Further ontological considerations: the materiality of discourse and discursive practices

The decisions regarding the theoretical framework did not come without challenges. From a practical perspective, the above ontological positions allowed the synthesis of the three papers into the present thesis. Likewise, and in terms of their theoretical foundations, the three papers are based on the overlapping aspects of approaches concerned with the study of practices. However, the same approaches differ conceptually in ontological terms regarding the role of the material world in the constitution of social phenomena (Table 4); Foucault and his followers studying governmentality draw on discourses and ‘what is said’ to uncover deep-seated assumptions (Bacchi, 2012; Bacchi & Bonham, 2014; Dean, 2010; Rose & Miller, 2010b). Latour’s (2005) ANT argues for a view of the ‘social’ as socio-material networks and therefore of importance are the connections or translations enabling its construction. International practices (Adler & Pouliot, 2011b; Bueger & Gadinger, 2014) build on the works of Bourdieu and other more recent practice theorists arguing for practices as the ‘smallest unit’ of analysis to study international phenomena. The issue therefore was how discourses, practices, and networks can ontologically be compatible with each other without reducing their conceptual and analytical value as such. Schatzki’s (2005, 2011) argument and understanding of non- humans as necessary and constitutive of practices but agential only as entities composing social orders

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along with people brought ANT and International Practices closer as these theories clearly argue for practices as socio-material instances. In contrast, Foucault’s concept of discourse needed further interpretation in this regard since more often than not discourse is identified with language.

According to Reckwitz (2002b), practice theories are cultural theories but not all cultural theories are practice theories. Practice theories are cultural because they conceptualize human action as the outcome neither of interests (homo economicus) nor norms (homo sociologicus). Rather, cultural theories source human action and social order in ‘the symbolic structures of knowledge which enable and constrain the agents to interpret the world according to certain forms, and to behave in corresponding ways’ (Reckwitz, 2002b, pp. 245–246).

Actor-network Theory International Practices Governmentality Location of the ‘social’ Socio-material networks Socio-material practices Discursive practices Role of material in constitution of practices

Constitutive (agential) Constitutive (not agential)

Constitutive (needs interpretation)

Table 4: Materiality in the constitution of practices

In addition, he argues that practice theories differ from other cultural theories in that they conceptualize the smallest unit of analysis, or else the ‘site of the social’ (Schatzki, 2002), in practices. In contrast, other cultural theories such as mentalism, textualism, and intersubjectivism conceptualize the social in the minds, discourses, and interactions of humans respectively.

In Reckwitz’s (2002b) respect then, Foucault’s (1995), discursive practices do not fit into practice theories since they are a distinct kind of practices in which the smallest unit of analysis is discourse,strictly understood as language, and not practice. As this chapter is unfolded, I will show that this is not the case; according to recent interpretations of Foucault’s concept of discursive practices (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014), discourse, understood as knowledge, is about language as much it is about material practices rendering the discursive/non-discursive dichotomy irrelevant. Discursive practices are not a different kind of practices but rather the site in which knowledge, rules, and materials co-habit and reproduce themselves. In so doing, discourse is ontologically compatible with

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practice theories and also contributes to the conceptualization of practices themselves by uncovering the implicit and deep-seated knowledge guiding the governance of anti-corruption.

Foucault’s work has been associated and developed during the ‘linguistic turn’ in social sciences (Rorty, 1967; Van Maanen, 1995), a movement which claimed language and ‘what people say’ as a meaning inscribing device. According to this philosophical turn in social sciences, discourse does not have a strictly descriptive of ‘what is true’ function; rather it is used both to inscribe meaning to the world and also to read back this meaning (Carver, 2002). Discourse then is constitutive of the social world since it gives meaning to it. In this sense, the site of the social is not out there waiting to be found, but rather is constructed and co-constructed through the discourse used by human beings (Hook, 2001). It is people through their spoken, written, or even conceptual language who attach meaning to certain objects, phenomena, relationships, understandings, events, and so on. But discourse also constitutes the social world since it allows people to ‘receive’ back meanings as they have always been there. Risk, for instance, is a concept which has been constructed through discursive practices (Hardy & Maguire, 2016; Maguire & Hardy, 2013; Slager, 2017), and at the same time is received back as differently as a danger (Beck, 1992), uncertainty to be organized and managed (Hansen, 2011; Power, 2007), treatment (Hansen, 2011), and opportunity (Andersen et al., 2014). Foucault did in some cases use the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘discursive practices’ in the same way humans use language to inscribe meaning in and out of the world. In his own words, ‘what they say, that little fragment of discourse - speech or writing, it matters little’ (Foucault, 1991a, p. 71, emphasis in the original). However, several scholars argue that Foucault’s concept of discourse means knowledge (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014; Cousins & Hussain, 1984; Hook, 2001). According to this line of interpretation, Foucault’s use of discourse as knowledge points to two distinct but interrelated meanings; discourse as ‘what is within the true’ (1995), and discursive practices as a set of practices

which contain the rules shaping (1995) what is to be taken as true or knowledge. This distinction

derives from Foucault’s definition of discourse as the difference between ‘what is said’ as opposed to ‘what can be said’:

‘discourse is constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one period (under the rules of grammar and logic) and what is actually said’ (Foucault, 1991a, p. 63).

