894 Reading Notes: Foucault

How Foucault is productive for me

"Discourse is.. a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed" (p. 55) 

(my photo)  

When I first studied Foucault in Modern Rhetoric, I approached his ideas with a certain level of discomfort, mostly because I wasn’t sure that I bought into his ideas about how power constructs subjects.  However, his insights in The Archeology of Knowledge have been more compelling as well as more productive for my purposes, and I tend to rank him higher as a theorist as a result.  Foucault’s view of “discourse” as a theoretical construct is something that I believe can be productively employed in the more theoretical social sciences, in cultural studies, and very definitely in rhetoric. While it’s true that Foucault does not offer a direct methodology for me to explore disciplinarity—particularly since Foucault makes the explicit point that discursive formulations are not equivalent to disciplines but more akin to discursive webs that cross disciplinary boundaries and institutional practices.  However, even if disciplines are not discourses per se, they do employ discourse in the Foucauldian sense and are “disciplined” by such discursive phenomena as Foucault discusses.  The Archeology of Knowledge is not an argument about the social construction of knowledge (see, for example, Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967))  or a version of the rhetoric of science, but rather the discursive construction of knowledge. That discourse is socially constructed is a fairly necessary foundation, of course, but it is not the focus of Foucault’s treatise.  Instead, he is concerned with how epistemologically structured discourses (that is, discursive formulations) emerge with a set of rules (enunciative functions) that in turn shape what can be said and known, and thus create knowledge.   I think some of Foucault’s ideas can definitely be productive for me as I look at disciplines as a community of practice and consider how discourses in the Foucauldian sense are superimposed on disciplines as well as working within disciplines.  I think I can use some of his concepts methodologically in a narrower way, as well.  In other words, even though Foucault is interested in discourses (big D discourse) that go beyond a single discipline or institution, it seems like it would be productive to look for discursive formations and enunciative functions within the discourse (small D) of disciplines and subdisciplines in the academy.

Reading Foucault

What reading Foucault requires (my photo)

My experience reading Foucault was challenging, but educational in several ways.  It goes without saying that I gained a great deal of insight about Foucault’s ideas from the inside.  It’s one thing to read about a theory; it is always a different experience to read the theorist.  However, I also learned some things about how to read a more challenging text.  For example, I eased my way into the book with some preliminary scribbled notes.  As I look back at them now, they hardly seem necessary but they were helpful for dipping my toes into the argument, for example, I started with “History seen as periods with trajectory, continuations…History in other disciplines—like literary studies as disruptions and ruptures.”  I began to think of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts.  Foucault mentions the “Other” (caps, italicized) (p. 12) I asked, “What does F. mean? How does he use this term (i.e. compared with others who popularized it?”  (After reading the rest of the book, I’m not sure he did do much with it. I’m not saying that Foucault does not discussthe idea that there is an Other that is not being spoken because certainly the idea is salient to him, but I felt it was an indirect point in this book.) After I got going in the book, I thought about the concept of rhizomes from Deleuze and Guatarri (2004). 

Somewhere in part two I started taking more systematic notes, discovering that the outline of the book is, in fact, well-organized.  The table of contents and the chapter titles are a decent roadmap to the theoretical framework.  I also discovered something important about how to read Foucault.  I discovered that is better to read through to the end of a chapter without stopping too much, trying to keep track of the general flow of the discussion but don’t worry about understanding too much until I get a sense of where he is going with something. He often summarizes and rephrases a key point at the end of the chapter, and at the ends of sections, he often recapitulates his arguments.  A great example of this is the end of chapter 4 of part 3 (p. 116).  Even though Foucault did often come back to his main points at the end of chapters, I often had to re-read a chapter.  Rereading a chapter was always more productive than rereading a paragraph multiple times.  In fact, I feel like I understand Foucault overall much better now that I have a sense of the book as a whole that I did at any time or point during the actual reading process. This is the case even as I forget the details.  I don’t know if this has to do with the way Foucault writes per se, or if it is something of a French style.  I feel like Derrida, Deleuze and Guatarri, and Barthes gave me a similar feeling of discursive abundance, of flowing quite a distance before being circling back to make the point.  I might also mention that I discovered that Foucault often provides a road map ahead.  This is also helpful, more than anything when I flip back to these sections after I have read them. 

