L ' discourse analysis aims to show the order, and never simple but always unique and differentiated mobile, which oversees the production of discourse, the objects they generate, the subject positions that are involved. It is aimed at investigating the function of speech and not the structure itself and not even considered for the identification of speech in the sense that it would be concealed. But most will leave the possibility speech by all instances of that control and regulate it direction according to the criterion of the will to truth, excluding those speeches that in some way disturb the established order, destabilize the instances of power that organize a distance. Is not just the texts considered canonical, but also of legal documents, statistical tables, institutional regulations, or the anonymous but powerful speech in which you can recognize the bundle of complex relationships and the possibility of linking different speeches to the demands of power. You can not grasp the meaning and relevance of the analysis of the speech given by Foucault when the melt from its political significance, the spirit emancipation of the restless, the legacy of which he complains. L'Ordre du discours with (1970), Foucault proposes a set of principles which inspire the 'discourse analysis for practical flexible: the reversal, discontinuity, specificity and outer.
Reversal : recognize the positive role traditionally ascribed to the notions of author, work, discipline, will to the truth of instances of control and rarefaction of discourse, the devices regulate the proliferation of discourses second limits, order and measure recognizable.
discontinuity : recognize that beyond the control instances there is a single speech and simple, these repressed, and to which we must return the word, just as there is only one instance of the controlling power in one place and one second order (in this case the reference is critical Marxism, and it is this horizon in the eighties that the analysis of the speech will find wide use in cultural studies).
Specificity : the speech is not a simple reflection of reality but as it is drawn. The type of processing depends on the integration of speech in a certain order or exclusion, regularity or rarity of his appearances in different areas or contiguous.
externality: the analysis is not directed at speech as a mere manifestation of a meaning, a thought to interpret, but proceeds "to its external conditions of possibility".
The research inspired by these four principles articulated in two different perspectives, but among them the critical and genealogy. "On one hand all critical which puts into practice the principle of reversal: to try to identify the forms of exclusion, restriction, African, to show how they developed in response to such needs, as we are modified and moved, which have exercised restraint, in which measures have been circumvented. On the other hand, the whole family which puts into practice the other three principles of how they came through in spite of or with the support of these systems of constraint series of speeches, what was the specific rules of each, and what were their conditions of appearance, growth and change. " The analysis of the discourse seems to offer the finest tools to interpret cultural phenomena linked to the contemporary: the academic specialization and its effects of fragmentation and distortion of cultural diffusion, and the television as a form of production and control instance of popular culture, and cultural identity at the time of globalization, the power relations that underlie the scientific discourse, with particular attention to the emerging new technologies and the renewal of forms of power to control internet.Non new media as it is possible to close the list of cultural studies inspired by Foucault and discourse analysis. But we must also detect the use of a perspective that we might call methodological or reflexive, defined Critical Discourse Analysis.