The Yale Journal of Criticism

But, you may ask, why involve Mikhaïl Bakhtin and Michel Foucault when Marc Angenot's oeuvre, daunting enough by its scope and originality, is at issue here?¹ One obvious answer can be drawn from Angenot's own investigations, which demonstrate the strategic advantages of reading any text in its interdiscursive conditions of emergence. This principle guides all of his writings on speech genres (from pamphlets to collectivist utopias), ideological formations, and the totality of social discourse:²

My basic problem consist[s] of trying to connect the literary, scientific, philosophical, political fields, etc., and, being careful not to overlook the stakes, constraints, and traditions of each of these fields, to extrapolate transdiscursive rules, to discover vectors of exchange, to set up a global topology of the prevailing sayable (i.e., what can and cannot be said), accounting for my using "Social Discourse" in the singular, and not "social discourses" as a simple coexistence and juxtaposition of genres, disciplines, and local cognitive strategies.³

Angenot's work literally demands to be studied in relation to other correlated practices—and it would be theoretically inconsistent to consider it in vacuo.

But why these three, together? Partly because of their common effort to develop discourse analysis through a sustained analysis of, and opposition to, formalism and structuralism in linguistic, literary, and cultural studies: the Bakhtin circle against both Saussurian linguistics and Russian formalism, Angenot and Foucault against structuralism in the humanities and functionalist semiotics.⁴ Discourse analysis (DA) has a history of emerging as formalism's critique, in times of political turmoil: witness the rise and fall first of Opojaz and the Bakhtin circle in revolutionary Russia, then of structuralism and l'analyse du discours in Prague and Paris, differently disrupted by revolutionary movements in 1968. Relations among revolution, formalism, and DA can only be a matter of speculation here: extended inquiries into their various forms in art, music, literature, and philosophy remain to be done. Yet from the outset it seems as though formalism and DA constitute two opposing attitudes to a revolutionary present. The first attempts to ascribe disciplinary limits to knowledge, to control its production [End Page 263] as scientific and objective, in short, to govern discourse on literature or language and produce truths from a position of temporal exteriority: structural linguistics studies not historical speech, but the system of language (la langue) generating the infinity of particular utterances; formalism considers not literature, but literariness, the differential relations that make a verbal utterance a work of art. The second attitude engages with a fluctuating present and heeds events, it surveys discursive practices across borders, analyses and produces forms of intersubjective transformation rather than objects—in short, discourse analysis studies and generates differential cultural relations.

But Angenot, Bakhtin, and Foucault deploy the concept of discourse differently, and produce alternate forms of historical analysis. In order to evaluate the position and pertinence of Angenot's concept of social discourse in contemporary cultural studies, I believe it is useful to articulate it to the transgredient concepts of dialogical and governmental relations elaborated by Bakhtin and Foucault.⁵ Correlating Marxist and structuralist principles of analysis, Angenot's concept of social discourse enables specific historical and materialist analyses of the production and circulation of hegemonic truths and values. Such diagrams of ideological formations, however, tend to reduce differences among discursive practices, and cannot account either for agency (in subjects of discourse) or for transformations (in social discourse as a whole). Bakhtin's concept of dialogical relations focuses on these very questions, while taking for granted the ideological horizon shared by speakers (and explored by Angenot). Both recognize ideology as pervasive in discursive practices, and both ignore relations of power in their actual analyses (if not in their theoretical frameworks). Foucault's analysis of governmental relations connecting forms of subjectivity, types of normativity, and fields of knowledge in discourse can serve to displace, and complete, the other two approaches. This essay will situate the theoretical and methodological operations undertaken in Angenot's texts, and invoke dialogical and governmental relations only in their necessary correlations to the concept of social discourse, in order to foreground a set of analytical instruments for cultural studies, and consider some of their implications for questions of identity, subjectivity, and agency. Such research is eminently pertinent for praxis in our times, when issues of race, ethnicity, and identity are invoked as forcefully by movements of political and economic liberation as by those of oppression and genocide.

Perhaps one of Angenot's greatest gifts to cultural studies is the tool box he has assembled to register and reconstruct the ever-present rumbling of discourse, acknowledged by virtually everyone, but closely examined by very few. His analyses function at the level of intertextual construction (an aspect largely neglected by Foucault, for example). Angenot describes his method as "tinkering" (or bricolage) [End Page 264] with various strands of twentieth-century linguistic, literary, philosophical, sociological, and political theory.⁶ Such an eclectic approach results in an extremely effective analytical grid, which makes visible various interconnected discursive mechanisms producing recognized truths in social discourse. Armed with this method (described below), he then approaches the archive in a manner aptly characterized as heroic by Fredric Jameson (and bulimic by Angenot himself) because of its extensive scope—covering entire discursive genres, ideological formations, or simply the whole of social discourse. His investigations cut across disciplinary boundaries to interconnect political pamphlets with newspaper reports, medical treatises and literary texts, boulevard songs and pornographic materials, popular romances and distinguished journals of opinion.

