19,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
This book deals with one particular aspect of British drama between the 1890s and the late 20th century: ‘queerness’. ‘Queerness’ is a term that in the last two decades has come to be used predominantly to refer to manifestations of homosexuality, male and female, and otherness. In total, this book concentrates on four examples: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton, Boom Bang-A-Bang by Jonathan Harvey and Handbag by Mark Ravenhill. These works are analysed with sections concentrating on figure conception and characterisation and additionally discourse and language use. Furthermore, an introduction to drama theory, discourse theory and ‘queer theories’ will be given as well as some preliminary definitions of ‘homosexuality’, ‘queerness’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘otherness’. From the text: - Discourse Theory; - Queer Theory; - Oscar Wilde; - Joe Orton; - Jonathan Harvey; - Mark Ravenhill
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 283
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Ähnliche
Impressum:
Copyright (c) 2015 GRIN Verlag / Open Publishing GmbH, alle Inhalte urheberrechtlich geschützt. Kopieren und verbreiten nur mit Genehmigung des Verlags.
Bei GRIN macht sich Ihr Wissen bezahlt! Wir veröffentlichen kostenlos Ihre Haus-, Bachelor- und Masterarbeiten.
Jetzt beiwww.grin.com
Notes on Abbreviations and on Quotations from the Plays
For complete references of the plays see ‘Works Cited’.
The abbreviations above are used for all quotations from the primary works. In the text, The Importance of Being Earnest is abbreviated to Earnest, What the Butler Saw to Butler, and Boom Bang-A-Bang to Boom.
Since not all of the plays are divided into acts and scenes, quotations from the plays are rendered differently. Common to all is the reference to the respective page number.
Quotations from The Importance of Being Earnest are rendered as follows: (IBE: 27, I, 490), with the first (Arabic) number referring to the page, the second (Roman) number to the act and the third (Arabic) number to the line.
Quotations from What the Butler Saw are rendered as follows: (WBS: 418, II), with the first (Arabic) number referring to the page, the second (Roman) number to the act.
Quotations from Handbag are rendered as follows: (Hbg: 150, sc. 2), with the first (Arabic) number referring to the page, the second (Arabic) number, preceded by “sc.”, to the scene.
Quotations from Boom Bang-A-Bang are rendered as follows: (BBB: 199, I), with the first (Arabic) number referring to the page, the second (Roman) number to the act.
Quotations from other plays are rendered in analogy to the above, depending on whether the particular play is divided into acts and/or scenes and whether line references are provided or not.
The turn of phrase ‘my emphasis’ is abbreviated to ‘my emph.’, ‘emphasis sic’ is abbreviated to ‘emph. sic’ .
Table of Contents
Notes on Abbreviations and on Quotations from the Plays
0. Introduction
1. Theory
1.1. Drama Theory
1.2. Discourse Theory
1.3. Queer Theories
1.4. Some Preliminary Definitions
2. Handbag and The Importance of Being Earnest
2.1. Figure Conception and Characterisation in Handbag and The Importance of Being Earnest
2.1.1. From the Margins to the Centre: Backstage Characters
2.1.2. The Absent Father and the Disruption of the Patriarchal Order
2.1.3. Concepts of Artificiality, Naturalness and Normalness
2.1.4. Notes on the ‘Primacy of Language’, on the Consumption of Food, and on ‘Bunburyism’
2.2. Discourse and Language Use in Handbag and The Importance of Being Earnest
2.2.1. The ‘Interview Scene’
2.2.2. Ravenhill’s Vision of Lady Bracknell: Augusta O’Flaherty
2.3. Brief Summary of Interim Findings I
3. Handbag and What the Butler Saw
3.1. Figure Conception and Characterisation in Handbag and What the Butler Saw
3.1.1. Heteronomous Identity: The Case of Geraldine Barclay
3.1.2. The Self as Reproduction of the Other and a ‘Post-queer’ Potential: Phil/ Eustace and Cardew
3.1.3. Dr Rance and the Ridiculousness of Stating Unnaturalness and Abnormality
3.2. Discourse and Language Use in Handbag and What the Butler Saw
3.2.1. Captivated by Cliché
3.2.2. Exclusion Strategies: Allegations of Madness, Perversion, Anarchism and Delusion
