Discourse and Geography

Discourse is a particular claim about the relationship between words and the things they represent. Discourse theory began with Michel Foucault, the famous French philosopher, as a critique of the Enlightenment idea that science and scientific investigation—using observation, measurement, and hypothesis testing—act as a mirror to the world, thus providing us rational objective truth about the world. Discourse theory rejects the claim that science offers us objective knowledge of the world and claims instead that all objects—while certainly real in a material sense—are also discursive constructions. Discourse theory claims that an object cannot be understood as a mere object but can only be understood in context, that is, in relation to the conversations, or discourses, that surround it. Imagine a car: It is in one sense a vehicle to get from Point A to Point B. But it is at the same time an object embedded in myriad discourses—environmental, social, and political, among others that reach far beyond its mere meaning as a way to get to and from work.

Discourses must be understood as constellations of statements that are not free-floating or disembodied but that act in powerful ways to shape our conception of the world and the objects in it. Invariably, the play of discourse sanctions some forms of knowledge as normal or true while excluding others. Social institutions play an important role in the production and circulation of discourse—what we talk about, how we talk [Page 767]about it, and what context we choose, or are allowed by the rules of what is normal, to discuss an object in. This is what is meant by the proposition that all objects are at once objects in a material sense and social constructions, and that is why Foucault equated discourse with power, knowledge, and truth. These claims have profound implications for scientific explanation, education, social policy, and politics of social change.

Discourse theory in the main rests on two principles common to all science and to geography: selection and aggregation. It is, of course, true that any object possesses an infinite number of attributes. Consider, for example, a human body, which presents itself to us as a single, tangible, bounded, objective unit of reality. But a human body has innumerable aspects such as physiology, personality, sexuality, medical history, and identity characteristics within each of which is another endless list of metric and nonmetric attributes. For a doctor, a body is a site of healing and surgery. For a biologist, a human body is a site of cellular processes. To a soldier, a human body is a target. To a census taker, it is a statistic; to a lover, a site of pleasure, and so on ad infinitum. So what exactly is a scientific definition of a human body? Every description of a body is by necessity a partial description of attributes that have been selected from an infinite list. In other words, the body is discursively constructed for a purpose, and there are as many such constructions as there are purposes. Consider the proposition “The man is black.” A person's skin color does not describe something fundamental or essential about him or her. The statement represents a discursive construction of a particular human body relative to the powerful body discourses that are prevalent in society. The constructivist claims I have made about the body of a single person are true for all objects of scientific inquiry ranging from a grain of sand to the nearinfinite realms of the known universe. From an infinite number of attributes, we select certain elements; this is a natural and essential process, without the ability to select certain attributes and ignore others, conversation of any sort would be rendered impossible. The claim of discourse theory is simply that what we select, and what we ignore, are shaped by social forces and certainly cast doubt on the rational scientific claim to objective knowledge free from discourse.

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