while I feel like I am having a slightly blasphemous moment here, especially since to coming from a cultural studies background the notion of discourse is a very important key concept of making sense of any current or past scholarship. and while i still believe that the notion of discourse makes a lot of sense. I am surprised at how much it worries me to see in how far the concept of discourse is deeply interwoven with the cybernetic concept of reflexivity.
While Deleuze takes up Foucault's phrase of the immanent causes stating that:
"the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that executes its relations; and these relations between forces take place 'not above' but within the very tissue of the assemblage they produce" (p.37) Derrida argues that: "every concept, moreover, belongs to a systematic chain and constitutes in itself a system of predicates"(p.21)
Both turn to the question of how it is possible to rewrite the system within the system describing the process of rewriting as a mechanism, which hopefully results in either drawing new maps, or reversing and displacing meaning. Since there is no outside, there is nothing else which can be done. So the question I have is essentially in how far this notion of discourse might actually be quite problematic as it plays into a cybernetic concept of regarding society and human beings as part of a mechanism or a machine? And if it is problematic, in which other way might it be possible to think?
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