3.2.3. Bodies and the Marketplace: Discourse in Handbag
3.3. Brief Summary of Interim Findings II
4. Handbag and Boom Bang-A-Bang
4.1. Figure Conception and Characterisation in Handbag and Boom Bang-A-Bang
4.1.1. ‘Norman No-Mates’ from Upstairs: Excluding the Gay Fellow
4.1.2. Steph as a ‘Queer’ Character
4.2. Discourse and Language Use in Handbag and Boom Bang-A-Bang
4.2.1. Three ‘Queer’ Kinds of Cliché
4.2.2. ‘Queering’ Discourses
5. Conclusion
6. Works Cited
Appendix ‘Matrix Correspondences’
Anhang: Kurze Zusammenfassung der Arbeit auf deutsch
0. Introduction
This thesis deals with one particular aspect of British drama between the 1890s and the late 20th century: ‘queerness’. ‘Queerness’ is a term that in the last two decades has come to be used predominantly to refer to manifestations of homosexuality, male and female, and otherness (for definitions see below). The introductory remarks are preceded by a list of abbreviations indicating the system by which references to the plays are made. The first chapter introduces drama theory, discourse theory and ‘queer theories’ as the major theoretical approaches applied in the play analyses. The first chapter also presents the working hypothesis. The theoretical part will be concluded by some preliminary definitions of ‘homosexuality’, ‘queerness’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘otherness’. Chapters two to four each offer analyses of particular plays, the terminology of which follows Manfred Pfister’s The Theory and Analysis of Drama (2000).
In total, this study concentrates on four examples: The Importance of Being Earnest (premiered 1895, published 1899) by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), What the Butler Saw (1969) by Joe Orton (1933-1967), Boom Bang-A-Bang (1995) by Jonathan Harvey (1968-) and Handbag (1998) by Mark Ravenhill (1966-). The main part of the discussion consists of three chapters that offer play analyses. Each of them contrasts Ravenhill’s Handbag to one of the three former plays in chronological order. Hence, the second chapter compares Handbag to Wilde’s play, the third chapter examines Handbag in contrast to Orton’s play, and the fourth chapter juxtaposes it to the 1990s play Boom Bang-A-Bang. The general emphasis will lie on language use. It is under this aspect that concepts which keep recurring in the plays – such as identity and alterity, naturalness and artificiality, sameness and otherness, and of course queerness – will be looked into. The three chapters dealing with drama analysis (ch. 2-4) mirror each other in structure: An introductory part is followed by a section on figure conception and characterisation, which in turn is followed by a section on discourse and language use.
The fifth chapter provides a brief summary of the major findings. The bibliographical and penultimate part comprises all works cited. The concluding part contains an appendix. In addition, a brief summary in German is attached to the study.
1. Theory
In this thesis three theoretical approaches are applied: drama theory, discourse theory and ‘queer theories’. It is in this order that they will be briefly introduced.
1.1. Drama Theory
As far as drama theory is concerned, the terminology follows Manfred Pfister’s The Theory and Analysis of Drama (2000). To this day there seems to be no other companion to the theory of drama which is as detailed and at the same time as concise as Pfister’s. The main foci of the discussion are figure conception and characterisation on the one hand, and discourse and language use on the other hand. Hence, the two chapters from which most of the technical terms are borrowed are chapter five “Dramatis personae and dramatic figure” (Pfister 2000: 160-195), and chapter four “Verbal communication” (Pfister 2000: 103-159). The following is an incomplete and simplified account of only some basic expressions and concepts of drama theory following Pfister. I will be chiefly concentrating on the terms ‘figure’, ‘expressive function’, ‘referential function’, and ‘appellative function’ of dramatic language, ‘explicit-figural self-commentary’, ‘implicit figural self-commentary’ and outside commentary, as well as ‘internal’ and ‘external communication system’. As a last point, attention will be drawn to the specific status of fictitiousness that dramatic figures occupy.
