Initiators of discursive practices


Citing Freud and Marx as the examples of initiators of discursive practices, they too, like the authors of the transdiscursive, open up the possibilities of various related discourses that stems and branches out from their work. There are always new possibilities that can be sourced out of their work if one is to "return to" the text and diligently picked out what has been left unexplored. Interestingly, "there are no 'false' statements in the work of these initiators" (What Is an Author? 145) and this marks the disparity between the work of an initiator and that of a transdiscursive author. The work of the transdiscursive author will ineluctably be subjected to the actions of "rediscoveries" or "reactivations", terminologies used by Foucault to refer to the revamp, improvements, corrections of earlier "[findings] of any scientific endeavor" (146).

Foucault also makes a distinction earlier on between initiators of discursive practises and an author who writes a novel. He regards the majority of novelists as being only "the authors of [their] own text[s]" (146) and at most offering the lending of some of the features of the work to other realted novels. The initiators of discursive practices have much wider roles, they "not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also make possible a certain number of differences" (145). New elements arises out of these differences but are by nature related to the field of discourse.



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