Foucault seeks to disrupt historical theoretical problems, which include discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation. Within these concepts, he examines two forms of continuity: one being the tendency to always avoid the “interruption of a real event” by replacing it with something that precedes it. The other form is taking actual statements “already said,” which makes the saying possible. He wants to avoid this process by looking for interruptions and to look at the immediacy of the statement. Foucault wants to question identifiable groupings and division of groupings, such as literature and philosophy, terms that emerged after the 17th century. These divisions are reflexive categories and should not only be questioned but also how they interact with one another. Discontinuity between categories leads to the emergence of new relations and interruptions and leads him to his four-step hypothesis.
To test how objects of discourse operate, Foucault uses the example of how madness emerged out of psychopathology in the nineteenth century. He demonstrates that just because two statements belong to the same group, they don’t refer to the same object (i.e. madness isn’t defined by two statements). Rather, madness is understood through all of its relations to other statements; there is not one version of it that encompasses everything. The hypothesis begins by mapping out surfaces of the object’s emergence (different types of mania, criminality, etc.) and finds a way of limiting its domain and giving it the status of an object to name and describe. The second step is to describe the authorities of delimitation, which defines a group of statements by its similarities instead of what they are trying to define. The example of medical discourse highlights how the terms get too complicated when trying to identify how they relate. In essence, how the statements exist through their governing system is the best method for analysis. The third step of the hypothesis analyzes the grids of specification—systems which classify the different types of madness and how they are divided, contrasted, related, etc. In the 19th century psychopathologic discourse, categories included: soul, body, life, and history of individuals. The fourth step is to look at the themes, an idea that doesn’t work because it can include a variety of discourses that negate or complicate each other. The key point in this process is the concern with maintaining discourse’s “consistency to make it emerge in its own complexity” (47). These hypotheses birthed a new idea that instead, accounted for the common discrepancies and measured them through that lens, a concept he calls “discursive formation.”
Hortense J. Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” explores femininity in relation to African captivity and the Atlantic slave trade attempting to use a similar method. The way Spillers presents her ideas, though, is confusing. It’s hard to tell if she tries to differentiate slavery by showing how femininity is erased and female slaves are lumped in with male slaves, or if her main effort is to show that all slaves are feminized by being essentially unfathered/unfamilied. Perhaps she is merely demonstrating that the term slavery creates a multitude of implications. Africans who sold their neighbors as slaves valued female slaves and kept them for their own markets, creating an absence of female slaves transported on the Middle Passage. In that context, the female was valued as female. Their absence from slave ships was noticed and accounted for in purely mathematical terms (how much space needed to be made for each female body), but neither the absence nor the presence of femininity was noticed by slave traders on ships who mostly leave female slaves out of their narratives and instead focus on male insurrection rather than either female insurrection or conquest. The slaves themselves noticed the maternal absence because women slaves were bought and sold with no regard for kinship. Still slaveholders, and inheritors of the ghost of slavery, were/are very aware of the presence of the female slave. The former in terms of hypersexuality or sexual jealousy, and the latter in the many images of the suffering slave woman. Because of the number of varying perspectives and contexts, femininity and slavery together is best understood through the discourse of occurrences and perceptions of them.
Objects are discussed again through psychopathology. Foucault looks at why certain terms get selected, which get obliterated through history, and how they all transform. He’s interested in the surfaces of emergence (what is madness?), how did the defining objects create the discourse to be discussed, who was the authority, and what were the systems in place? The problem, he finds, is the object of emergence also relies on the interconnecting points that allow for a specific discourse – it’s the complexity of these relationships that characterize them. Discursive relations can also encompass what is being said outside the discourse and within: it’s in the limits that matters.
To answer the question of how statements are connected (again with 19th century medicine), the laws and origins behind them must be understood, and is broken up into 3 parts. The first is: who is speaking? This includes qualifications of the doctor; the complex history of education; societal standards, how they relate to society, etc. The second component of connection is the institutional sites which discourse comes from. The example gives the hospital which has a governing system of its own as well as smaller, complex systems within it. Finally, the third part consists of the positions of the subject: listening, questioning, and observing. These relations are composed of many different elements to constitute discourse and “it is this, as a practice, that establishes between them all a system of relations…[and] are not simply juxtaposed by a series of historical contingencies, it is because it makes constant use of this group of relations” (54). Ultimately, statements cannot exist on their own but must be understood through their complicated history, which is essentially the idea Foucault is trying to get away from.
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