Folks, by and large I think your exploratory discussions last Thursday reflected a very good understanding of Foucault's discursive event -- the idea that, in every society, the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures -- and this was a huge impetus for our discussion. Each of you was able to articulate Muckelbauer's principal contribution: looking more carefully at resistance with/in Foucault's work opens up important re-definitions of resistance and power (Muckelbauer 72) and reveals critics' own programmatic agendas (73), freeing us up to consider the many "certain Foucaults" to whom critics think they are responding (74).
I also appreciate how, in some of your exploratory discussions, you raised the possibility that the way in which we enact a productive (rather than a programmatic) reading of Foucault's resistance could serve as a model for invention, for experimentation, for critical provocation, and even for historical flustering (i.e., complicating what we think we know, remember, or suspect about a particular discursive event). Finally, several of you found or described what you saw as potential "locuses of power" (to apply a Foucauldian term to your discourse analyses) -- that is, you saw potential places in your discourse where the power function in a society is wrapped up in how people think they function in society.
While we did discuss the institutionalized nature of Foucault's "power," we did not have sufficient time to explore the idea of "epistemic shift" -- the idea that there is a discursive formation to every history, and thus a network of discursive practices informing how we understand historical eras to be defined. The idea of cultural dis/identification accounts for how a particular theory relies on or resists the particular institution(s) and episteme(s) out of which it emerged. For Foucault, it seemed that texts were discursive practices, and that histories were texts.
We also had little to no time to discuss McGee's deconstruction of "the people," or to consider together how this fictionalized agent might be constructed in the Anglo-American experience versus in other cultural experiences. McGee's arguments provoke some of our earlier understandings of audience and logic, i.e., we discussed P&O-T's "universal" audience as one that was conceptually and morally accessible, whereas McGee implies that "the people" is a rhetorical fiction with a kind of transitory power/agency that can only be realized through a particular kind of rhetorical criticism. His political context was not so far removed from the contexts in which P&O-T and Kenneth Burke wrote their treatises, yet his argument seems to place new burdens on ideas of "collective identity" (McGee 328), "leadership," "followership," and even "social theory," and that is what I had hoped we might discuss.
So, I have changed our reading schedule for next week with the hopes that we can build a stronger understanding of identity politics in the context of rhetoric and composition theory, considering Gates's (historic) dilemmas with "signification" alongside other more explicit arguments for signification in the writings of Anzaldua and Trinh. We will probably spend some time comparing Gates's "master trope" with Anzaldua's "mestiza consciousness" and Trinh's "difference." [Viewing some of Trinh's creative work has helped me to understand her approach to "difference," and some of the stills in her essay are taken from "Surname Viet Given Name Nam."]
We will continue to work in this space, as well, thinking about how the following concepts function in and across our readings: conceptions of postmodernity; meaning(s) of reading, writing, authoring; place(s) of knowledge and knowledge-making; power and control; relationship(s) of language to communication and truth; subjectivity; otherness; and the teaching of writing.
See you next week!
-Dr. Graban
