Foucault and Bourdieu

Foucault and Bourdieu are both focusing on the relation between language and social power. They advance the analysis by overcoming the focus of universal apriori structures to analyze the social relations of power that produce, within the speaking individuals, certain dispositions (disciplinary selves or social habitus) that generate their identities and sense of self. They do so to a large extent by inculcating discourses and linguistic abilities (broadly constructed) which define the imaginary worlds of situated subjects. How can we understand the relation between language, social power, and the self-understanding of agents? How do discourses, enabled by and situated in social institutions and social practices, influence and shape linguistic meaning? To what extent is the participation in discourse based on social power—and how is symbolic power defined and actualized? How are the linguistic capacities of social agents related to, and shaped by, their social conditions of existence? To what extent is it possible to critique and transcend existing types of socially inculcated self-identity? To what extent is the socially based linguistic capacity completely defining a self’s identity, and which possibilities of other modes of reasoning could there be?