Statements and enunciation as sites of truth and power: Foucault contra Hegel (a note)

In America whoever is in a position of superior power is always right, though they are always right for a specific reason that they are prepared to give and that must be acknowledged, even though it does not much matter what this reason is. Everyone would just be insulted if you pointed this out, and yet everyone seems to both know it (perhaps discovering it every time) and not recognize it.

Perhaps this is related to a curious truth about enunciation in discourse. Social power and effects of truth depend on it. The problem is not that no one relates enunciation to statement, but that most of the time the dependence of truths and social power on the former is displaced onto the latter, so that the power of social authority to determine the presumptive truth of statements is systematically occluded and denied.

(Hypothesis: The two different ways of understanding the relationship between discourse and enunciation is what separates Hegel and Foucault (e.g., in Archaeology of Knowledge). 

Hegel's idea of Reason and its relationship to both recognition and dialectic is articulated by means of a dependence of the deictic positions of enunciation upon the content of what is said. This results in the 'existential' and ethical legitimation of bureaucracy as the rule of a discourse that has reasons for everything, rooted in the necessity of its projects. What pins together discourse and situation is above all references to needs, which are desires or projects that have the truth of their necessity, and in a manner that is of course essentially circular. If this is rejected, the consequence for social criticism is that, as in science generally, it requires no affirmation. There is no point where discourses are rooted in something like the holy with its aura of a necessary good or desirable necessity. Necessity of course is always just an affirmation of the way things are in terms of the projects underlying a given set of procedures and techniques. Thus, criticism requires no ground, and no legitimating notion of an idea or project of the good).