Summary
A discursive formation is a body of statements – a way of talking and thinking about something, such as madness – that hangs together because it follows the same underlying rules about what can be discussed, what kinds of statement can be made and with which concepts. The term is from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ (1969).
These rules aren’t grammar or logic, and nobody chose them: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has them operating “beneath the consciousness of individual subjects”. Nor are they fixed; a discursive formation, Foucault wrote, “is not an atemporal form”. Some writers now use it loosely, for unspoken limits on public speech.
Rationale
Foucault finds rules beneath awareness in what gets said and known. We began with language too, then found ‘narrative’ “slightly misleading”: the patterns we’re after also live in bodies, places and habits.