Power and the Celebration of the Self: Michel Foucault's Epideictic Rhetoric

Abstract

I argue that Michel Foucault can be read as practicing a kind of epideictic rhetoric. Foucault's work is epideictic because it tells a history of the present, is concerned with aesthetics, and is involved in uncovering and displaying common cultural values or ideals. Through an analysis of the epideictic dimensions of Foucault's work I link his conception of power to his concern with the self and demonstrate that self-creation is connected to a display of the history of the present. Such a move implies that epideictic is a critical practice for contemporary rhetorical theorists and critics, the significance of which can be extended and developed in the light of Foucault's position on power and human agency.

Parts of earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at the 2002 National Communication Association annual convention, New Orleans, LA, and the 2003 Eastern Communication Association annual convention, Washington, D.C.

Notes

1. Both “subject” and “self” appear a number of times in this essay and in Foucault's works. There is an important difficulty in using these words. Traditional metaphysics uses the concept of the self and the subject as an essential trope in understanding how individuals know and act in the world. From the perspective of traditional metaphysics, individual and subjective notions of selfhood prescribe and privilege a certain form of agency that Foucault tries to avoid but that is often inscribed in the very ways language operates. Foucault's task is to begin to think about the subject and the self as constituted by discourse and power relations—that is, as something more complex than a subjective agent free to know and act in the world. In what follows, I attempt to follow his lead by understanding the self and the subject as made possible by the power relations and discourses that operate in a given context, but I cannot avoid employing language in a way that hints at the presence of the notion of free and subjective agency. This is both a testament to the influence of Western metaphysics and a sign of the limitations of our own language to escape the patterns of thought already established.

2. By writing about epideictic rhetoric, the Greeks emphasized the values that tied a speaker to an audience—this is made possible, in part, by the assumption that there was one, homogeneous Greek culture. One of the problems in writing about Foucault's epideictic rhetoric is that he is French. One must assume that the values he outlines are the values of Continental culture and not necessarily American culture. This is one of the problems of importing any Continental theorist into an American context, especially in terms of a rhetorical theory that pays such close attention to context. In what follows, it is not necessarily the content of Foucault's rhetorical practices that interest me, but the shape of the strategies themselves. In other words, I do not assume that what he says necessarily applies to an American context, but I do assume that the strategies he uses to make his case can be useful in an American context.

3. As a specific example of a community redescribing its own moment as a means of resistance, one can consider AIDS activists during the 1980s. The confrontation between the medical industry and the gay community revealed the need for the gay community to both master the dicourse of the medical industry in order to understand the manner in which sufferers were turned into patients and to invent mechanisms to reimagine the gay male body that could escape the oppressive cultural categories of the moment. Many of the mechanisms for reimagining the gay male body were aesthetic, and these aesthetic mechanisms underscored any overtly political strategies used by the activists. For an extended commentary on this story, see Treichler (1999).

4. By “traditional metaphysics” I simply mean the distinctions between appearance and reality and surface and depth that mark the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato. The assumption is that appearances hide something that is true and the job of philosophy is to get beyond or underneath appearances so that one can know what is real or what is true. This is not the kind of uncovering that Foucault practices—it is the kind privileged by Plato.