福柯话语权力观解析——以美国历届总统候选人电视辩论话题为例

A Study on Foucault’s View of Discourse Power——Taking Presidential Candidate Television Debates’ Topics in the US as an Example

人类历史是一部话语生产史。法国后现代哲学家米歇尔·福柯在《词与物:事物的秩序》和《知识的考掘》中指出,话语是构成知识和人类活动的一种方式;话语是由有权言说之人根据一定仪式来表述的;话语(或文本)具有实在性;不同话语之间的区别由话语规则决定。本研究以福柯的话语权力观为理论基础,以美国历届总统候选人电视辩论话题为语料,从对象、陈述模式、概念和主题构成规则四个维度考证话语规则,揭示话语与权力的关系,探析话语之社会建构功能,揭示美国历届总统候选人电视辩论话语在建构美国政治生态和社会关系中发挥的重要作用,希冀加深人们对话语的理性认知,为话语分析提供一个宏大叙事模式。

Human history is a history of discourse production. Michel Foucault, a French postmodern philosopher, pointed out in his work The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences and Archaeology of Knowledge, that discourse is a way to constitute knowledge and human activities;discourse is expressed by those who have the right to speak due to certain rituals;discourse has the feature of reality;the differences between different discourses are determined by the discursive rules. This study, based on the theory of Foucault’s discourse power, taking presidential candidate television debates’ topics in the United States as the corpus, examines the objects, statement patterns, concepts, and themes make-up rules to reveal the relationship between discourse and power, and the social construction function of discourse. The paper aims to justify the significant roles of the presidential candidate television debates topics in the construction of American politics and social relations, thus making people to deepen the understanding of the rational cognition on discourse and offering a grand narrative mode for discourse.