New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

216 CINEMATIC REALISM
analyzing the nature and development of modern forms of power. Rather
than analyze culture in semiological terms of “systems of signs,” Foucault
sees culture as a social constellation of sites of powers. Thus Foucault
grounds discourse in relations of power, and specifically in the forms of
power embodied in specialized and institutionalized languages.
Foucauldian genealogy is concerned with DISCURSIVE REGIMES, i.e.
the processes, procedures and apparatuses whereby truth and knowledge
are produced. “Truth,” within a Foucauldian perspective, is a construct
exploited and struggled over by contending groups. Foucault studies
discourse first as a historical phenomenon. The analysis of discourse for
Foucault involves research into the historical conditions—the power
relations—which facilitated, but did not wholly determine, their
emergence. Foucault speaks of DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS, i.e. the
linguistic practices and institutions that produce the knowledge claims,
usually correlatable with a disseminated power, within which we exist
socially. Discourses for Foucault have a maieutic function; they bring
cultural objects into being by naming them, defining them, delimiting their
field of operation. These objects of knowledge then become linked to
specific practices, for example those of the criminologist, the psychiatrist,
the administrator, the legislator. Practices realize and set the conditions for
discourse, while discourse, reciprocally, feeds back utterances which
facilitate practice. The concept of discursive formation, although influenced
by Marxism, marked a sharp break from Marxist conceptions of statecentered
power. While classical Marxism saw power and repression as
emanating from the bourgeois state, Foucault conceives of power as
omnipresent, dispersed across the plural relationalities of the social field.
Unlike earlier forms of power, modern power is continuous, capillary and
productive. Foucault’s critique had the paradoxical result of seeming on the
one hand to offer a way out of the impasses of more determinist forms of
Marxism, while on the other positing a disciplinary society where power
was so pervasive and all-infiltrating as to be virtually “unseizable.”
Foucault’s analyses of power had relevance not only to the analysis of
cinema as an institution, but also to films themselves and their relation to
the spectator. Up to this point, however, cinema studies has shown less
interest in the “post-structuralist” Foucault than in the equally
poststructuralist Lacan. In Film Theory: An Introduction (1988), Robert
Lapsley and Michael Westlake point out some of the problems in
extrapolating Foucauldian theory for the cinema: (1) Foucault never
explained how change occurs, how one discourse or regime comes to cede
place to another (a subject about which Marxism had more precise ideas);
(2) Foucault’s concepts had more obvious bearing on issues cinema
“shared” with other media such as literature, for example issues of
authorship and realism, than with specifically cinematic issues; and (3)