Toward a poststructural rhetorical critical praxis: Foucault, limit work, and Jenninger's Kristallnacht address

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 167-196

  Bruner, M Lane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247689204     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1996.14.2.167     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 191
2. This essay will focus on several texts through which Foucault articulates his various "positions": Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)
3. idem, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972)
4. idem, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970)
5. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)
6. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
7. and The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
8. For an excellent discussion of the various details of limit work and its relationship to Foucault's scholarship, see Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1995)
9. Thomas Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). For example, Farrell claims that "character in public must constantly be re-formed and performed through the rhetorical choices we make in engaging responsible others. [These] responsible others are competent precisely because they are able to recognize and enact the relational goods of civic friendship, practical reason, and hope" (pp. 80-81)
10. The following is a complete list of recent theoretical articles related in one way or another to Foucault and rhetoric: Carolyn J. Dean, "The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and The History of Sexuality," History and Theory 33 (October, 1994): 271-97
11. Martha Cooper, "Rhetorical Criticism and Foucault's Philosophy of Discursive Events," Central States Speech Journal 39 (Spring, 1988): 1-17
12. Carole Blair, "The Statement: Foundation of Foucault's Historical Criticism," The Western Journal of Speech Communication 51 (Fall, 1987): 364-83
13. Carole Blair and Martha Cooper, "The Humanistic Turn in Foucault's Rhetoric of Inquiry," Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (May, 1987): 151-71
14. William S. Connolly, "Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political Theory 21 (August, 1993): 365-90
15. David J. Sholle, "Critical Studies: From the Theory of Ideology to Power/Knowledge," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (March, 1988): 16-41
16. Robert Hariman, Maurice Charland, and Raymie E. McKerrow, "The Forum: Critical Rhetoric: Critiques and Responses," Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (Winter, 1991): 67-78
17. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, "Commitment to Telos - A Sustained Critical Rhetoric," Communication Monographs 59 (March, 1992): 48-60
18. Steven Savgren, "Power Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucauldian Usage," Cultural Anthropology 10 (February, 1995): 3-41
19. and Raymie E. McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis," Communication Monographs 56 (June, 1989): 91-111
20. Critical applications of various versions of Foucault's archaeology include Sonja K. Foss and Ann Gill, "Michel Foucault's Theory of Rhetoric as Epistemic," The Western Journal of Speech Communication 51 (Fall, 1987): 384-401
21. Eric Gilder, "The Process of Political Praxis: Efforts of the Gay Community to Transform the Social Signification of AIDS," Communication Quarterly 37 (Winter, 1989): 27-38
22. Marc J. LaFountain, "Foucault and Dr. Ruth," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (Summer, 1989): 123-37
23. and, in a relatively implicit fashion, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, "Disciplining the Feminine," Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (Winter, 1994): 383-409. While least explicit in its use of Foucault, the Blair, Brown, and Baxter article is the clearest example of the kind of limit work implied by the normative framework explicated in this essay
24. "Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions," Praxis International 1 (October, 1981): 284
25. Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 19
26. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, p. 43
27. For a sample of essays representative of recent debates, see After Foucault, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), especially the essays by Balbus and Sawicki
28. Also see Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988)
29. For example, see Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1991)
30. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
31. Isaac Balbus, "Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse," Praxis International 5 (January, 1986): 466-83
32. and Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992)
33. "Foucault and Habermas on the Subject of Reason," in Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, p. 237
34. Christopher Norris, "What Is Enlightenment?: Kant According to Foucault," in Gutting, Cambridge Companion to Foucault, p. 178
35. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?", in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, p. 32
36. Norris, "What Is Enlightenment?", p. 167
37. Jürgen Habermas, "An Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Foucault," in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 258-59
38. It will be recalled that for Parmenides and Plato, language could transparently reflect being, and in the mimetic tradition, the function of language was to represent World. This tradition guided Western metaphysics from Plato through Descartes, and continues in many idealistic philosophies today. Also see "The Limits of Representation," in Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 217-49
39. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 312-18
40. For several in-depth discussions on these differences, see Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, pp. 16-43
41. The Order of Things, p. 317
42. See also Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, p. 168
43. Foucault and the Political, p. 14
44. For an excellent example, see Fraser, "Foucault on Modern Power," esp. pp. 272-87
45. For discussions of the differences between the term "rational" and "reasonable," see C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), esp. pp. 1-4, 26-32
46. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 282
47. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 284
48. See also Richard Bernstein, "Foucault: Critique as Philosophical Ethos," in Critique and Power, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). In this essay, Bernstein asks if such questions do not constitute their own form of Enlightenment blackmail
49. Ingram, "Foucault and Habermas," p. 235
50. "Foucault and Habermas," p. 236
51. Michel Foucault, "Final Interview," Raritan 5 (Summer, 1985): 1-14. See especially p. 2, where Foucault states, "What bothered me about the previous books is that I considered the first two experiences [the problem of truth and the problem of power] without taking the third one [the problem of individual conduct] into account."
52. "Modernity-Postmodernity Controversies: Habermas and Foucault," Theory, Culture and Society 5 (November, 1988): 611-44
53. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987)
54. The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 225
55. "Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (Winter, 1992): 356
56. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 26-27. While a complete discussion of Foucault's notion of genealogy is beyond the scope of this paper, Foucault defines the term as follows: " . . genealogy . . . is a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects (formation of subject matters), etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history."
57. Simons, Foucault and the Political, pp. 86-87
58. For example, see Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, p. 103, and the discussion on how many feminist researchers find in Foucault "a wholesale rejection of subjectivity and agency."
59. See especially his later interviews, the second and third volumes to The History of Sexuality, and various statements to be found in The Final Foucault, ed. J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988)
60. Jana Sawicki, "Foucault, Feminism and Questions of Identity," in Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, p. 294, is an example
61. See all of "Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations," in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp. 381-90
62. Michel Foucault, "It Is Really Important to Think?", trans. Thomas Keenan, Philosophy and Social Criticism9 (Spring, 1992): 29-40
63. This essay first appeared as "Est-il done important de penser?" Liberation (30-31 May 1981): 21
64. see also Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, pp. 152-53
65. Richters, "Modernity-Postmodernity Controversies," pp. 624-26
66. "Le souci de la vérité," Magazine littéraire 207 (Mai, 1984): 18-23
67. Obviously a full treatment of this subject would carry us beyond the limits of the present inquiry; see Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge. The actual "method" outlined in the book has been explicated and simplified by Martha Cooper, "The Implications of Foucault's Archaeological Theory of Discourse for Contemporary Rhetorical Theory and Criticism," diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1984
68. and Carole Blair, "An Archaeological Critique of the History of Rhetorical Theory: Beyond Historical-Critical Dualism in the Analysis of Theoretical Discourse," diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1983
69. For an extended discussion of the audience and occasion, see Girnth, Europäische Hochschulschriften, pp. 2-4
70. For two articles that concisely summarize the relationship between politics and history in Germany, see Stephen Brockmann, "The Politics of German History," History and Theory 29 (1990): 179-89
71. and Theodore S. Hamerow, "Guilt, Redemption, and Writing German History," The American Historical Review 88 (1983): 53-72
72. Norms of Rhetorical Culture, pp. 319-20
73. Foreign Bulletin Information Service (EEU-88-220): "Jenninger Speech Termed 'Not Accident'," Neues Deutschland [East Berlin] (12 Nov. 88)