Foucault’s overemphasis on discourse and power is overdetermining and politically disabling

(David, Language, History, And Class Struggle in In defense of history)

It should be emphasized that this argument differs substantially from poststructuralist accounts that may in some respects look similar. Michel Foucault, for example, is noted for his view of language as a terrain of power and domination embodied in particular social institutions such as hospitals, asylums and prisons; and, especially in some of his later writings, Foucault appears to allow for the possibility of resistance to practices of domination. Foucault’s emphasis on power was an attempt to counter the political emptiness of theories that reduce social relations to their linguistic forms. In a vigorous riposte to Derrida, he charged deconstruction with locating everything in texts “so as not to put discursive practices back into the field of transformations in which they are carried out.”4 This position has considerable strengths. Yet, while disavowing enclosure within texts, Foucault himself fails to break out of discourse as a field closed in upon itself. Indeed, his whole concept of “power-knowledge” tends towards the position that power relations are constructed in and through practices of “knowing” humans. And these practices—of classifying, measuring, and surveying people—originate in the realm of discourse, where people are assigned to different categories of thought and description. It follows that “the development of humanity is a series of interpretations." Thus, for all his insights into social institutions and their practices of domination, Foucault reverts to his own version of discursive determinism; he is led by the logic of his position to conclude that inevitably “one remains within the dimension of discourse.”5(29)