Foucault argues that discourse—systems of knowledge and representation—are inseparable from power relations. What we 'know' about sexuality, madness, criminality, race, or gender is produced through discursive practices, not discovered as natural truth. Literary texts are discursive formations that construct and circulate knowledge about the world.
From ideology and hegemony, you know that dominant ideas do not simply float freely in culture — they are produced and reproduced through specific institutions, practices, and representations, and they serve the interests of particular groups while appearing natural or universal. Foucault's concept of discourse sharpens this analysis. For Foucault, discourse is not simply language or text; it is a historically specific system that determines what can be thought, said, and known within a given domain. A discourse is a set of rules — often implicit and never formally codified — about what counts as a legitimate statement, who has the authority to speak, what questions can be asked, and what forms of knowledge are recognizable as knowledge at all.
The paired concept is power-knowledge (written as power/knowledge to signal their inseparability). Foucault argues that power does not operate primarily through direct repression — prohibiting speech, imprisoning bodies, declaring things false. It operates productively: it generates subjects, produces truths, and constitutes the very domains about which knowledge is possible. The emergence of psychiatry in the nineteenth century did not simply impose a false label "madness" on people who were otherwise free. It created a set of practices — the asylum, the case file, the clinical gaze, the diagnosis — that produced a new type of subject (the psychiatric patient) and a new form of knowledge (clinical psychology). The knowledge is real; the power that produced it is also real; neither can be understood without the other.
For literary criticism, the key application is that texts do not represent pre-existing realities — they participate in constituting the realities they appear to describe. A Victorian novel that portrays criminal behavior as the product of degraded heredity and squalid environments is not simply reflecting contemporary criminological knowledge: it is circulating that knowledge, reinforcing the discursive conditions that make such explanations seem natural, and producing readers who learn to see deviance through that particular lens. What the novel cannot represent — the structural economic conditions that produce poverty, the class interests served by criminalization — is as significant as what it does represent. Discourse has a constitutive outside: every formation of knowledge is simultaneously a formation of what cannot be known within it.
Foucault's approach transforms the questions critics ask. Instead of asking whether a text accurately represents reality or what ideological distortion it introduces, the question becomes: what discursive formation does this text belong to? What objects does it bring into visibility? What speaking positions does it produce? What knowledges does it make available, and what does it render unthinkable? A text about homosexuality written in 1880 is not simply a text with particular biases; it is a discursive artifact of the moment when "the homosexual" was first constituted as a kind of person — a type, a species, a case — rather than a set of acts. Reading it discursively means reading it as a site where that subject is being produced, not simply described. This is why Foucault's genealogical approach focuses on emergence and contingency: the categories we take as natural have historical origins, and exposing those origins is itself a form of critical practice.
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