Concerning figure conception and characterisation, only two aspects will be mentioned here. Firstly, being fictitious, figures are of an ontological status different from that of real persons (Pfister 2000: 160ff.).[1] While the set of information about real persons is infinite and open to change, the set of information about figures is finite and closed. On the one hand, this means that relevance must be ascribed to each piece of information about each figure and that it is possible to tabulate all relevant qualitative features of the figures in matrices of contrasts and correspondences (Pfister 2000: 166-170). On the other hand, this also entails that dramatic figures are of ‘fragmentary quality’, meaning that the characterisation of dramatic figures can never be as detailed as that of the characters of novels (Pfister 2000: 162). This is partly due to the relative brevity of plays in comparison to novels and partly to the fact that figures are not described but that they represent themselves, namely through dialogue and action. This brings us to the second significant difference between dramatic figures and both real persons and the characters of novels: Dramatic figures are compelled to speak. The reason for this is obvious. Apart from action, dialogue is the prime mode for representing figures. It will be seen that in each of the four plays, on which the discussion focuses, action is subservient to verbal communication.
Regarding verbal communication, the distinction between the six functions of dramatic language on which Pfister elaborates will be adhered to in the following. The six functions are the expressive, the referential, the appellative, the phatic, the metalingual and the poetic function (Pfister 2000: 105-117). However, we will be concerned here only with the first three functions. The expressive function dominates an utterance if what is being said relates back to the speaker. The referential function dominates if the utterance refers to the speech context, the situative context or the environment. The appellative function dominates if the speaker, either explicitly or implicitly, tries to exert influence over the addressee of an utterance. Nevertheless, dramatic language is characterised by polyfunctionality rather than monofunctionality, meaning that an utterance usually fulfils several of the above mentioned functions at the same time. An utterance which is dominated by the speaker-related, expressive function often is also an explicit-figural or implicit-figural self-commentary. Yet, it can also be an explicit-figural or implicit-figural outside commentary (Pfister 2000: 183-194). A brief extract from What the Butler Saw will serve to illustrate this:
Prentice [to his wife]: Could I borrow one of your dresses for a while, my dear?
Mrs Prentice: I find your sudden craving for women’s clothing a dull and, on the whole, a rather distasteful subject (WBS: 375, I).
Since Dr Prentice directs a plea at his wife, his contribution can be described as being dominated by the appellative function. The way in which Mrs Prentice reacts, however, draws attention to the fact that inherent in his question is an implicit self-commentary, namely that he would like to have a dress – for himself, as Mrs Prentice assumes wrongly. In Mrs Prentice’s reply, a dominance of both the referential and the expressive function can be detected. The referential function is due to the fact that her statement refers to the immediate speech situation, more precisely, to Dr Prentice’s request. Nonetheless, Mrs Prentice expresses her own opinion and she does so through an explicit self-commentary, commencing with “I find”. From this derives the assumption that apart from the referential function, the expressive function is also stressed. At the same time, Mrs Prentice’s remark is an implicit outside commentary, for she accuses her husband of being obsessed with women’s clothes.
Apart from this, the short repartee points to another distinction that has to be made whenever plays are analysed. There is a discrepancy between the effect which Mrs Prentice’s reply will have on her husband and the effect it will have on the audience. It has to be assumed that Dr Prentice is troubled by his wife’s remark, since he faces the problem of either having to confess his attempted assault of a job applicant or of being accused of transvestism. His concern is indicated by a stage direction, namely by the explicit-authorial commentary “Dr Prentice passes a hand across his brow” (WBS: 375, I). By contrast, the audience will be induced to laugh, because they know that Dr Prentice does not require a woman’s dress because he has a proclivity for transvestism, but because he needs to clothe the victim of his attempted assault. The audience know this, because at this point in the play, there is a discrepancy of awareness between the audience and the figure ‘Mrs Prentice’, with the audience being granted superior awareness. Such a discrepancy of awareness (Pfister 2000: 49-55) and the resulting difference between the effects on the figures and the effects on the audience, is due to a more general and fundamental distinction between two communication systems: the distinction between the external and the internal communication system (Pfister 2000: 3f.). The internal communication system refers to the level on which the figures of a play operate. On this level, communication has to be regarded to take place between the figures. Both the senders and the receivers of utterances are figures. The internal communication level might be referred to as the ‘inner-dramatic world’. The external communication system relates this inner-dramatic world to the audience. Even though on the external communication level the senders of information still are the figures, the receivers are the audience. With regard to the internal communication level, one may analyse, for example, how one utterance is related to the preceding or following utterance and to what extent language and action are related. With regard to the external communication system, by contrast, one may ask how the audience will react to, or are expected to react to, a particular repartee or action.
