Writing with Foucault: openings to transformational knowledge practices in and beyond the classroom

ABSTRACT

This article engages questions of authority and authorship in the discipline and the IR classroom, driven by a search for affirmative horizons within critical scholarship and academic practice. Prompted by a series of ‘failures’ attached to the social and disciplinary performance of ‘expertise’ in the context of violent conflict, I explore the practice of writing as it unfolds from Michel Foucault’s lesser cited essays and interviews as a generative, creative resource. I follow Foucault in breaking down the normalised perceptions of the ‘author function,’ revealing writing as an act that diagnoses, discovers, and potentially transforms writer, reader and the social structures that the writing addresses. Foucault’s experimental ethos brings to light the complex life worlds of sense-making through the vehicle of writing. It also invites us to embrace the transgenerational heritage that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge together with the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the text. I enter such processes of negotiation and transgression in Foucault’s work and my own writing through a series of vignettes, which aim to actualise the ‘method’ these gestures may harbour for making ‘uncommon sense’ and re-inhabiting research and pedagogical practice as continuous, self-reflexive and self-authori(zi)ng journeys.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• author function
• narrative writing
• critical pedagogy
• creative methods
• everyday IR

Experts in war

On the second morning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I walk into the classroom and head straight to the screen to set the ‘meeting’ up. This is Week 5 of an MA-level Research Design and Methods in IR class. Our theme is ‘focus groups.’ I am quick to greet everyone sitting there, at the back of the room, far away from the tablet, which is technically our shared meeting location. Those joining online queue up as grey icons in the front, with cameras turned off. I place my body in that narrow corridor from where I can see the whole room and I can be seen by the camera. Without much hesitation, I begin. Words roll out surprisingly quickly. I announce the topic and invite reflections on the readings. There is not much movement on either sides and I notice that my words, underneath the face mask and beneath the surface of their illusionary smoothness, don’t carry much power. I also note, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I missed my opportunity to ground this class, ourselves, in the light, and darkness, of what is happening less than a thousand kilometres away from us and the presumably safe physical space in a Western country, where our ‘learning’ is meant to take place.

The generic unease of the pandemic classroom has been growing for weeks now. Beyond the immediate anxiety, anger, panic, and powerlessness that the eruption of the war triggered, it feels that this subtle pressure on the nerves, which became our default condition a long time ago, has crept deeper into the cells.

Halfway through the session, which mostly consisted of me ‘covering the basics’, a participant, with their camera off, unmutes themselves.

‘I don’t want to disrupt the flow of the class, but I feel like I’m unable to focus, and it’s not just me. I think we need space to say a word about Ukraine. I think a lot of us feels useless … I feel useless, I am unable to do anything besides joining the protest and sharing useful information.’

Other voices weave in, now from both planes. I stand back and let go of any ambition of carrying on with ‘teaching.’ I do my best to hold whatever is there to be held onto and embraced. I lean against the wall for support. The pauses in between are gentle and respectful. In those moments when I am able to register this, a wave of gratitude flows through me. ‘Thank you for sharing.’ I cling on to these words, the safest I can locate. What I really mean is: ‘I see you, I hear you, I’m with you.’ A few minutes into the exchange, which remains remarkably honest and unchoreographed, I realise that there is a simultaneous WhatsApp conversation running in the group. Someone steps forward to mediate between (what for me is) ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet my presence as a teacher, that of the mostly friendly yet still threatening other in possession of the power over grades, is not the only otherwise muffled dividing line brought to the fore by the ‘state of emergency’. Some of those with friends and family in Ukraine have sent emails in advance or during the class to excuse their absence. Those Russian students who showed up sit shocked and frozen with empty gazes pinned to a small anonymous spot on the desk in front of them. Wrapped up in the caring attention of their peers, who genuinely worry about them, some of them choose to leave. ‘I am sorry, I am not able to stay.’ I nod with understanding. Their fading footsteps are absorbed by a sudden outburst from the screen. A student who hardly ever speaks, now switches their camera on. ‘What can you do against a psychopath? This madness is incapacitating.’ The halt that follows gives away the struggle to hold things together. It feels like a thin, fragile line.