Although all of his books carefully describe the theory, method, and corpus to be investigated, Critique of Semiotic Reason (1985) provides a sustained analysis of the limits and unexplored possibilities of structuralist linguistics, based partly on Luis Prieto's materialist reading of the Course in General Linguistics. As is well-known, Saussure's quest for scientific knowledge begins by positing a new object of study, la langue, defined as an abstract system of differences, "where there are no positive terms."⁷ Three basic principles determine semantic production: 1) the system operates as a self-enclosed totality, 2) the meaning of any element of the system is determined by its relations to all others and to the whole, and 3) system transformations are self-generated. Such principles exclude both history and the subject from scientific investigations (la langue "is not a function of the speaking subject," Saussure insists, "it is the product that the individual passively registers").⁸ Prieto historicizes this model by insisting that the pertinence of any sign (the differential traits selected as meaningful) is always determined in praxis, by a social (rather than "individual") subject.⁹ Yet both linguists usually conceive of language exclusively in terms of communication: subjects work to intervalidate their coded messages, in peace and harmony.¹⁰ Angenot points out that discourses serve not only to communicate, but also to institute knowledges and produce ideological subject positions: "the semiotic operation, semiosis, institutes its subject, elects its addressee, and designates the world as the place from which signification emanates, and as the place in which it is validated and to which it refers."¹¹ Power relations and the police (a term crucial to Foucault's work on governmentality) are conspicuously absent from the linguistic model.¹²

Angenot argues that ideological objects ("the nation," "women," "Jews") are fabricated through the interdiscursive circulation of (often contradictory but nevertheless co-intelligible) predicates; the reiteration of these predicates across social discourse, through multifarious argumentative and narrative strategies, eventually produces an isotopic [End Page 265] category endowed with truth value and political legitimacy. Therefore an analysis of ideological objects should not restrict either itself or its corpus to disciplinary boundaries. It cannot seek the illusory comfort of scientific certainty either by misapplying a variant of the phonological model or by limiting its investigations to local systems. The critic must risk a much vaster undertaking, and assess the conditions of emergence and dissemination of ideological objects in social discourse as a whole, however alarming or depressing the prospect may be.¹³

After this theoretical manifesto, Angenot spends several years analyzing the whole—or a reasonable sampling of—social discourse in French for the year 1889.¹⁴ The resultant analyses specify several interlocking levels for the production of hegemony in social discourse.

• 1 A repertoire of widely accepted precepts or understandings (topoï or ideological maxims) that serve to ground arguments and narratives across social discourse is identified.¹⁵ The presupposition and interdiscursive dissemination of these units of meaning increases their authority and thereby rarefies the sayable of a social formation: violent polemics can take place without ever transgressing the limits implied by these readily acknowledged, most common premises. Conversely, from a historical distance, the unsayable becomes identifiable.

• 2 Each discursive practice inflects these rules and facts of discourse differently, according to "its cultural status and institutional attachments, its function as intertextual mediator in the circulation of ideologemes, its immanent ideology that confers both mandate and legitimacy, its particular tradition, . . . [and] selected speakers with their specific auras and abilities."¹⁶ An analysis of these characteristics allows Angenot to delineate a topology of discourses in a given social formation and to specify a division of discursive labor among them (determined by their relations to each other and to the whole).

• 3 All of these analyses reveal transdiscursive rules, cross-disciplinary vectors, and shared themes, which together consolidate a general way of knowing the world, a gnoseology, for the ideological formation or totality of social discourse under study. Angenot demonstrates how nineteenth-century French social discourse plays according to the epistemological rules of narrative realism. This "generalized novelistic mode" considers outside reality as immediately available to cognition, and language as a transparent medium for the communication of objective knowledge. Presupposed (and thereby unquestioned) ideological maxims allow individual facts to be strung together in sense-making stories, ordering "typical" (and thereby oversimplified) events and characters [End Page 266] along teleological lines of development, representing reality "as it is." Angenot argues that literary realist fiction is but a sub-genre of this generalized gnoseology, traversing all of social discourse. Wedged in between classical oratory, and twentieth-century structural, nomothetic, and relativistic discourses, he maintains, the last fin-de-siècle knew the world through the discourse of narrative realism.¹⁷

For a North American audience only rarely initiated to such extensive rhetorical and textual analyses, these are perhaps the most immediately helpful, pertinent methodological elaborations for cultural studies.¹⁸ Angenot's grid makes visible the material/textual connections among: the production and dissemination of ideologemes through argument and narration, the elaboration of both the sayable and the unthinkable through a limited number of discursive practices differently inflecting widely acceptable themes and paradigms for debate, and an overarching way of knowing the world. His method thus substitutes historically specific analyses of the discursive production of hegemony for such confused and syncretic categories as "bourgeois ideology."

According to Angenot, the overall effect of social discourse is to naturalize its constituent discourses and thus produce hegemony; art, on the other hand, can inscribe historical conditions of emergence (its own and those of the discourses it includes) and thereby defamiliarize hegemonic constructs and values. "The 'literature' effect," he asserts, "can only be judged and measured in relation to the global socio-discursive system in which it is engendered."¹⁹ Literature comes after social discourse: it listens to surrounding murmurs, assembles and exposes several discourses, and thus makes their precarious fragility not only visible, but accessible. Assuming the role of court jester, it can exclaim that established relations of power-knowledge need not remain so forever: "literature does not know the world better than other discourses manage to; it only knows, or rather it shows that the discourses that pretend to know the world and the humans who humbly or gloriously try to know it, really do not know it . . . [Literature] says, often manages to say: this doesn't hold up, that wasn't all that could have been said, there is more to it than that, 'There are more things in Heaven and Earth . . . ,' 'It ain't necessarily so . . . .'"²⁰ Angenot thus arrives at the para-doxical conclusion that literature reflects or refracts not reality, but social discourse.