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By ‘what is said’, Foucault (1991a), detaches discourse from a strict linguistic understanding since he distinguishes it from language in good grammatical order and logical thinking (Cousins & Hussain, 1984). Therefore, for discourse to count as knowledge, neither (simply) a formulation of words in grammatically correct order, nor the outcome of a person’s thought suffices. A well-articulated and thought statement can as well be proven not to be ‘true’. Indeed, as Bacchi and Bonham (2014) note, Foucault’s focus was on ‘what people say’ and not on ‘what people say’. This is justified by Foucault’s interest in studying not the sovereignty of the subject, which does not exist, but the mechanisms through which an object is subjectified. Plenty are the cases from our personal experience in which we consider other people’s sayings as irrelevant to a particular discussion or when we dismiss them as simply not ‘true’. Likewise, there are cases where we conclude that someone’s words are logical but are the outcome of thinking under either stress or anger and therefore not valid for a certain situation. Discourse thus cannot be simply what is thought and comes out of people’s mouths. If ‘what is said’ is the outcome neither of grammatical rules nor logical thought, then there must be some mechanisms refining all the things that ‘can be said’ until only a small bit, the ‘true’, remains (Foucault, 1991a, 1995). In this sense, a discursive practice is not about how people use discourse but rather how the practice of discourse regulates what is to be said. Indeed, for Foucault (1995, p. 117) discursive practices are:

‘a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function.’

Foucault and his students have conceptualized in different ways the nature and form of such mechanisms, as rules of formation (Foucault, 1995), problematizations (Bacchi, 2009, 2012), government analytics (Dean, 2010), rationalities and technologies (Rose & Miller, 2010), or even simply as discourses (McHoul & Wendy, 1993). Dean (2010) for instance, in his government analytics, writes about thoughts, technical means, visibility, and identities as the integral ‘discourses’ of ‘regimes of practices’. Therefore, the study of discursive practices can also be thought of as a study of practices of discourse (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014) in the sense that discourses (what is said) mean not only knowledge of the kind ‘what is true’, but also the mechanisms regulating what is to be counted as such (Cousins & Hussain, 1984):

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‘If I have studied ‘practices’…it was in order to study this interplay between a ‘code’ which rules ways of doing things (how people are to be graded and examined, things and signs classified, individuals trained, etc.) and a production of true discourses which serve to found, justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things.’ (Foucault, 1991b, p. 79)

Most importantly, these mechanisms and rules are not external to the discourse they regulate but inherent to its own practice. Just like subjects are not sovereign and therefore their interests alone cannot shape their actions, the rules by which discourse is regulated cannot come from anywhere else but the practice itself (B. Brown & Cousins, 1980). This is why, according to Bacchi and Bonham, (2014)2014, Foucault (1991a, p. 71) insisted that discourses need to be studied as ‘a complex and differentiated practice subject to analyzable rules and transformations’ (emphasis added).

To complete this position, Bacchi and Bonham (2014) argue furthermore that the distinction made between discursive and non-discursive or material practices is not a valid one. They do so by highlighting Foucault’s (1995) concept of ‘statements’ as material ‘monuments’ or events’, artefacts build by humans, and which require ‘archaeology’ if they are to be ‘unearthed’ and studied. Statements, like discourse, are not meant to be understood and handled as ‘speech acts’ because a statement is more than language (Cousins & Hussain, 1984). Rather, statements are material at their core; they do not contain meaning themselves but offer a map of the ‘rules and transformations’ that made a practice possible and meaningful in a certain time and place:

‘The statement is always given through some material medium, even if that medium is concealed, even if it is doomed to vanish as soon as it appears.’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 112)

The materiality of statements is conditioned by the practice itself (Young, 2001). Take as an example anti-corruption legislation and in particular the UK Bribery Act as one of the landmarks of the anti- corruption regime. The UK Bribery Act and its accompanying guidelines can be seen as an example of a ‘statement’ made by the UK Government. Once introduced, the UK Bribery Act turned from words carefully arranged to an event or fact; it has been used by national and international public and private actors in the practice of anti-corruption to educate, guide, prosecute, inspire, and enforce certain behaviors and practices. The UK Bribery Act then acts as a function of the ‘institutional

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apparatus’ of global anti-corruption and one can possibly think that it cannot exist outside this framework regardless of whether it was written, typed, or even said or remembered. A study on a statement then is not about where it is stored or how it was produced, but about how it has come to be as a material artefact securing ‘the status of “discourses” as knowledge’ (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014, p. 184; Foucault, 1995). By securing, it is meant that statements play a central and organizing role in ‘activating’ other statements and their routines of relations (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014). To return to the above example, The UK Bribery Act activates other statements such as announcements, codes of conduct, Deferred Prosecution Agreements, categorizations of employees, risk assessments, corruption indexes, and training courses. It follows then than what can be called anti-corruption discourse is made up of such materialistic statements (Young, 2001) and hence their study requires an ‘archaeological’ inquiry; one that will focus not on these statements as materialistic facts, signs, events, or objects but on the relations between them (Foucault, 1995).

The triangle of discourse as knowledge, practice, and materialistic statements causes Reckwitz’s (2002a) argument that Foucauldian approaches are not ontologically practice-based to collapse. By ‘discourse’, Foucault meant not the language representing reality but the practice within which knowledge, rules, and materials co-habit and reproduce themselves, including language. In this sense, it is possible to think that discourse understood as language has neither priority over other elements or components of practice nor is it a special kind of practice; rather, discourse is meaningful only within a certain practice along with the rest of its components.