About half of the cohort comes from the post-Soviet space. Cellular memory of war doesn’t take much to be activated in bodies marked by the history and ongoing legacy of the Second World. ‘It’s retraumatizing to talk too much about Ukraine,’ someone remarks. ‘We might end up at the opposite end where we need to protect ourselves psychologically at the same time.’ For those who experienced violent conflict in their youth first-hand trauma has already returned. Some of the survivors’ anger who witnessed the Russo-Georgian and Nagorno-Karabakh wars is deep and silent. Hours later at a consultation I catch a glimpse of it as a whisper, a ‘footnote’ inserted in-between two ‘academic’ questions:

‘About a year and a half ago I attended my classes from a war zone. No-one cared about us. The university did nothing. There was no sympathy, not even acknowledgement of the situation. I know that it is wrong to compare suffering and I do feel for Ukrainian people, but what happened to us still hurts. Seeing all the outpour of solidarity, it hurts doubly.’

What could not even be articulated and fed into ‘classroom discourse’ reveals itself as a vast affective terrain that lies beneath the surface of interactions. Those who identify as in some sense ‘privileged’, Westernised Central Europeans or ‘proper’ subjects of the Global North, are puzzled as to what they can do. Shame lingers around the feeling of powerlessness. The fear of doing harm, to make a demand on those, even if out of good intentions, whose lives and wellbeing have already been profoundly impacted by the circumstances, is exhausting. ‘I am at the limits of my ability to compartmentalise,’ says someone and the sentiment is echoed from multiple corners. The palpable emotional distress, of whatever origin and composition, the pressure to perform in the programme, and not least, the basic desire to ‘go on’ with life swirl around in endless, interrupted circles.

The growing tension pushes us towards finding some logistical ‘solution.’ I learn from the student who stepped up as our diplomat that about half of the group would prefer to continue with discussing research methods and dissertation projects that are due within a few months. This intervention relieves the class of doing further damage to unacknowledged experiences, needs and emotions, at least momentarily. In the space stretching between ‘we can’t pretend that things are normal’ and ‘we need some structure so that we don’t drown completely’ it is hard to know the way forward. In fact, it’s hard to ‘know’ anything.

Before the energy of our striated yet open being-together would be channelled towards resolving the organisational matter of creating two platforms simultaneously – one to continue to share and another to return to the intended academic subject matter of the class – a new interjection folds onto a whole different dimension:

‘We are in an IR department and in a methods class, so I was thinking … . while I’m totally heartbroken, I was reflecting critically, with as little emotion involved as possible, on IR and what IR actually means and can do. Yesterday I was extremely negative, and I would only see the shortcomings of this field. If we come to think of that the IR bubble could not realistically assess what was happening on the ground. I feel extremely disillusioned about this. As if I had wasted my time in the past six years. I had been studying something that cannot help people. It cannot even come up with realistic scenarios. At the same time, I know that this is not the best approach, and I don’t want to stay in this place. So I am thinking, what could I do with the knowledge that I possess right now? What can we do more than donate, more than listen to each other? How can we be a bit better than the previous generations? In IR we are trapped in abstract concepts that don’t help anyone. We want to help each other but we also need to continue our own lives.’

The interpellation is real. So is the demand for more affirmative horizons. Part of me feels contented. Inspired by Foucault’s critical ethos (see Strausz 2018a, 2018b), I have taken every opportunity in the past years to emphasise that the aim of critique is not to stop at the worst of ‘diagnosis.’ We need to keep searching for alternatives – transformational, poetic gestures and moments where a plurality of experiences may emerge – and push ourselves for thinking, sensing, imagining otherwise what we might be able to do and what we might become. Yet the question about knowledge hits home in more than one senses. I write and teach the discipline, claiming that neither is a fully self-referential process. I insist and persist that both research and pedagogy have valuable resources to offer to ‘life’ as we live it, for the irreducible complexity of the everyday, including those mundane, seemingly non-political experiences that quickly disappear within the aesthetic distribution of voice and skill in the discipline. I hold on to this – perhaps wishful – mission, stressing that none of these ambitions and promises are straightforward, let alone easy to attain. I have been repeating bell hooks’ powerful statement like a mantra inside and beyond the classroom: ‘theory is not inherently healing, liberatory or revolutionary. It fulfils this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end’ (1994, 61). The unsettling work of ‘translation’ (Nagar 2019) should be ongoing in how we sense and make sense of texts and the life worlds from which they emanate and which they always fail to capture. I have been making space for the discomfort that it brings, giving the reassurance to whoever would need it, myself included: ‘that’s OK. Whatever is there, it has a reason to be there, and it is not an abstraction. This is the actual raw material of our sense-making.’