The differences between literature and social discourse rest primarily on their discursive function: both constitute "un ensemble composé de discours," with one serving to establish, the other to question, the ideological constructs of a time.²¹ Yet the particularities of literary texts (or indeed any text) tend to dissolve when Angenot places them in social discourse: [End Page 267]

By re-immersing Zola into its Gleichzeitigkeit you discover that Jacques Lantier [the main protagonist and murderer in La Bête humaine] is an ideological brother of Jack the Ripper (1888-89) interpreted through Cesare Lombroso's theory of the "born criminal" and reinterpreted in relation to a number of supposedly scientific constructs on atavistic regressions, aberrations of the genital instinct, theories of progress and devolution, etc., that were fashionable one century ago. By simply rereading any literary text isolated from the cacophonic rumors of contemporary social discourses you grant it all that it demands: to become a "pure" aesthetic entity.²²

To this argument, however, can be countered that unlike social discourse, which is composed by everyone and no one in particular (as it both results from and overdetermines all discursive practices), literary texts are composed by subjects engaged in specifically aesthetic practices. Neglecting this difference leads Angenot to eliminate agency, as well as aesthetics, from his analyses. Indeed literature has altogether disappeared from his more recent explorations of social discourse. But what is this overarching concept?

On one level, social discourse is the product of DA: through the study of a synchronic set of the already uttered and printed, the researcher extrapolates "a global regulating system" that delimits the sayable (and the unthinkable) of a social formation.²³ Social discourse is thus a secondary modeling system (to use the expression of the Tartu school) devised to make sense of what is printed as a whole. This model reiterates the three structuralist rules for the production of meaning:

1. 4. Social discourse is a self-enclosed totality with no direct relation to reality. The ontological difference between discourses and reality is equivalent to that between the map and the terrain for Angenot:

   It is not with words and discourses that society produces agricultural laborers, homemakers, or even petit-bourgeois intellectuals. These are matters of economic constraints and primary semanticizations inscribed on the body of social man, interiorizing in habitus, in dispositions, in tastes, the milieu, . . . and "objective" destiny. Words and discourses are at first uninvolved . . . Feminist or socialist critiques have seemed to say that the "social magic" of discourses would be the essential element in the production of sexual or class identities; such critiques attribute to discourses a function that they in no way possess . . . Social discourses . . . naturalize social processes. . . . One must not, however, attribute to discourses all of the magic of voluntary servitude and of social repression. In itself, no discourse is ever performative.²⁴

2. 5. Units of this totality acquire their meaning differentially: a discursive division of labor determines the sayable of each discursive practice, in relation to the overall regulatory complex of social discourse. If a famous public figure dies, Angenot argues, the topology of the whole is transformed (as in Saussure's langue, in which the appearance of a new term modifies the economy of the whole).²⁵ [End Page 268]

3. 6. Transformations within social discourse are self-generated; this explains why the obvious validity of one state of social discourse becomes incomprehensible for its successors, in a matter of one or two generations. Comparing "the Derrida, the Michel Serres, the Sollers, the J.-F. Revel, the Hélène Cixous" of today to the "Louis-Pilate de Brinn'gaubast, Jules Simon, Jules Lemaître" of 1889, Angenot notes that "posterity . . . is cruel for these people whose prestige was enormous. Such prestige is proportionate to the oblivion that buries them."²⁶ Such sea changes, however, remain unaccountable within the framework of social discourse analysis (as they are within formalist or structuralist analyses).²⁷

On another level, social discourse exerts real pressures on all aspects of discursive production. The concept of social discourse thus functions like Saussure's concept of langue, as both constructs of their methods and actual systems determining discursive production. Angenot explains how statements (not subjects) recognize their position and strategize accordingly; structures (not struggles) necessitate certain interpretations:

What is enunciated in social life is inflected by strategies through which the statement "recognizes" its position in the discursive economy and functions accordingly; the social discourse, as global unity, is the resultant of these multiple, but non-aleatory, strategies. The effect of "synchronic mass" of social discourse overdetermines the legibility of particular texts forming this mass . . . through a structural necessity resulting from the topological organization of discursive fields.²⁸

All agency belongs to the system, not the subjects, who are wholly absorbed by the game and its rules: "discourses are not made by writers and publicists but rather . . . writers and publicists are shaped in their identity and role on the social stage by the discourses they hold." Various set roles and attitudes can be identified: "the great man and the wit, the arbiter elegantarium, the grumpy benefactor, the voice of wisdom, the pervert, the fashion contractor."²⁹

This theoretical and methodological approach thus articulates structuralist principles to those of historical materialism; it historicizes forms and draws their contingent character. Considerably problematized with notions of mediation and totality, the division between base and superstructure nevertheless remains operative. Discursive effects come after the initial work of economics and other primary semanticizations, to legitimate and consolidate them: "hegemony completes in the order of 'ideology' the systems of political domination and economic exploitation which characterize a social formation."³⁰ Angenot (like Bakhtin/Voloshinov) insists that everything is ideological, that "ideology = social discourse," in that no discourse is ever pure or objective, but necessarily invested by social interests.³¹ However, the categories [End Page 269] of "true critique" and "authentic art" are equally maintained, in their opposition to ideology:

For the person who is lost in the discourses of his time, . . . [w]hat is hidden is the underlying system. . . . True critique, authentic art can only be conquered against the spirit of the time and radical ruptures which can objectivize and deconstruct the logic of hegemony are few and far between.³²

True critique results from two correlated moves: first, the analyst must double her act of knowing by also knowing the historicity of the point of view from which she knows; second, several points of view must be brought to bear on any "segment of the world" in order to "identify a problematic area within it."³³ Like literature, the critic comes after social discourse, ingesting and analyzing it in its entirety. This effort produces an overarching perspective, able to encompass more than any particular discourse, and to evaluate each discourse's relation to all others, and to the whole. The fragility and contingency of hegemonic forces become visible to the analyst, who assumes a position analogous to that of the narrator in realist fiction, able to know more than any of the characters, and yet forever positioned "outside" and "after" the game: the "narrator as nobody."³⁴ Like the narrator in realist fiction, the analyst is caught in the ironic bind of being unable either to accept or transcend these limited perspectives, for everyone is entrapped in some social discourse—"in eo movemur et sumus."³⁵ In spite of the risks involved in the analysis of social discourse (which does not protect its practitioners with the blanket of scientific objectivity), the critic ultimately remains separate from the object of analysis, uninterpellated and unimplicated by its stakes and agonistic positioning, literally "out of the action."

This ironic, outside perspective of the critic is made possible by a series of divisions between base and superstructure, things and words, power and discourse, truth and ideology, the present and the past. The analysis of social discourse excludes economic practices and the other forces determining "the terrain." Power relations eventually disappear at the edges of discourses that evolve according to internal pressures. For example, in L'utopie collectiviste (1993), Angenot details the different discursive constraints affecting the production of collectivist utopias under the Second International. These texts systematically reproduce a master blueprint for a future socialist society, in which the "correct administration of things" resolves social conflicts. Angenot identifies this solution-through-managerial-revolution as being typical of "all the fundamental contradictions of modern ethical and civic thought," which is unable effectively to reconcile collectivist principles and individual liberty.³⁶ The ideology of the Second International thus

ends up with wobbly formulas always implying a free citizen that would have completely interiorized and recognized as his own the needs of the collective organization [End Page 270] . . . . Collectivism does not hinder liberty . . . in that it fixes impersonal social rules imposing duties and limits to the rights of each; but it can only conceive of liberty in terms of security (of work, satisfaction of needs, insurance against chance events in life).³⁷

Through cogent analyses, Angenot identifies the State as the great enabling blind spot of collectivist utopias: "it is the discursive, argumentative, deductive solution to all the logical difficulties, all the aporias that we encountered."³⁸ Because the analysis of social discourse excludes power relations, however, Angenot conceives the function of the State as governor of things strictly in terms of argumentative strategies. Economic forces (commodity fetishism, which allows material production to be perceived as a relation between things instead of laboring subjects, as analyzed by Marx) and political forces (the eventual development of the welfare state and its multifarious security measures) are severed from the analysis.

Thus while profoundly historical (anchored to the specificities of time periods and genres), Angenot's concept of social discourse as a global regulating system producing hegemony carries certain limiting methodological implications. The theoretical imperative to analyze the totality of discursive formations necessarily restricts the scope of examination to a relatively circumscribed synchronic slice, an approach that prevents any consideration of the means of revision, modification, and change over time. This inability to account for transformations is compounded by the distinctions drawn between discourses and reality, the map and the terrain: relations of power are excluded, as agency and subjectivity are considered as features of the systematic production of ideology. Moreover, the focus on the production and dissemination of hegemonic truths tends to diminish the differences between discursive practices. Such an approach leaves unexplored the production of the new or the mechanisms of alteration—areas of particular interest to Bakhtin, who elaborates the concept of the dialogical in order to account for processes transforming the subject, the other, and culture. Indeed Angenot and Bakhtin recognize two poles of textual analysis, and proceed in opposite directions: Angenot toward the "potential language of languages," and Bakhtin towards "the unrepeatable event of the text."³⁹

Both Bakhtin and Angenot are fascinated by the relations between the said and the unsaid in discourse, the mechanisms that allow seemingly innocent utterances to imply ideological truths and values. Whereas Angenot focuses on the presupposition of commonly held discursive elements (topoï or ideological maxims), their typical configurations and patterns of dissemination, Bakhtin conceives of this component of discourse as a complex set of spatio-temporal, ideological, and axiological relations between historical subjects:

In no instance is the extraverbal situation only an external cause of the utterance; it does not work from the outside like a mechanical force. On the contrary, the situation [End Page 271] enters into the utterance as a necessary constitutive element of its semantic structure. The quotidian utterance . . . is therefore composed of two parts: (1) a realized or actualized verbal part, and (2) an implied part. That is why an utterance can be compared to an "enthymeme."⁴⁰

An utterance is composed of abstract significations and concrete meanings. Carried by words and syntactical structures, significations are self-identical in every repetition, and therefore signify very little; their function is to provide the potential, the mere "technical apparatus" for the realization of meaning, in the concrete, non-reiterable event of speech, as intersubjective process.⁴¹ Bakhtin accentuates the pragmatic, responsive character of all meaning: "with meaning I give answers to questions. Anything that does not answer a question is devoid of sense for us."⁴²

