Discourse

From Geography

The term discourse has become one of the key terms

It has become one of the key critical terms in the vocabulary of the humanities and the social sciences, so it is not surprising that it is contentious.

written or spoken communication or debate. (oxford dictionary)It is important to distinguish Foucault's use of the category, a discourse, from contemporary uses of the term 'discourse'. For within the human sciences this term is becoming embarrassingly overloaded and more likely to induce confusion than any clarity it might originally have been set to produce (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/discours.htm).

Foucault's concern is not to produce a general theory of discourse (whatever that might mean). His use of the term discourse may be taken to be tactical. It may be thought of as an attempt to avoid treating knowledge in terms of 'ideas'. The reason for avoiding the term 'ideas' is that it brings in its train a series of presuppositions which Foucault hopes to abandon.