‘What is the use of what we are learning?’ – I hear out from these words, and I note that the disappointment that radiates through them is harder for me to face than the feelings of lacking agency or capacity to do something for others. I found that the latter has been relatively easy to subvert, even if temporarily, by drawing attention to more resources. To give an account of the worth and ‘legitimacy’ of what I have invested not months but decades of energy into, and under circumstances where it is pretty hard to go on as a speaking subject, is more challenging. The figure of Elizabeth Dauphinee’s interlocutor, Stojan Sokolović and the sentiment of his question pointed at the researcher reverberates in my mind: ‘what expert are you?’ (2010, 803) With perhaps even greater force arising from within a pedagogical relationship, I hear ‘What expert are you and what experts are you turning us into? What experts are we becoming through you?’

Enter Foucault

Days pass by and I note that our unconscious wiring gradually re-establishes a sense of normalcy – or a semblance of it – at least for those who can afford some distance from the actual unfolding of events. As the presence of war becomes a normalised aspect of the ‘new reality’ the rupture in our academic being and being-together slowly closes in. Having reached a point of saturation mentally and emotionally, class interactions settle back into familiar tracks carved out by ‘peacetime’ dramaturgies. The affective landscapes of war mostly withdraw into the realm of the ‘private’ and the edges of university life. Donation platforms and initiatives are omnipresent. The continuing angst shows itself in proliferating extension requests, consultation appointments and questions about how ‘the situation in Ukraine’ might affect, even side-track someone’s dissertation research. The latter has grown into an unspoken measure of authenticity or validity. As if there was an obligation to cite and recite, weave the war into narrations even if it often remains an exhausted, empty gesture, almost already disarmed in its ability to provoke new thinking and imagination. I am witnessing how ‘war’ becomes a placeholder, muted in its disruptive force. Yet as overstretched feeling capacities begin to recuperate, I can also sense that gestures have become more spacious and attentive. Something feels softer, humbler, more compassionate as the traces of the initial shock are slowly absorbed in bureaucratic operation. Beyond its reduction to nominal appearance, I note that ‘war’ also acts as a reminder that life worlds are inextricably linked, regardless of whether we may acknowledge this or not.

I wholeheartedly wish for this register of presence and sensitivity to stay and continue to permeate the everyday social milieu of the university. I wonder about what my role could be in affirming and nourishing this quality, and the yet unchanneled potentiality that springs from shattered cognitive frames and points of reference? It strikes me that after all, this is that 'practice of life' (Strausz 2013) that quietly grows beyond and through what is recognised as disciplinary practice. It is what discreetly wraps around the disillusionment of expertise, too, and the discourse that both enables and constrains its expression. It is right there in its aliveness as we continue to negotiate experiences – within ourselves and with others – from moment to moment. Yet this kind of emergent, situated and situational ‘knowledge’ – moments of understanding, relating and connecting, sparks of practical wisdom – remains strangely elusive. The subtle field of newly found lines of solidarity and practices of care keeps hovering above the demands for certainty through knowledge, nearly imperceptible in its capacity to offer some remedy and solace, even if it will not predict, let alone end the war in any direct manner.