Thus every utterance, every word is directed towards the responsive understanding of another, a trait Bakhtin identifies as the finalization of the utterance.⁴³ The subject "first reach[es] awareness" in discourse, in the use of words brimming over with other people's intentions and struggles: "a word in the mouth of a particular individual person is a product of the living interaction of social forces." Languages of class inflect even such primary sensations as hunger.⁴⁴ In this sense, the characteristic trait Angenot discerns for literature (and the critic), that of coming after social discourse in a historical/critical swerve, is for Bakhtin a trait of discourse in general, and of the subject of discourse.⁴⁵ The production of meaning is therefore an on-going transformational process, made possible by the historicity of discourses and their subjects. Because they bear the marks of their use in past struggles, words necessarily exceed any meaning the subject attempts to ascribe to them: an area of "play" is opened by the fact that the (past) meanings of words always outreach the needs of any present use.⁴⁶ Conversely, a word is also influenced by its anticipated future reception. This non-concordance of the word to its actualization in an utterance allows for the inscription of new inflections and meanings. Bakhtin describes a series of possibilities offered in discourse for such tactical adjustments, producing alternate meanings: hybrid constructions, double-voiced discourse, parodic stylization, and carnivalization, to name only a few.⁴⁷ Whereas Angenot discerns mechanisms whereby the same is reiterated in hegemonic discourse, Bakhtin focuses on means of displacement and disturbance in discourse as an intersubjective practice. He insists however that "what interests us is not the psychological aspect of the relationship to others' utterances (and understanding), but its reflection in the structure of the utterance itself."⁴⁸

The excess of meaning actualized by the (historical) word equally applies to the speaker, whose participation in numerous discursive practices (each with its own finalization, appropriate speakers, institutional accents, and so on) makes any perfect fit with a single discursive [End Page 272] subject position at any given moment impossible. Working from a synchronic perspective allows Angenot to sketch general roles required by social discourse and "filled in" by different individuals or celebrities in a given period. Bakhtin's diachronic approach, specifically engaging with an unfolding present, allows him to recognize possibilities for altering these speech roles, and thus clear a space for agency for subjects (where there is none for Angenot, save for the truly exceptional artist or critic). For Bakhtin, speakers are not overdetermined, but rather freed up by their involvement in different discursive practices, whose various exigencies may be rearranged in new combinatory configurations: "it is precisely the zone of contact with an inconclusive present (and consequently with the future) that creates the necessity of this incongruity of a man with himself. . . . An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing sociohistorical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities and needs . . . there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found." The production of "responsive understanding" implies strategic maneuvers (at times described through war metaphors by Bakhtin) in relation to the other.⁴⁹ Such dialogical encounters operate within single utterances (whether composed of one sentence or an entire novel) as well as transcultural exchanges; they work not to overcome contradictions (as in dialectics) or achieve consensus (as in dialogue), but rather to transform subjects and displace problematics—and thereby produce culture over time.⁵⁰ Speakers who engage in dialogical relations are altered by their introduction to transgredient elements that modify their ideological horizons.⁵¹ Whereas comprehension is an ongoing, transformational process between subjects, explanation (as performed through the analysis of social discourse, for example), is never dialogical, and involves a subject's relation to an object.⁵²

Dialogical relations do not simply happen in some utopian space of free exchange for Bakhtin, but rather occur within the ideologically saturated discursive environment of the speakers, which works to rarefy the sayable in a social formation, in accordance with the requirements of the "generating socioeconomic reality."⁵³ The overall number of speech genres available at any time to different classes or segments of the population is thereby restricted. Saussure and his structuralist followers reject actual speech as part of their investigations because of what they perceive to be its infinite variety, reflecting the historical multiplicity of individual speakers. Bakhtin objects to this premise: "Saussure ignores the fact that in addition to forms of language there are also forms of combinations of these forms, that is, he ignores speech genres."⁵⁴ Speech is organized into a limited number of genres, historical forms that select as meaningful certain traits of reality in accordance to the exigencies of practice (as in Prieto's description [End Page 273] of the semiotic process). Genres act by shaping the present with the forms of cultural memory; they affect the future by forcing speakers to "learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre."⁵⁵ The historicity of these forms is what ties them (and the utterances they generate) to social values and practical, economic, and political exigencies. Bakhtin argues that although form is "realized entirely in a given material, and is bound to it," it also "takes us axiologically beyond the bounds of the work as organized material, as a thing."⁵⁶ Forms and values produce ideology as material, bodily practice (Angenot's "primary semanticizations"): "we are most inclined to imagine ideological creation as some inner process of understanding, comprehension, and perception, and do not notice that it in fact unfolds externally, for the eye, the ear, the hand. It is not within us, but between us."⁵⁷ He insists however that the centralizing forces of genres cannot be viewed as achieving a unitary, overarching totality (as in Angenot's concept of social discourse): speech genres are irreducibly diverse (a trait he terms heterology).⁵⁸

What interests Bakhtin are the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of discursive encounters with the new, and the other, in the present, especially in the novel.⁵⁹ He argues that the novel must be related to "a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships." Born out of this first encounter with multiple, contingent discourses, the novel engages with the open-ended present in its relation to the future (instead of the absolute past characteristic of the epic form). It materializes its objects and ideas through the artistic orchestration of speech genres, and can thereby destabilize discursive hierarchies and "expose the conventionality of their forms and their language." Facing the other makes the one appear historical and contingent, rather than inalterable and true: "reality as we have it in the novel is only one of many possible realities; it is not inevitable, not arbitrary, it bears within itself other possibilities." Moreover, once the novel becomes the dominant artistic form, "almost all the remaining [literary] genres are to a greater or lesser extent 'novelized.'"⁶⁰ The "novelization of the world" documented by Angenot specifically for nineteenth-century discourse is thus conceptualized in more general epistemological and political terms by Bakhtin.