Before progressing to discourse theory, I would like to draw attention to one specific aspect in which drama differs significantly from all other literary forms, and which Pfister leaves relatively understated. I am referring to drama’s peculiar ‘dual nature’ or ‘duplicity’ as far as ‘reality’ is concerned, i.e. the phenomenon that drama participates at once in fiction and in reality.[2] In a way, drama can come ‘closer to reality’ than any poem or narration can, because each performance of a play really takes place and hence participates in the real world. At the same time, ‘reality’, i.e. the audience’s reality, affects each performance of a play. Thus, obliquely, the play itself is affected by reality. Examples of the influence of real life on plays can be observed in the many cases in which later editions of scripts have been revised, some clearly in response to audiences’ and critics’ reactions. Further examples are the cases in which plays are revised on account of the opinion of producers and directors, who usually also have audience reactions in mind when inducing playwrights to rewrite or even delete certain episodes.[3]
Different again from both the characters of novels and from real persons, dramatic figures are likewise characterised by a ‘dual nature’. They occupy a very peculiar status of ‘fictitiousness’: They are indisputably fictitious – as ‘figures’. At the same time, however, they are non-fictitious, or ‘real’. This is because in performance a figure never appears exclusively as figure but always also as the specific person who acts as the respective figure. The actor ‘embodies’ the figure.[4] Arguably, it is not least this corporeality – or ‘corpo-reality’, i.e. the reality of the body – to which drama’s oscillation between reality and fiction can be ascribed. This oscillation also goes for roles and identities. The actor enacts the role, but the influence between the actor’s identity and the role is reciprocal. Not only does the actor’s identity influence the role, but the role also influences the actor’s identity, even if the significance which a specific role occupies in processes of identity formation varies. These observations may offer an explanation for the great interest which ‘gender studies’, as well as feminist, lesbian, gay and queer studies, take in drama and other performance arts (cf. Butler 1990b; de Lauretis 1990; Wandor 1987). It is precisely the intersection of roles and identities that is at the heart of many of the theories developed in these fields. With regard to the plays which will be analysed in the following sections, we will see that the tension between roles and identities is crucial for both the respective plot developments and for many of the ‘queer’ aspects of the plays.
1.2. Discourse Theory
I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role it is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality (Foucault 1972: 216).
‘Discourse theory’ is based on the assumption that the perception of the world is contingent on the language with which this world is referred to. Even more radically, it assumes that the world is not only contingent on, but in fact created by language, as the specific world as perceived by the individual human being. At the same time, it assumes that the language with which the individual refers to the world, i.e. the language which determines how the individual perceives the world, is not controllable by the individual. Instead, it is determined and controlled by decentralised and anonymous power structures. Very generally, discourse theory holds that no individual can make just any statement at any place at any point in time: “[N]one may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he has satisfied certain conditions […]” (Foucault 1972: 224f.). It is the aim of ‘discourse analysis’ to construe the historical conditions under which statements can be made, or rather, under which statements have been made in the past.