I wonder about how to inhabit this liminal space that I am striving to hold a bit longer in my teaching, research, and life. As I flick through my notes for drafting this paper that seeks to rethink the critical potential of Foucault’s essay ‘What is an author?’ for IR and CSS, one part of me keeps circling back to the question of ‘expertise’, not only with regards to what it might mean to study matters of international relations and security through the intellectual apparatus of the discipline but also how being a ‘knowing subject’ is performed in research and enacted in pedagogical relationships. To displace IR’s ‘ontology of suffering’ and open space for an ‘ontology of joy’ Elina Penttinen emphasises the need for intense self-reflexivity to understand how certain ways of scholarly thinking and practice are implicated in the construction of problems that foreshadow particular solutions (2013, 12–14). Thinking alongside hooks, if the discipline has failed to provide resources, maybe we haven’t been asking theory (enough) to heal or haven’t learnt how to do so in a way that the practice of theorisation would indeed enable access to life experiences that are affirmative and generative of alternative horizons of thinking, action and being. I have displayed hooks’ quote over and again on nicely polished PowerPoint slides, fitting the aesthetics and promise of Western higher education. I have been working to ground the call in actual practices where anxieties over ‘security’ have transfigured into experiences of connection, solidarity, and growth. Yet have I been able to do that in a fashion that the energy of transformation, or at least the potential for change and becoming otherwise, might have shone through stronger, more persuasively than the default disciplinary projection of a hollowed-out world, constructed through ‘the linking of concepts or data points’ (Sylvester 2014, 56)?

My own ‘expertise’ in this regard – the daily efforts of translating between concepts and lived experiences, guarding against sense-making turning into solidified knowledge, holding space for plurality, keeping questions open in the face of impatient pulls towards finding ‘certainty’ – is still in the making. Taking inspiration from Sam Okoth Opondo’s figure and ethical modality of the ‘amateur diplomat,’ the making of ‘uncommon sense’ beyond ‘the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience’ is an ongoing endeavour that goes on to enact and uncover ‘practices and beings that exist alongside or below the threshold of diplomatic recognition’ (Opondo 2019, 104). I wouldn’t be writing this, and certainly not in this manner if I did have ‘answers,’ or I would be aiming at arriving at any definite statement. I continue to work at the junctures where ‘discipline’ meets ‘world’ and ‘world’ meets ‘discipline.’ In search of ‘more life-affirming encounters’ (104) and methods that embrace and serve the fullness of life with all its contingencies, this is where finally, and as per the original intention, Foucault enters, yet doesn’t stay for very long, at least not in any single or conclusive sense.

Reparative intentions

Foucault’s persistent interrogation and simultaneous resistance of social structures and ordering practices make his work – and especially his transformational scholarly ethos – an uneasy fit with any disciplinary practice that seeks (or otherwise establishes) certainty and with that, control over the subject matter, perpetuating the colonial legacy and violence of Western academic practice. Foucault-inspired security studies as an epistemic community has been critiqued on multiple counts with regards to having reproduced contested aspects of Foucault’s thought, exacerbating already existing omissions and distortions in his writing, such as race, gender, or a predominantly Western focus. Besides what to take (further) from Foucault’s oeuvre in substantive terms, the question of what Foucault’s presence may do to academic practice has also been widely engaged, pointing to some of the ways in which the discipline failed to turn the sentiment of Foucault’s critical ethos back on itself, reinforcing violent epistemologies, fixing identities and limiting its liberatory potential (see e.g. Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2019; Coleman and Rosenow 2016; Shani 2010; Walker 2017; Amoore 2008; Calkivik 2010). RBJ Walker observes

what may be an irritating absence of a manageably consistent voice behind the texts circulated under Foucault’s name, as well as an equally irritating desire to impose a singular voice so as to appropriate that name, into a concern with the problems that provoked him (2017, 314).

While disciplinary practice constantly produces figures of ‘Foucault,’ Michael Dillon and Andrew Neal foreground Foucault’s ‘fallibility’ as an opportunity to think ‘both with and against the thinker’ (2008, 2), and take responsibility not only for what we may take from him but also how we may draw upon his legacy. Neal notes that

if we look closely at the way Foucault writes about madness, we can see that as soon as he mentions a new discourse it is already disappearing. This constant disappearance is expressed not only in the imagery of the text but also in the movement of the writing itself. Somehow, every description is annulled within a few pages. As soon as a seemingly decisive discourse of madness appears, it is already disappearing. (2009, 542)