However, for Bakhtin, the novel's dialogical relations are distinguished from others by their function in the aesthetic achievement of completion. All utterances are open-ended, answering previous speech events and anticipating future responses; aesthetic utterances, however, punctuate this transformative process with moments of consummation, achieved in intersubjective, dialogical relations. Bakhtin argues that an aesthetically valid whole results from the active engagement of the author and reader with the cognitive and axiological content of [End Page 274] the work. The text's structure (its architectonics) provides the material support for the production of its aesthetic form by the subjects it interrelates: "form is the expression of the active, axiological relationship of the author-creator and of the recipient (who co-creates the form) to content."⁶¹ Michael Holquist notes that this "wholeness, or consummation, is always to be understood here as a relative term: in Bakhtin, . . . wholeness is a kind of fiction that can be created only from a particular point of view."⁶² The wholeness produced by aesthetic activity is therefore not an overall system, a self-enclosed totality, but rather a local (and temporary) process that produces "the event of reality" between subjects.⁶³

The concept of the chronotope (the time-space relations of any speech genre) is thus fundamental to the understanding of the aesthetic event. Although Bakhtin claims to use Einstein's concept in a metaphorical way, the physicist's own explanation of the relations between space, time, and the event are relevant to the cultural critic's apprehension of the problematic:

In the pre-relativity physics space and time were separate entities. Specifications of time were independent of the choice of the space of reference. . . . One spoke of points of space, as of instants of time, as if they were absolute realities. It was not observed that the true element of the space-time specification was the event. . . . It is neither the point in space, nor the instant in time, at which something happens that has physical reality, but only the event itself.⁶⁴

Bakhtin's aesthetic event occurs in the consummation of form, which is co-produced by the author and reader (as positioned by the text's structure). Other dialogical interactions, specified by other chronotopes, will alter this form: the analysis of a novel must therefore take into account the chronotope of the text, of its conditions of emergence, and of its conditions of consummation. The outside position of the critic drawn by Angenot's work is thus rendered untenable by Bakhtin's engagement with the other in the present.

To a large extent, the aesthetic event is an immaterial materiality, but Bakhtin takes pains to reassure his reader:

There is absolutely no reason to be afraid of the fact that the aesthetic object cannot be found either in the psyche or in the material work of art. It does not become in consequence some sort of mystical or metaphysical essence. The multiform world of action (the being of the ethical) finds itself in the same situation. Where is the State located? In the psyche? In physicomathematical space? On the pages of constitutional records? And where is the law located? Nevertheless, we do deal responsibly with the state and with the law.⁶⁵

These questions concerning the immateriality of the State and its effects on dealing responsibly with everyday life can be answered with Foucault's concept of governmentality. Indeed Angenot's analyses of social discourse consider the systematic production of hegemony [End Page 275] within specific, historical freeze-frames; Bakhtin's investigations of dialogical relations bear on local, transformational processes, in their chronotopic unfolding as events. Both of these modes of discourse analysis consider that ideology reigns supreme, yet both tend to exclude power relations from their actual investigations. Foucault's genealogy of discursive practices avoids the concept of ideology, for three principal reasons: the notion stands in opposition to "something else which is supposed to count as truth" (whether science, critique, or art); it positions knowledge as epiphenomenal to material practices; it necessarily refers to the subject in one of its humanist, Marxist, or phenomenological variants.⁶⁶ By inserting the study of historical matrices of power-knowledge into DA, Foucault's writings effectively redistribute this configuration of primary material practices and secondary discursive ones, while maintaining notions of subjectivity and agency very close to Bakhtin's own, because of their common focus on discursive events (as argued below).

Notorious for changing his analytical strategies with every new inquiry, Foucault nevertheless maintains in "What is Enlightenment?" that his inquiries "all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?"⁶⁷ Although these three axes are inextricably linked, Foucault's books tend to assign a predominant place to one over the others: knowledge in the 1960s, power in the 1970s, and ethics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like Angenot and Bakhtin, Foucault insists on the spatio-temporal and interdiscursive configuration of statements:

At the very outset, from the very root, the statement is divided up into an enunciative field in which it has a place and a status, which arranges for its possible relations with the past, and which opens up for it a possible future. . . . There is no statement that does not presuppose others; there is no statement that is not surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects of series and succession, a distribution of functions and roles.⁶⁸

Like Bakhtin, Foucault rejects the priority given by structuralists to the systematic over the historical, to totalizing concepts over local, conjectural configurations. Foucault insists:

The question which I ask is not about codes but about events: the law of existence of statements, that which rendered them possible—them and none other in their place: the conditions of their singular emergence. . . . Nothing, you see, is more foreign to me than the quest for a sovereign, unique and constraining form. . . . Wherever it seemed necessary, I have been prepared to add to the plurality of distinguishable systems.⁶⁹

Nevertheless, as long as Foucault limited his analyses to the government of statements (in the series of books on madness, the clinic, and the human sciences), his investigations could not account for transformations or radical discontinuity within knowledge formations (an incapacity [End Page 276] shared by formalism, structuralism, and Angenot's analysis of social discourse). Archeological examination can only register the effects of epistemological ruptures; their emergence and intelligibility become accessible only when domains of knowledge are articulated to relations of power.