The following will briefly delineate some of the major aspects and basic definitions of discourse theory and discourse analysis as they have been introduced by the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Only those terms will be introduced here which will be re-encountered in forthcoming chapters or are of immediate relevance for the definitions of the terms that will be re-encountered. The terms I will be concentrating on are ‘power’, ‘discourse’, ‘statement’, ‘enunciation’, ‘referential’, ‘discursive formation’, ‘discursive practice’, and ‘reverse discourse’. All these terms, however, are multiply interconnected. Since the body of Foucault’s work is vast and since Foucault repeatedly revised his own definitions of recurring terms, the definitions provided here follow the ones articulated in only three of Foucault’s works. The particular works I am referring to are The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), the transcript of Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, “The Discourse on Language” (1972), and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1990).[5] The following explanations and definitions make no appeal to completeness. Rather, they should be understood as an attempt to provide a greatly simplified overview of some basic, yet very complex, concepts providing the basis of Foucault’s discourse theory. Furthermore, it will be indicated how discourse theory and discourse analysis may be applied in the following play analyses.
The conceptualisation of power is an even more persistent theme in Foucault’s work than the conceptualisation of discourse. Considering what has been said above about Foucault’s frequent revisions of central terms and concepts, it may not be surprising that in the course of time his concept of power underwent radical changes. While the earlier works are dominated by a negative view of power, which then is chiefly taken to be a means of repression and exclusion, the later works are dominated by a more positive view. Here, the aspect of de-centralisation is further stressed in so far as power is now seen to “underlie[] all social relations from the institutional to the intersubjective and is a fundamentally enabling one” (McNay 1994: 3, my emph.). The most important thing to note is that Foucault sees power and discourse as inextricably linked. While power is distributed and controlled by discourse, discourse is distributed and controlled by decentralised power structures:
[…D]iscourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power […]. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it (Foucault 1990: 101; cf. Probyn 1997: 139).
What this quotation illustrates is that power is understood not as an instrument at the hands of some unspecified ‘Owner of power’, but (partly) as a product of discourse. Therefore, an explanation of the central term discourse becomes inevitable.
When defining the term discourse, one must distinguish between a broad and a narrow meaning of discourse. Unfortunately, the broad meaning of discourse, as Foucault employs it, is extremely hazy. Roughly, it may be understood as an umbrella term encompassing ‘anything that has been enunciated, by anyone, at any time, at any place’. It is this broad meaning of discourse that Foucault has in mind when hypothesising:
There is undoubtedly in our society […] a profound logophobia, a sort of dumb fear of these events, of this mass of spoken things, of everything that could possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered even and perilous in it, of the incessant, disorderly buzzing of discourse (Foucault 1972: 228f.).
Discourse, in this broad sense, is thus characterised as being disorderly, discontinuous, proliferating, violent and unpredictable, in short, threatening. Due to discourse’s additional omnipresence, the human being can never escape its “awesome materiality” (Foucault 1972: 216). Strategies are required to help control the perils, the chance and disorder inherent in discourse. In “The Discourse on Language”, Foucault calls such strategies rules or systems of appropriation, limitation, and exclusion (Foucault 1972: 216, 219, 231). Above all, he elaborates on “three great systems of exclusion governing discourse – prohibited words, the division of madness and the will to truth” (Foucault 1972: 219). To these systems of exclusion, particularly to the will to truth, we will return below.
In its narrow meaning, discourse is defined “as the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation” (Foucault 1972: 107).[6] Such a group of statements “can be assigned particular modalities of existence” (Foucault 1972: 107). In other words, discourse means a set of statements which are governed by the same (discursive) regularities and which belong to the same (discursive) formation. Discourse is a practice governed by “its own forms of sequence and succession” (Foucault 1972: 169).
In order to grasp the full meaning of the definition of discourse, one has to look at the way in which Foucault understands statements, discursive formations and discursive practices. One of the major problems when wanting to apply Foucauldian terminology paradoxically arises out of the fact that Foucault often deploys terms that are part of everyday language. Yet, his use of these terms differs considerably from the way in which they are used in an everyday context. At the same time, Foucault usually omits any clear definition of his own use of these terms. An example of this is his use of the seemingly unproblematic term ‘statement’. The statement is the smallest unit of discourse that Foucault examines. Very basically, the ‘statement’ (énoncé) must be distinguished from the ‘enunciation’ (énonciation). While the statement is characterised by a repeatable materiality (Foucault 1972: 102), an enunciation is unrepeatable and unique:
We will say that an enunciation takes place whenever a group of signs is emitted. […] The enunciation is an unrepeatable event; it has a situated and dated uniqueness that is irreducible (Foucault 1972: 101).
