894 Case Study #1: Foucault

Looking for a way to bring together the discourses of disciplinarity and the concept of genre, I chose as my object of analysis interviews of notable academics that are distributed within the discipline.  Typically this would be an interview in an academic journal, but it could also be an online journal or forum or archived within a university department, as Florida State University has done with its “Visiting SpeakersSeries.”  I chose to begin examining this object of study through a Foucauldian analysis, mostly because Foucault’s concept of discourse seemed like a productive way to look at the discourses of disciplinarity.   As a matter of fact, I discovered that Foucault was not the best choice for an analysis that placed significant weight on the concept of genre.

A Foucauldian analysis would probably not define the interview genre explicitly, but would more likely situate the interview genre within the larger academic discourse, which would be the more salient object in a Foucauldian analysis.  Let’s look at one example, “‘That Light-BulbFeeling’: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi.” This interview, in a typical move, has a blurb at the beginning introducing Spinuzzi as “an accomplished scholar and teacher in rhetoric and technical communication” (McNely, 2013, p. 1).  In other words, this interview, as is typical, is predicated on the fact that there is a scholarly discourse, that scholarship takes place within discrete fields, and that certain individuals advance the field or discipline, and as intellectual leaders, are worth listening to.  The interview genre reveals the existence of academic celebrity, and through what these prominent scholars say in the interview, the discourse and the discursive formations that structure it may emerge.  The genre in itself, however, is hard to theorize as very important in a Foucauldian analysis, something that becomes clearer as we examine what might be regarded as the nodes and links in the Foucauldian model.    
In the first section of The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses four types of discursive formations.  The first type builds the discourse around “objects of which it [the discourse] can speak” (p. 46).  The second is the formation of “enunciative modalities” that have to do with the positioning of the speaker as legitimated by his or her position within institutions or settings that are valued by a society, permitting and shaping the types of discourse that emerge.  The third type of discursive formation involves concepts around which discourse may organize itself. Here Foucault gives some examples from economics and from botany, and it appears that the concept is something like ideas that might catalyze paradigm shifts in Thomas Kuhn’s model.  Foucault suggests that “one tries to determine according to what schematas (of series, simultaneous groupings, linear or reciprocal modification) the statements may be linked to one another in a type of discourse” (p. 60).  The final type of discursive formation is what Foucault calls “the formation of strategies” (p. 64).  This refers to something like the logical linkage of discourse elements, or, as Foucault puts it, “as systematically different ways of treating objects of discourse…, of arranging forms of enunciation…, of manipulating concepts” (p. 69-70).  Thus, in a Foucauldian analysis, the first three discursive formations—objects, subject roles and positions, and concepts—tend to serve as nodes, I would argue, while strategies—the fourth discursive formation—might be better seen as the linkages or connections between the nodes—or perhaps an algorithm for directing the flow of information.   In other words, the discursive functions provide the skeleton of discourse as network. 

What then are the discursive formations of the interview genre?  Or do multiple types of discursive formation apply?  The interview involves a conversation with two interlocutors, a venue for publication, an imagined audience consisting of disciplinary practitioners and potential disciplinary practitioners, and the generic expectations offered by the genre frame.  The concept of object does not seem immediately helpful since a diverse array of objects can be discussed.  Academic discourse encompasses many fields and disciplines, each of which has its own set of salient objects and concepts.  In fact, in describing the first discursive formation, Foucault is not referring to objects per se, but to the rules governing the emergence of a set of objects viewed and managed in a certain way by discourse.  While academic discourse of all types examines and discusses its objects of study in conventionalized ways, the interview genre does not seem the best place to seek these rules.  This brings us to a question of scope that we must address before moving forward. 

Foucault’s model, as already noted, is built around the concept of discourse.  Understanding exactly what he means is hard to nail down, partially because at times he uses the term in more or less the conventional way but at other times, as the broader, more theoretical concept that he is generally noted for.  A reasonably good definition of this is “a loose structure of interconnected assumptions that makes knowledge possible” (Bertens, 2005, p. 154).   Above this already fairly big picture position, Foucault poses another, even broader level, episteme, which is described as “the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive regularities” (1972, p. 191). Mills (2004) offers an explanation that is perhaps a little more transparent: “An episteme includes the range of methodologies which a culture draws on as self-evident in order to be able to think about certain subjects” (p. 51). Clearer, this is macro level that subsumes discourse.  On the other hand, Foucault’s view of discourse is larger than one discipline; instead, it may connect multiple institutions and disciplines.  (See, for example, Foucault, 1972, p. 179).  Nevertheless, it was the prospect of using a Foucauldian analysis to examine the ways that disciplines and subdisciplines enact and construct disciplinary values that drew me to try out the theory.  After all, many of Foucault’s examples in The Archeology of Knowledge involve disciplinary discourse at a given point in time.  But when I began the analysis, I realized that the interview genre exists—or could exist—in more than one discipline.  In other words, the discourse governing the genre must be the assumptions that undergird American academia, that confer status on certain scholars, and that make it meaningful and interesting to publish simulated conversations with them.  The discourse governing the content of a given interview or subset of interviews, on the other hand, should be the values and reasoning that undergird a specific discipline or research program.  American academia arguably has a discourse that extends itself into all disciplines and fields represented by institutions of higher education, but individual interviews are more likely to yield the objects valued by the discipline.  Research reports might be more fruitful for an analysis of academic discourse per se, and indeed, Swales (1990, 2004) does reveal characteristics of academic discourse through genre analysis that might be reinterpreted as discursive formations.  Going back to the interview genre, Foucault’s third discursive formation, examination of concepts that construct discourse, poses similar challenges when moving beyond disciplinary boundaries. 
Examining the concept of enunciative modality in relation to the interview genre is more meaningful. The subject of an interview is typically chosen for his or her notable contributions to theory or methodology within a discipline.  As the subject, the interviewee is given a great deal of status, but oddly, not a great deal of agency.  Because an interviewee has been chosen for well-developed and widely-promoted theories, he or she is, in fact, constructed and positioned to a degree by his or her own theory.  The interviewee explains and builds on the theory but is unlikely to develop new theory or make substantive changes during the discussion; in fact, the theorist has become constrained by the boundaries of his or her own theory.  In terms of producing a description of academic discourse, then, the interview genre reveals the way that academics are anchored by the discourse of their fields, even their own contributions to it.

