French historian Foucault, Michel’s term for a system of statement produced by force of a single discursive practice (the underpinning system of rules of a particular society at a certain moment in its history). Foucault created this concept as a means of rethinking causality in a nonlinear or dispersed fashion. For instance he wanted to be able to show that transformations which took place in such diverse and geographically dispersed entities as factories, hospitals, prisons, and schools in Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were consistent with one another, because there is a discursive link connecting them all. The changes are not the product of a single consciousness, or a specific intention. The changes accrue over time as a specific discursive practice---in this case discipline---moves more and more into the foreground. Discursive formations emerge, then, in a slow and uncertain way; they aren’t born or created by fiat; and they are anonymous and objective. Further Reading: J. Bernauer Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight (1990). M. Foucault L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), translated as The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). C. O’Farrell Michel Foucault (2005).