Foucault is no ‘expert’ in the style of knowledge production that sustains the ‘priestly caste’ of the social sciences (Shilliam 2013). His mastery is found not in perfecting representations and claiming authority over ‘a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating’ (Foucault 1984, 50), but rather, he writes to challenge fixity. This includes his own identity, with a view of having ‘no face’, of becoming other, subverting the bureaucratic logic of statehood (Foucault 2009, 19). A ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ calls for an ‘attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ (Foucault 1984, 50). Experimentation for Foucault takes the form of enabling and creating transformational experiences through scholarly inquiry. Within his intellectual practice and what he described as ‘experience books’ neither writer, nor reader, including their relationship to the subject matter, remain the same. The practice of writing as such ‘constitute both an experiment which the author carries out on him or herself, and an experiment in which the reader too can participate’ (O’Leary 2009, 7). As such, ‘madness’ as ‘the lyric glow of illness’ (Felman 2003, 52) can be encountered in and through Foucault’s prose freed from the regulatory discourse of psychiatry, as yet undifferentiated, unclassified, unsuppressed experience.

Foucault’s ethos remains equally slippery and unpindownable as an object of study through its multiple articulations that sometimes speak through fictionalised dialogues (see Foucault 1981, 2009). Inspired by the sentiment of his ‘critical attitude’ I wrote an experience book that sought to take forward and actualise the spirit of experimentation. I was asking: ‘How do we know what we know and who do we become in the process?’ (Strausz 2018a, 1). I designed a reflexive writing practice to explore and transform my own disciplinary conditioning and subjectivity, making this experience accessible to others as a creative resource I needed courage to do this, as being ‘unfaithful’ to Foucault (Neal 2009) opens onto an abyss of potentiality, which not only comes with the ethical weight of choice (and the risk of losing disciplinary recognisability) but also the simultaneous acceptance of the lack of control over what is yet to unfold. Writing the Self engendered a modality of narrative writing that foregrounds what writing may write back to the writer. It journeys through states of liminality and in-betweenness as meaning is ‘made,’ but more often found, stumbled upon, received, invented, co-created with others. With this ‘research design’ (and despite my mentors’ advice) I let go of the ambition to become an expert in a particular sub-field or issue area in the discipline. I came to ground my efforts and their ‘utility’ in the slow, patient cultivation of the micro-sites of everyday meaning-making and worlding. I chose to write around and into being what may grow in-between the cracks of the normalised, hegemonic aesthetics of scholarly practice, untethering those disciplinary imaginations from the hold of our academic wiring that separate rather than connect.

Years passed by and I hear ‘what is the use of what we are learning?’ from this juncture. I embrace the interpellation of what disciplinary knowledge practices might have to offer for the present, in and beyond both the classroom and the university, as my opportunity to reconnect with a modality of reading and working with, through, and perhaps despite Foucault’s thought that earlier gave rise to what was – for me at least – a transformational experience. In engaging Foucault’s account of the ‘author function’ and its implications for rethinking ‘authority’ in IR and CSS, in the next sections I set out to re-read the essay ‘What is an author?’ together with an experimental interview. The former unravels the normalised social perceptions and power relationships in how authorship and authority are constituted, drawing attention to what may go unnoticed in their habitual performance. In the latter Foucault reflects on his own writing practice, what could perhaps be described in Deleuzian terms as the ‘fold’ of the author function within, in the making and negotiation of subjectivity (Deleuze 2006, 97–98). I revisit Foucault’s dual practice of ‘diagnosis’ and ‘poiesis’, social critique conjoined with an art of self-fashioning (McGushin 2007, xviii) as they appear in these two sites in the spirit of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls reparative reading (2002). I engage discourse, knowledge and self through an intention that looks for what may be ‘additive and accretive’ (149), conducive to growth and resourcefulness. The ‘reparative reader’ persists in their attempts of finding sustenance in such (institutional) cultures and milieus, fields of practice which may otherwise not (yet) be attuned to healing and wellbeing (hooks 1994). I commit to what Penttinen describes as the relentless study of ‘what makes individuals flourish and expand regardless of oppressive structures’ (2013, 15). I do this to dwell deeper into some of the aesthetic divisions that create and maintain a lure of expertise as a promise of control in the everyday practices of reading and writing, teaching and learning (through) the discipline, and to map out vistas for life-affirming modes of relating to and connecting with what lies in front of us, from moment to moment. Such as today, on the twenty-fifth two hundred third (and counting) day of the war. The research methods class has long been concluded yet the line that jumped out at me from the density of words and emotions – ‘what experts are we becoming through you?’ – is still hovering over my shoulder.