By contrast, in order that one may refer to a group of emitted signs as a statement, four conditions have to be met: (1) There must be a referential to which the signs of this group refer. This referential is not identical with the referent of a proposition. It is less concrete than this. It is does not consist “of ‘things’, ‘facts’, ‘realities’, or ‘beings’, but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named […] within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied it” (Foucault 1972: 91). The referential “forms the place, the condition, the field of emergence” of a statement in that it defines its “possibilities of appearance and delimitation” (Foucault 1972: 91). (2) There must be a “set of possible positions for a subject” (Foucault 1972: 108). While an enunciation is enunciated by a single, specified speaker, a statement is made from a certain position (at a certain place and point in time), but not by one particular individual. (3) There must be a “field of coexistence” with other statements (Foucault 1972: 108). Every statement is contingent on other statements, or rather, all statements are interdependent:
A statement always has borders peopled by other statements. […] There is no statement that does not presuppose others; there is no statement that is not surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects of series and succession, a distribution of functions and roles (Foucault 1972: 97ff.).
As mentioned above: (4) In order to be considered as a statement, a group of emitted signs needs to have a repeatable materiality (Foucault 1972: 102, 109). There need to be possibilities for the statement to be re-inscribed and transcribed (Foucault 1972: 103). Summing up the above in a greatly simplifying way, we may say that a statement is the isolated, repeatable materiality of what has been said by an unspecified speaker at a certain place and at a certain point in time, bearing a contingency on other statements (Fink-Eitel 1989: 58). Furthermore, a single statement is not a discrete unit carrying meaning. Instead, it has to be understood as a function, more precisely as a function which “cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space” (Foucault 1972: 87). Consequently, the aim of the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ is not to try and interpret statements, but to analyse their positivity. In other words, the aim is to establish when and where a specific statement emerged, and what the underlying conditions for its emergence are.
Under certain conditions statements may be connected to groups. Provided that the statements are connected and organised in accordance with certain rules and regularities, we may refer to a group of them as discursive formation (cf. Marti 1999: 40f.):[7]
Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, […] a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation (Foucault 1972: 38, emph. sic).
In short, a discursive formation is “the general enunciative system that governs a group of verbal performances” (Foucault 1972: 116). It is significant that within a particular discursive formation no-one may say just anything at any time. Instead, what can and what cannot be said is determined by certain rules, i.e. the rules of formation (Foucault 1972: 38). Controlling the emergence and connection of statements, these rules overlap with what Foucault calls discursive practices. A discursive practice is
[…] a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function (Foucault 1972: 117).
Implicit in the above is that the rules determining which statements may be connected to a particular discursive formation, i.e. what can and cannot be said within a particular discourse, are changeable. They differ from one discourse to another. Additionally, they usually change over time with regard to the same discourse. The aforementioned three basic rules, or ‘great systems’, of exclusion – “prohibited words, the division of madness and the will to truth” (Foucault 1972: 219) – might be regarded as such discursive practices. One of the most vivid illustrations of how these rules work, and, more precisely, how the will to truth works, is the example of Mendel that Foucault provides:
People have often wondered how on earth nineteenth-century botanists and biologists managed not to see the truth of Mendel’s statements. […] Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within the true) of contemporary biological discourse: it simply was not along such lines that objects and biological concepts were formed (Foucault 1972: 224, emph. sic).
Interestingly, Foucault here implies that Mendel himself was thinking ‘along such lines’ that were not part of contemporary biological discourse. The reason for mentioning this is that such implication seems inconsistent with one of the basic assumptions of discourse theory. I am referring to the assumption that the individual, who is seen to be subjected to discourse rather than in control of it, is unable to think or articulate anything that is not part of the general system of thought. The very same kind of inconsistency is also at the heart of another phenomenon, i.e. of ‘reverse’ discourse. The question of whether or not there can be any ‘reverse’ discourse is inextricably linked to the question of whether or not an individual can think along such lines that move beyond those of the dominant discourse. It is in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1990) that Foucault assumes that a ‘reverse’ discourse exists:
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature, of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and ‘psychic hermaphrodism’ made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in [sic] its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified (Foucault 1990: 101, my emph.).
