be
charted and it is this tripartite relationship through which postcolonial discourse gains salience.
Hence the latter assumes a critical position toward what it operates upon, although it has the same

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