Writing ‘the author’ back into being

What resources could be found in Foucault’s scholarly ethos for transforming how we read and write, and relate to the discipline? Where may the potential be found to displace and reimagine authority in a fashion that it empowers and unites, rather than distances and disappoints? I ponder these questions while acknowledging that at first re-reading this essay may feel remote from the concerns of the IR classroom. What may present itself as ‘resource’ is yet to be found out. I continue to read with this uncertainty, embraced in its generative power rather than expelled in appeals to expertise, as a practice that seeks to do the work of unmaking and refashioning in the (inner) space opened up by the question.

Foucault describes the ‘author’ as a discursive construct which is also ideological as it performs a series of illusions. It creates the appearance of what it is not: a symbol of freedom, agency and independence that exists both outside and prior to the text (Foucault 2000b, 205). Despite its projected individuality, the author’s singularity can only be captured in the very disappearance of the markers of the writer in the game of writing. The name and its potential localizability in an actual body are what secure control and perpetuate the possibility of punishment over discourse that has become transgressive. The writer sinks behind the author’s public image: it is only when normalised social imaginations are subverted that the mask breaks and writing becomes personal, subject to discipline.

The author function as an instrument of control limits, rather than encourages, the proliferation of meaning. This derives from a particular relationship to discourse and language, which gives rise to experiences that are emblematic of our times. As Foucault notes elsewhere, our love for discourse and constant discoursing – ‘What civilization has ever appeared to be more respectful of discourse than ours?’ (Foucault 1991, 66) – harbours a fear of discourse’s power that lies in its profoundly untameable character. Logophilia, manifested in attempts to liberate discourse from its constraints, covers up a simultaneous desire to remove what is dangerous in the ‘mass of things said’ and what can potentially be said, ‘the surging up of all these statements, against all that could be violent, discontinuous, pugnacious, disorderly as well, and perilous about them’ (66). Yet the normalising mechanisms that continuously order and guard the use of language and practices of meaning-making – ‘as if we had tried to efface all trace of [discourse’s] irruption into the activity of thought and language’ (66) – also draw our attention away from the noise, the ‘murmur’, the yet undifferentiated experience of language, its formlessness, and its forgotten ‘root,’ where divisions, partitions, speaking subjects do not yet exist (see Siisiäinen 2013, 10–11). ‘What precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language’ (Foucault 2000a, 166), notes Foucault, and it is from this place that language can be ‘freed from all the old myths by which our awareness of words, discourse, and literature has been shaped’ (2000a, 167). What remains with forgetting the conditioned use of our senses is ‘extreme attentiveness’ to ‘what is radically new, with no bond of resemblance or continuity with anything else’ (167).

The author in this regard can be seen as a place-holder (Hendricks 2002, 152) in at least two senses. While we hold our gaze on an emptiness charged with multiple projections, we miss out on the omnipresent aliveness and creative power of sound, and the unique presence of the living being, a someone, writing. How we write and read is symptomatic of the ways in which ‘writing has freed itself from the theme of expression,’ turning into an exercise whereby the writing subject ‘cancels out the signs of his particular individuality’ and works towards ‘creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.’ (Foucault 2000b, 206) Just like the author performs ‘death’ in writing, the text, too, becomes a dead object for the reader: ‘an inert entity in the external world from which our mind extracts meanings through a kind of surgical operation’ (McGushin 2007, 193). As such, writes Foucault, ‘we try, with great effort, to imagine the general condition of each text’ (Foucault 2000b, 208) instead of engaging what is being expressed through the practice of writing.

One way out of this trap is to refocus on experience and how, with the prognosticated disappearance of the author function, we might encounter the infinite possibilities of the true polysemy of language and the unordered, incessant ‘buzzing of discourse.’ Foucault writes that ‘all discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop into the anonymity of a murmur’ (2000b, 222). Yet cracks in our normalised ways of reading and writing can already be found. Neither ‘work,’ nor ‘author’ possesses the object-like unity and stability attributed to them. Where does someone’s oeuvre begin and end? Foucault asks:

What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: it is a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? (207)

We might add: what about the millions of traces that those alive create from moment to moment in their writing and elsewhere? Foucault encourages us to ‘locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance’ and ‘follow the distribution of gaps and breaches’ (209).’ In this way we may arrive at a plane where the staged disappearance and its connection to the actual person reveal their complex imbrications. Despite the aesthetic modality of perception that establishes the illusion of individual agency, neither the person writing nor the author remains the same in the course of writing, regardless of the genre of the text produced:

Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator’s account, neither in the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance (215).