The many different disruptions of 1968 in cities across the world (Prague, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, Chicago, etc.) attributed a sense of urgency to debates about power, its nature, proper administration, and analysis. The traditional model of base and superstructure, with the State and its ideological apparatuses serving to consolidate economic and political exploitation, no longer seemed fully adequate to the multifarious functions and continual redistribution of power, in repression and resistance. In France, the May protests also displaced epistemological priorities; Foucault believed that his work on medical and psychiatric institutions and discourses, previously judged as "politically unimportant and epistemologically vulgar," acquired a new pertinence in the light of "daily struggles at grass roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power."⁷⁰ Concepts of class and ideology could not satisfactorily account for what came to be known as the new social movements.

Through his work with the Groupe information prisons, the writing of Discipline and Punish (1975), and in a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in the mid-1970s, Foucault began to develop a model of power that he opposed to the classic Liberal or Marxist versions. In the Liberal model, power is described as a right, a kind of property or good possessed by individuals who can relinquish parts of it in order to form a sovereignty. In this contractual model, power is positioned as a commodity which can be conceded, exchanged for security, circulated among consenting partners. In the Marxist model, the ruling class uses power primarily to establish and maintain relations of exploitative economic production and political domination. In both cases, power is considered as isomorphic or contiguous to commodity exchange. It is precisely because of this close connection between relations of production and relations of force, Foucault argues, that the analysis of power requires a model that is not circumscribed by the commodity form, and can account for the unending reach of power relations. He proposes that the conflicts, tactics and maneuvers of war can provide such a model, for power relations, like war, saturate every facet of life; they involve strategies of imposition and resistance, large confrontations and more circumscribed skirmishes; they affect individual bodies and entire populations. He proposes that Clausewitz's famous formula be reversed, and that politics, and peace, be considered as war by other means.⁷¹

Rather than start with such accepted universals as "the State" and "the governed," opposite extremes fastened together with "a bit of [End Page 277] string called ideology" (in Paul Veyne's words), Foucault begins by investigating local centers of power-knowledge relations as transformational processes affecting subjects.⁷² Rather than look for the essence, origin, or location of power, Foucault asks "how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors etc."⁷³ Thus "power is not a substance. . . . Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals;"⁷⁴ it is an attempt to "conduct the conduct of others." But the individual itself is not a primary unit controlled by power, it is rather "an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle."⁷⁵ Foucault argues that "one of the great inventions of bourgeois society," which has been a "fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism and of the type of society that is its accompaniment" has been the incorporation of power relations through discipline, in a web of interconnected strategies designed to produce "docile bodies" in various institutional settings and cultural habits—armies, factories, hospitals, schools, and salons.⁷⁶ Reminiscent of Angenot's "primary semanticizations," such power relations are articulated in discourse for Foucault, rather than on some other plane before or beyond the reach of social discourse. Foucault's description of subject formation as discursive and bodily relational processes recalls Bakhtin's accounts of transformational, intersubjective dialogical encounters, except that for the former, such transactions are necessarily enmeshed in the exercise of power. Power, knowledge, and subject relations are articulated, transmitted, resisted, and transformed in discourse for Foucault.⁷⁷ The function of genealogy is then to destroy the apparent unity of the individual, to "disassociate the self" from the fiction of identity that attaches it to discourses of truth and effects of power.⁷⁸ Foucault argues that "We must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place. . . . In the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power."⁷⁹

Relations between the subject and discourses of truth occupy much of Foucault's research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he displaces the "tired notion of power-knowledge" (as he terms it in one of his lectures) with that of governmentality, the government of self and others, exercised on the population as a whole and on each individual, through security measures covering every facet of life—health, education, work, leisure, and culture. The proper exercise of this bio-power (first known as "the police," in the sense of policy), requires infinite [End Page 278] amounts of truth about "all and each," about their current and future needs, about the efficiency and extent of governmental interference, in order to ensure "'the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end.'"⁸⁰ The problem of ensuring the freedom of each while providing for the needs of the collectivity, and its "resolution" through the correct administration of things (documented by Angenot in collectivist utopias), can thus be traced throughout modernity, in both capitalist and socialist societies where the State is governmentalized, and charged with securing the life of the nation.

But, Foucault asks, how can a form of government responsible for the continuum of life acknowledge economic, political, social differences among citizens? "If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the old sovereign right to kill [or to differentiate and exclude]," Foucault argues, "it must pass through racism."⁸¹ State racism and sexism, colonization and imperialism are required by the government of life, as an intrinsic part of its operations; they constitute the reverse side of Bakhtin's encounter with the other, the one that appears when bio-power relations, and the rationality of governmentality, are brought into focus. These relations also situate collectivist utopias (analyzed by Angenot) as the very forms of resistance drawn out by the exercise of governmental power. For Foucault, power functions not only through repression, but also through production and encouragement, by stimulating pleasures and ambitions, identities and habits. But power relations can only exist where resistance is possible: "resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite."⁸² Socialist dreams of a society where free citizens have "completely interiorized and recognized as [their] own the needs of the collective organization," and where individuals "can only conceive of liberty in terms of security" do indeed constitute the "irreducible opposite," the requisite resistance to power relations designed to foster the life of the population as a whole, and each of its individuals.⁸³ With historical distance and genealogical analysis, the failure of these socialist movements to overthrow the regimes they opposed can be seen as at least partly due to a misapprehension of the grounds and stakes involved in the battle. But is all resistance doomed to failure?

