foucault and the politics of language today

​The obverse of the impossibility of ruling out a positive valence of any given word is encapsulated in Foucault’s famous dictum that “everything is dangerous.”11 Certainly this applies to the use of offensive words. Conversely, while warnings from right-wing commentators that political correctness itself amounts to a creeping authoritarianism seem hyperbolic, the danger in this direction cannot be dismissed entirely either. It seems to me however that the main danger of “political correctness” is in a different direction, namely, that it has too little effect, by failing to allow for the complexity of the relation of language to power, and thus gives an impression of political action while possibly even being ultimately counterproductive vis-à-vis the ostensible goals of its advocates. It risks ineffectuality insofar as particular words can simply be replaced with others without a discourse changing structurally. If a racial epithet is replaced by a politically correct term for the same racial group, for example, but the same things are said of that group, it is not clear how much the situation has improved; this is evidenced by the phenomenon wherein a replacement term itself may come to be considered a slur. Bans on insensitive language have in any case been incorporated into contemporary strategies of power, as can be seen in their take-up by mainstream politicians, including those of the center-right, albeit with certain prominent recent exceptions that I will discuss momentarily. Not only can words be replaced within the same discourse, but a strategy of power can potentially continue while replacing larger-scale elements of discourse or indeed entire discourses with others, which might necessitate the strategy mutating significantly, but might also not. It seems to me that some such mutation has happened today with the bourgeois adoption of discourses of “diversity” and “inclusivity,” which to some extent or in some cases functions as discursive cover, the modifications involved being relatively superficial ones beneath which the strategies of power continue mutatis mutandis. I will argue below that even changes that appear more substantive than discursive are in fact rather less substantive and more discursive than they appear

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