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.
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.
