Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > * Words create reality?

Crunchy, my aim was simply to describe very, very briefly, and more or less impartially, a few approaches to the question of the relationship of language/discourse to reality. I think that you have misconstrued my post, particularly my last sentence:

Another handle on how reality is constructed by our discourse rather than reflected by it is offered by Foucault in The Will To Knowledge when he considers, for example, how the sexuality of children was created by an eighteenth-century discourse. [/QUOTE]

The epistemological status of scientific discourse is to produce a specific 'truth'. Foucault speaks of the procedures, the scientia sexualis which produced 'the truth of sex':

'"Sexuality": the correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis. The essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to the functional requirement of a discourse that must produce its truth. Situated at the point of intersection of a technique of confession and a scientific discursivity, where certain major mechanisms had to be found for adapting them to one another ... sexuality was defined as being "by nature": a domain susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one calling for therapeutic or normalizing interventions; a field of meanings to decipher; the site of processes concealed by specific mechanisms; a focus of indefinite causal relations; and an obscure speech (parole) that had to be ferreted out and listened to.'

So, for Foucault, things are not 'just the way they are'. They are *made* the way they are by regulatory social norms and practices, institutions and discourses. Children may well have been masturbating for centuries. But the sex of children and adolescents was not taken into account as something existing, something to be conceptualized, until the eighteenth century when 'the pedagogical institution ... multiplied forms of discourse on the subject; ... established various points of implantation for sex'.

But this is not to say that Foucault is suggesting that there is nothing that is non-discursive. He is not denying that there is a material reality which pre-exists humans. Nor is he denying the materiality of events and experience. What he *is* saying is that the only way we can apprehend reality is through discourse and discursive structures. In his view we categorise and interpret experience and events according to the discursive structures available to us, endowing these structures with a normality and a solidity that we often cannot think outside of.