Occasionally Foucault discusses examples from his earlier studies, Madness and Civilization, Birth of a Clinic, and The Order of Things.   These sections were among the most accessible even though I had not read the works that he referred to.   I don’t think examples are strictly necessary; I wouldn’t argue that he should necessarily have illustrated all of us ideas with examples.  However, when he did have them, I found them helpful.

To wrap up this section, I think I am pleased with how accessible Foucault proved in the end.  If I read more of Foucault’s works, I think I have a better idea how to proceed.

A few quotes I like:

“A statement always has borders peopled by other statements” (p. 97).  

“Archeology is not in search of inventions; and it remains unmoved at the moment (a very moving one, I admit) when for the first time someone was sure of some truth; it does not try to restore the light of those joyful mornings” (p. 144).

Uptake of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Some time back I became interested in learning more about discourse analysis. When I started looking for books and materials, I learned that “discourse analysis” means many different things to different people. One of the key ways the term is used is within linguistics where it primarily refers to taking a chunk of language larger than a sentence as an object of study.  That was a familiar concept to me, and more or less what I was looking into at that time, but I was a little surprised and mystified to discover that the term had also been taken up by different branches of social science and manifested itself as different methodologies.  Since then I’ve paid attention to different ways that the term “discourse” and “discourse analysis” is used.  In fact, it is a major research interest of mine now. By the time I began reading The Archeology of Knowledge I was already vaguely familiar with Foucault’s use of “discourse” as a philosophical concept, but I wasn’t aware until I did a little Googling that the concepts in this book have had a great deal of uptake in terms of what is now called “Foucauldian discourse analysis,” or as one recent online article put it, “FOUCAULTian discourse analysis” (weird capitalization in original). In fact, this article was quite interesting in capturing how Foucault’s method of analysis has been taken up in several national contexts—France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria and Netherlands, and Spain. It doesn’t talk much about the US, except to call the country an “underrepresented area” in terms of surveys like this one and to note that the impact “is enormous and the methodological orientation toward discourse analysis is increasing" (Diaz-Bone et al, 2007).   

Concepts of network, or why does this book fit this course

When I first started reading this book, I saw it as highly relevant to my research interests, to looking at how disciplinary discourses construct and are constructed by disciplinary beliefs and values.  What was less obvious to me was how the book fit a course in network theories. Spinuzzi and genre theory seem a reasonable fit since many genre theorists work within the framework of Activity Theory, and I think this is at least partially the case for Spinuzzi (2003).  Activity Theory is an ecological approach that connects moving parts in a network sort of way.  I figured Latour (2005) made sense. After all, the word “network,” is in the title and ditto for Castells (1996).  And Rickert (2013)? Well, the word “ambient” sounds dispersed and web-like.  But Foucault was less obvious as an inclusion.  In fact, most of the time when I was reading this book, the idea of network was not at the forefront of my mind.  However, there are some places where Foucault does explicitly use the term “network”. 

First, he discusses the idea of books as a “node within a network” (p. 23).  Interestingly, too, a book is not seen as the same kind of node in each type of discourse because different discourses are constructed differently.  Later, subjects are seen as situated within a “certain grid,” and, later on the same page, notes that a subject can occupy different positions  “in the information networks” (p. 53).  The next chapter discusses concepts in terms of “conceptual network” (p. 62), how concepts are established in relation to one another within a theory, a discipline or an approach at a given point in time.  Much later in the book, in the chapter, “Comparative Facts,” the idea of network is even more salient. Here Foucault discusses how different disciplines, institutions, and practices can be analyzed in different ways, and it is possible to reveal more than one “interdiscursive network” (p. 159). Finally, in contrast with the history of ideas, archeology maps rules of formation such as the principle that sometimes rules can only appear after others make room for their appearance.  In other words, “the archeological ramification of the rules of formation is not a uniformly simultaneous network: there exist relations, branches, derivations that are temporally neutral; there exist others that imply a particular temporal direction” (p. 169).

As I look back over my notes, I see that noticed them as I read.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in my notes, of course. By the same token, they are much more salient to me now as I cast my mind back over the entire book.  I can see how Foucault is primarily discussing connections and sets of relations—statements within a discourse, subjects in discursive spaces, connections between concepts, etc.   The notion of network is both explicit and implicit throughout.

References

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday. 

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum.  

Diaz-Bone et al. (2007). The field of Foucaultian discourse analysis: Structures, developments and perspectives.Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8(2). Retrieved from
http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/234/517

Foucault, M. (1989). The Archeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rickert, T. J. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.