Foucault argues that the dominance of one class and the importance of the State must be considered not as the origin of power relations, but rather as the end results of their integration. Multifarious local strategies, emanating from below and cutting across various locations (in class, family, sexual, racial, religious, military, educational relations) ultimately consolidate the many diverse privileges, the wealth and strength of the few—and conversely, revolutions could result from the ultimate integration of multiple resistance points.⁸⁴ Points of resistance [End Page 279] are continually activated throughout social formations, they emerge to alter present configurations of knowledge and subjectivity, "producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds."⁸⁵ By circumscribing the articulation of domains of knowledge and relations of power in discourse, genealogy generates new objects of knowledge, other subject positions, and alternate means of resistance. And this is where distinctions between subject and self (sujet and soi) and between knowledge and a knowledge (savoir and connaissance) are both crucial for Foucault's conceptual network, and very difficult to translate from the French.⁸⁶ The subject of a knowledge (connaissance) is positioned by power-knowledge relations in discursive practices with definite objects and modes of enunciation; it is the subject of explanation in Bakhtin, the one who utters or encounters pre-determined, pre-approved objects, with accepted modes of enunciation. This subject is thus necessarily occupying a position determined by past struggles and conflicts, long since resolved and naturalized into what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, the common categories of common sense. These categorizations work to shape the present according to the victories of the past; they work to extend such configurations into the future. Genealogy seeks to destroy the subject of connaissance and its objects, and clear the way for a subject of savoir who seeks to think otherwise.⁸⁷ Through a genealogical analysis of the historical forces present in current categorizations that go without saying, the subject of knowledge recognizes its contingent position; it can trace lines of rupture and weaknesses that can be used to elaborate difference in the present. It attempts to actualize unacknowledged virtualities, alternate possibilities. In other words, it interrupts the present and delays the future by actualizing the self. Thus Foucault speaks of "the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom." This is an impersonal project, enabled in genealogical practices, and oriented toward the future: "askesis is . . . the work that one does oneself on one's self in order to transform oneself or to make that self appear that happily one never attains."⁸⁸

Such work elaborates new relationships to discourses of truth that are crucial to the stakes involved in DA, according to Foucault:

Criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. . . . And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will . . . separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.⁸⁹

Just like the novel. The ethos of genealogy corresponds to the function of literature in social discourse according to Angenot, and to the [End Page 280] completion of the aesthetic form in Bakhtin. However Foucault cannot, in a theoretically consistent manner, claim truth for his writings, for this would enfold his work into the play of domination generated by the will to knowledge. Genealogy is forcefully "anti-scientific" and against globalizing theories;⁹⁰ it focuses on discursive events, and produces historical fictions that work to transform those who engage with them—as in dialogical relations. Although historically verifiable, Foucault's texts do not satisfy the disciplinary standards of history because of their formal experiments: omissions, exaggerations, rhetorical flourishes, large segments of polemical exchange in direct discourse, the enfolding of other texts into one's own, all of these devices tend to offend professional historians who question the status of the data. But Foucault is not targeting subjects or objects of connaissance. His engagement with the present, his ethical imperative to think otherwise and thereby to produce subjects of knowledge (savoir) engaged in their self-elaboration, necessitate such choices.⁹¹ He describes his books as experiences that can change their participants and thereby alter the future: "My hope is that my books will attain their truth once written, and not before. . . . I hope that the truth of my books is in the future."⁹²

Thus the thread of novelization returns. First encountered in Angenot's study of social discourse in 1889, it appeared as a general gnoseology, able to circulate ideologemes about the fin-de-siècle in language that purported to simply transmit reality as it was. The analyst could explain the phenomenon through historical critique, and remain largely unaffected by this new object of knowledge. Then it emerged with Bakhtin's comprehension of modernity's encounter with the present, and the other. The novel's dialogical form provided the possibility of aesthetic completion for the writer and reader, a momentary, transformational fiction bound to resurface in other guises, with other readers, in other events of reality. For Foucault, this process is not reserved for the aesthetic; the philosopher's work is involved, for it also functions as an intersubjective, dialogical event enacted in the present. Genealogy, however, recognizes the play of power relations in the midst of knowledge production; it works to counter their mechanisms of subjugation by developing practices of freedom; it elaborates new forms of writing that alter the subject's relation to the discourses of truth, and allow for the concern for the self. Local discursive practices, analyzed by the method of archaeology, are put into play, in the present, through the tactics of genealogy.⁹³

But to know how to analyze the fine meshes of discourses, in all of their materiality, in their production and dissemination, one must turn to Angenot's work for appropriate analytical tools; to grasp processes of transformation and engagement with the other, one must read over Bakhtin, and his apprehension of the event; and to know discursive [End Page 281] events as conditions for the emergence of the self, one must turn to Foucault's historical fictions. Cultural studies thus fashioned could devise effective tools for resistance and alteration.