 This video is a supplementary guide to support your understanding of the term discursive structure. Institutional and disciplinary structures build language, or discourses, which regulate what is accepted as knowledge regarding a particular topic or subject. For example, we can say, Australia is the lucky country. But think about the things we can't say, the things that breach the limits of discursive structures about what we understand to be true about Australia. However, we must remember that language does not necessarily imply any sort of truth. Rather, discursive language tells us what is understood as truth in any given historical context. As Michelle Foucault famously put forth, the world does not provide us with a legible face which we would only have to decipher. The world is not the accomplice of our knowledge. There are no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favour. What Foucault is saying is that first, the world is oblivious to humankind's insistence on it to make sense. And second, the world can only ever be an interpretation, but most importantly, an interpretation based on highly regulated sets of structures that are determined by institutional powers. For instance, depending on the context, discourse can regulate what constitutes romantic love. As one example, the language provided by Western Christian thought through structures of traditional religious institutions is that romantic love can only exist between a man and a woman. There has, up until now at least, not been space in the language itself to allow the possibility of romantic love, particularly within the institution of Christian marriage, between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Here we see not necessarily a reflection of the world, but a human-made structure trying to impose limits on the world in order to make that world make sense and make that world knowable, particularly in ways that uphold traditional power relations between the institutions and the subjects beholden to it. However, discourses become discursive structures in their interconnection with other discourses, or what we call a discursive structure. A discursive construct or structure as articulated by Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge is the locus at which various discourses about a particular cultural subject or artifact meet and come together. For example, when Christian discourse on marriage comes together with legal discourse constructed by the ruling government, then we see a discursive construct that is upheld within itself and so that it looks like the truth. Discursive structures are therefore self-perpetuating and reifying. They are the things that look natural but on closer examination only appear that way because they are supported by other discourses that resonate. Therefore, discourses do not work alone but are regulated in relation to other discourses, forming a complex web of practices. Thus, discourse itself is highly regulated and has its own internal rules because they are based in human-made structures and human-made knowledges which constantly shift and change according to investments of power. For example, new discourses are now providing new language with which to talk about marriage and romantic love between same-sex partners. The academic discourse, for example, gives language that structures new ways to think about things. Again, this does not claim a truth, only a challenging set of beliefs that create dissonance with the dominant construct. Through language, discourses form together a kind of interweaving mesh and the resulting latter's work forms the discursive construct. Thus, the discursive nature of knowledge imposes limits of what is sayable about a subject or artifact. In his book Madness and Civilization, Foucault took the madman as a case study that illustrates the way in which institutional discourses build discursive constructs. In his examination, Foucault finds that the institutions responsible for defining madness, the institution of medicine, and the judicial system, as two examples, organize logics around the reality of madness. Each logic reifies the other. Or, as Foucault pronounces, we find a rigorous organization dependent on the faultless armature of a discourse. This discourse, in its logic, commands the firmest belief in itself. It advances by judgments and reasoning which connect together. Any artifact is a site of knowledge, therefore built from various connecting logics that regulate its no-ability.