The work of representation

Dialectic’ is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and ‘semiology’ is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue (ibid).
construction, which is at the heart of culture, to its full depths. What we have offered here is, we hope, a relatively clear account of a set of complex, and as yet tentative, ideas in an unfinished project.

Rejecting both Hegelian Marxism (what he calls ‘the dialectic’) and semiotics, Foucault argued that:
Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts.

The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power not relations of meaning ...
(Foucault, 1980, pp. 114-5)

He moved away from an approach like that of Saussure and Barthes, based on ‘the domain of signifying structure’, towards one based on analysing what he called ‘relations of force, strategic developments and tactics’

We will return to Foucault's work in some of the subsequent chapters in this book (for example, Chapter 5). Here, we want to introduce Foucault and the discursive approach to representation by outlining three of his major ideas: his concept of discourse; the issue of power and knowledge; and the question of the subject

oucault’s attention were the various disciplines of knowledge in the human and social sciences - what he called 'the subjectifying social sciences'

Foucault’s work was much more historically grounded, more attentive to historical specificities, than the semiotic approach. As he said, ‘relations of power, not relations of meaning’ were his main concern

‘how human beings understand themselves in our culture’ and how our knowledge about ‘the social, the embodied individual and shared meanings' comes to be produced in different period

Foucault used the word ‘representation’ in a narrower sense than we are using it here, but he is considered to have contributed to a novel and significant general approach to the problem of representation. What concerned him was the production of knowledge (rather than just meaning) througli what he called discourse (rather than just language).

Models of representation, these critics argued, ought to focus on these broader issues of knowledge and power.