As may have emerged from the previous discussion, within a Foucauldian analysis, genre cannot quite serve as a node.  In rhetorical genre theory, genres might be seen as conveyors of action, or as links, and in activity theory, as mediating nodes.  Foucault’s approach tends to sideline them.   It might be possible, in fact, to argue that research genres encapsulate a strategy, Foucault’s fourth discursive formation, in the way that they stabilize and display conventionalized academic discourse.  Initially, I believe that interviews represented a less crucial part of the network of academia, but a recent discussion with Louise Phelps challenged that notion.  In a project that she is currently working on, she discovered that a scholar’s networking activities, for example, hosting conferences and mentoring other scholars have an important effect on scholarly presence.  Scholars with a presence in a field are more likely to be interviewed, and being interviewed will surely make a scholar more noticeable.  In this sense, the interview genre does play a role in terms of positioning a scholar within the larger academic discourse.  Indeed, becoming more recognizable in more contexts can perhaps play a small role in helping Spinuzzi (or Steven Pinker or Stanley Fish) to become public intellectuals and speak for academia.  In this sense their own theories become the theories that represent academia. 

Most interviews include a question about a scholar’s influences.  For example, McNely details a number of scholars who have influenced Spinuzzi such as David Russell, “his mentor and dissertation director” (p. 2).   Thus, interviews are genres that serve to connect scholars explicitly to their ancestors in their discipline.  If I am seeing discourse as network, is the interview genre, therefore, a collection of nodes, a sub-network of the larger academic discourse? 

When considering how nodes are situated and the relationships between nodes in the Foucauldian model, it seems like human subjects need to be primary nodes.  The interview genre certainly highlights the centrality of scholars as subjects, in an immediate relationship with another scholar, i.e. the interviewer, and building a connection to objects and concepts.  But here a problem emerges in the Foucauldian model.  He emphasizes the situatedness of discursive formation, emphasizing how discourse constrains what is noticed or can be said.  This makes discourse appear quite static.  At the same time, he is interested in discontinuities, and wants “to show that a change in the order of discourse does not presuppose ‘new ideas’, a little invention and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a practice, perhaps also in neighboring practices, and in their common articulation” (p. 209).  Where do this shifts come from given that subjects are seen as so limited in terms of agency?  If subjects had no agency, discourse would never evolve and none of the historical shifts that Foucault explored in his genealogies would have occurred.   

Perhaps it has to do with information flow.  If we can assume that statements (in Foucault’s sense of the word) flow through discourse as network, making use of nodes and paths (think discursive formations), and moving between subjects in network (for example, interview interviewer and interviewee, then there two things are likely.  First, repeating statements—knowledge as perceived, concepts as highlighted, strategies as employed—reinforces existing networks, like burning connections in a neural network in the brain, making certain types of discourse stronger through use.  The second possibility, again using the analogy of the neural network, is the emergence of slight shifts that subtly readjust the network, reshaping the discourse.  How exactly this would lead to seismic shifts, like paradigm shifts, is perhaps something that needs to be explained by another theory.

Foucault’s ideas about discourse do seem productive for discussing disciplinary discourse as well as larger discourses.  Using Foucault to look at the academic interview genre brought me contradictions of scope.  It seems that the genre is generated by the discourse of academia whereas the subjects (interview and interviewee) are more plausibly situated within the discourse of discipline.  Nevertheless, considering the linkages related to subject, stimulated by Foucault’s principle of enunciative modality, does offer some insights into how academics are situated in relation to each other within academic discourse.   

References

Bertens, H. (2005). Literary theory: The basics. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1972, 1989). The Archeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

McNely, B. (2013). “That lightbulb feeling”: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi .Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 3(1). Retrieved from
http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-3/that-light-bulb-feeling-an-interview-with-clay-spinuzzi/

Mills, S. (2004). Discourse (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.