CCT314H5 Lecture 3: WEEK 3 notes.docx

• School: UTM
• Department: Communication, Culture and Technology
• Course: CCT314H5
• Professor: Neil Narine

Document Summary

Foucault concerned himself with the production of knowledge rather than just meaning through what he called discourse (rather than just language). His project was to analyze 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 periods. Foucault and the discursive approach to representation has three major ideas: his concept of discourse; the issue of power and knowledge; and the question of the subject. Foucault studies discourse as a system of representation. Discourse means passages of connected writing or speech. However, foucault gave it a different meaning: he meant a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a particular moment. Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. Discourse if about the production of knowledge through language.