Michel Foucault’s notion of governing statement and the analysis of media’s discursive objects

Abstract

This paper aims at commenting on the notion of governing statement, offered by Foucault in his archeological method, and at discussing its operational possibilities in Discourse Analysis (DA). Firstly, we discuss the possibilities of analyzing discourses from the perspective of the archeological method. Following this first discussion, comes a brief passage in which we emphasize some necessary safeguards, given the specificity of some current discursive materialities. Those safeguards have to do with some of Foucault’s notions: discursive formation, governing statement, tree of enunciative derivation etc. Finally, we explore Foucault’s concept of governing statement and its relationship to the constitution of a research corpus. In an attempt of showing the operational function of such a notion, we analyze the role of governing statement played by the slogan “Brasil: um país de todos”. That slogan was used during the presidency of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2002 through 2006.