Summary:
Foucault ‘s approach to representation is not easy to summarized. He is concerned with thye production of knowledge and meaning through discourse. Foucault does indeed analyze particular texts and representation, semioticians did. But he is more inclined to analyze the whole discursive formation to which atext or a practice belong. His concerned is with knowledge provided by human and social science, which organize conducted, understanding , practice and belief,the regulation of bodies as well as whole population. Although his work is clearly done in the wake of, and profoundly influenced by the “turn to language” which marked constructionist approach to representation. His definition of discourse is much broader than language, and include many other elements of practice and institutional regulation which Saussure ‘s approach, with its linguistic focus, excluded. Foucault is always much more historically specific, seeing forms of power/knowledge as always rooted inparticular context and histories. Above all, for Foucault , the production of knowledge is always crossed with questions of power and body, and this greatly expands the scope of what involved in representation.
The major critique leveled against his work is that he tends to absorb too much into “discourse” and this has the effect of encouraging his followers to neglect the influence of the material, economic and structural factors in the operation of power/knowledge. Some critics also find his injection of any criterion of “Truth” in the human science in favour of the idea of a regime of truth and the will- to-power[ the will to make thing true] vulnerable to the charge of relativism. There is little doubt about the major impact which his work has had on contemporary theories of representation and meaning