Remembering My Roots

When you get to be my age, it's hard to remember how you came to think what you think, how your world view came to be what it is. Once in a while you are reminded.

Today I saw a couple of quotes from Michel Foucault on Twitter. Now, I'm not saying I read him all that thoroughly in graduate school, or that he was the only thinker I read who made this type of argument, but these words brought it all back:

Discourses are produced by the effects of power within a social order, and this power prescribes particular rules and categories which define the criteria for legitimating knowledge and truth within the discursive order.

Foucault uses the word "discourses," but all it means is communication (and in the case of my studies, that meant mass communication, mass media). "Social order" and "discursive order" and the idea of legitimating became so familiar to me that I stopped thinking of them as needing to be defined.

Another Foucault quote that was given on Twitter today:

Discourse analysis must seek to unfix/destabilize the accepted meanings, and reveal the ways dominant discourses exclude, marginalize and oppress realities that constitute equally valid claims to the question of how power could and should be exercised.

Discourse analysis is what Foucault did, though I always thought that name was bad marketing (hah). It made me want to run away, at any rate. I prefer to call it media literacy instead. Obviously, you have to analyze to do it, but there's something about the phrase discourse analysis that just dries the whole thing into a boring nothing.