A ‘reverse’ discourse, as Foucault here uses the term, is the kind of discourse that reflects and ‘re-presents’ another discourse, in that it deals with the same discursive objects, the same themes, and yet is crucially different. According to the above, the nineteenth-century ‘reverse’ discourse of homosexuality can be regarded as a reflection and a ‘re-presentation’ of the discourse of homosexuality as it had been introduced by psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature. The fact that “homosexuality began […] to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” not only means that homosexuality now had a voice. It also implies that with this voice homosexuality demanded a ‘re-valuation’ of itself, i.e. a re-valuation of how homosexuality was thought of and spoken of. The question that arises is how the production of such a reverse discourse could be possible. Discourse theory radically breaks with the Enlightenment idea of the autonomous founding subject as the originator and master of his thoughts. Instead, it considers the individual human being to be not only subjected to, or enslaved by, but even created by discourse. Considering all this, it is unclear how a reverse discourse might emerge. It is not surprising, therefore, that in his later works Foucault parts with the assumption that reverse discourse is possible (cf. Winko 1997: 469; Kammler 1990: 50).
In this thesis, however, the term reverse discourse will be employed nevertheless. In accordance with the above cited passage from the History of Sexuality (1990), the term will be used in reference to discourse which reflects a particular discourse, yet ‘re-presents’ and ‘re-values’ the discursive objects of the same (cf. ch. 2.1.3.; 4.2.2.). The reason for retaining the concept of reverse discourse despite the above reservations is the following: There seems to be a dilemma at the very heart of discourse theory, which, naturally, cannot be solved here: Foucault assumes that no individual is capable of changing the prevailing discourse of his own time. Yet, he demonstrates that in the course of time discourses undergo changes, discontinuities and transformations. It must be taken into consideration, however, that there are no other participants in discourse than a myriad of individuals. The ‘dilemma’ arises out of the fact that these three observations do not go together. Therefore, instead of maintaining that the individual has no influence whatsoever on the discourse he is participating in, perhaps one could propose the following: Discourse changes over time. Since the only participants in discourse are innumerable individuals, the changes discourse undergoes must be on account of these individuals. Hence, a certain influence is to be attributed to the individual. Only, this influence is oblique. No individual can change discourse at will or with a specific aim in mind. The individual’s influence is not an ‘im-mediate’ one. A few more words are in order to clarify this. It seems possible for the individual, albeit to a certain extent only, to transgress the rules of formation and think along lines that prevailing discourse does not provide for. Mendel is an example of this. Even though contemporary biology discourse did not change immediately after Mendel had put forward his hypotheses, and even though it did not change for many decades afterwards, it did change eventually – and arguably not least because of Mendel’s theses. Hence, we might put forward the suggestion that the individual has a certain restricted influence on discourse, even though this influence is not subject to his own control.
I would agree with the assumption that the way in which the individual perceives the world and the way the world can be thought of, is conditioned by discourse (in the broad and the narrow sense). I would also agree that the individual himself is conditioned by discourse. Yet, I would argue that if the individual is aware of his being conditioned by discourse, he becomes less conditioned. He does not become free, but he becomes free enough to recognise that there are fetters that bind him. He may even get a vague idea of what these fetters look like and might struggle to free himself of them. The fact that Foucault can speak of the will to truth is an example of this. He is able to recognise the will to truth and to elaborate on how this will to truth works as a system of exclusion. At the same time, Foucault is conditioned by the will to truth, as are his works, too. Yet, the fact that his works abound with revisions of his own ideas and with contradictions to his own theses, seems to indicate that in a sense Foucault managed not to surrender to the will to truth entirely. Precisely this might be one of the reasons why the perception of Foucault’s work is so difficult: because it suspends the will to truth to which we, the readers of his work, are subjected.