Foucault writes that not only what can be identified as literary writing but ‘all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self’ (215). Even in scientific prose ‘the self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on mathematics […] is identical neither in its position not in its functioning to the self that speaks in the course of a demonstration, and that appears in the form of ‘I conclude’ or ‘I suppose’ (215–6). Several selves and subjects – ‘positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals’ (216) – emerge in the making of discourse and text that are co-present without competition. The ‘author’ in fact is all of these and none of these ‘selves’: it effects the dispersion of these simultaneous selves (216).

The plurality of selfhood appears as a fundamental property of not only writing but also of being in discourse and navigating its terrain. It provides a point of access into the dynamics of how ‘authorship’ is not only constructed within social structures but also from within, through the practices of (academic) self-making and socialisation, as the lived experience of meaning making and articulation. Behind and beyond the discursive projection of the ‘author’ as a marker of unitary will or source of knowledge, there is the person, writing. The text marked by the name of the author could then also be experienced as a snapshot of multiple processes of becoming, which can be re-animated by our reader’s gaze (if we choose to direct it in this way). The choir of voices, fictionalised dialogues, interrupted arguments and vanishing concepts that populate Foucault’s writing allude to the possibility of such a reading. In stating that ‘Foucault argues x,’ whatever may appear as a claim, the traces and energy of the person writing, who is figuring things out through the vehicle of writing, are also present. The ‘author,’ seen through the position of the writer who changes themselves as they write, is already plural. While the argument derived from the text might cling empty and distant as it falls on a cognitive horizon, the life world from which it emanates preserves the complexity of its making.

Learning how to access this dimension, beyond the instrumental training of our senses that surgically extract rather than contextualise information, might be a path towards how ‘uncommon sense’ is realised, in and beyond the classroom. Building capacities to read life worlds simultaneously at the level of discourse and the field of practice from which it emerges and folds back into can help us leave behind the aesthetics of fixity, predictability and control attributed to ‘expertise’ and attune our sense-making practices to the messiness and ambiguity of processes and becoming. Read in this way, texts and other of forms of expression could reveal themselves as archives of intellectual and affective labour, marked by the infinite meanderings of the work of attention. We may pull some of these threads and wonder at them more often: what may have been the starting point, what was the journey like? How has a spark, an intuition, a question translated into a search, a choice of method, the working through of limitations, a mode of expression? Can we feel into the possibilities negotiated, can we follow them through the page, can we reconstruct how connections have been drawn? In the ethos of reparative reading and writing, how can we do this with the intention to learn for growth, healing and transformation?

Transgenerational traces

The author function is not only a diagnostic tool for Foucault to shed light on and elucidate further the intricate operations of discourse. It also serves as a point of access into understanding and undoing the ‘fold’ of this structural aspect as it enters subjectivity, becomes part of how selfhood is made and comes to be negotiated as lived experience, including his own. Embedding himself in the distinction made by Barthes, Foucault described himself as a ‘writer,’ not as an ‘author’ (Foucault et al. 2013, 69). Author and writer differ in their relationship to language: the former is a ‘salaried priest’ who perpetuates the ‘myth of fine writing’ by occupying themselves with style and the ontology of language (Barthes 1994, 188). The writer is a ‘clerk,’ for whom language is an instrument of communication, ‘a vehicle of “thought.”’ Being a writer implies an ethical commitment to what exceeds language and discourse.

In another transformational gesture Foucault turns the interview with the critic Claude Bonnefoy into a ‘speech experiment’ (Foucault et al. 2013, 15), an exercise of challenging himself: ‘I’m very pleased that we don’t know where we are going.’ He saw it as opportunity to ‘undo [his] customary language, to try to undo the threads, to present it in a way other than it’s ordinarily presented’ (55). It also required negotiating, between himself and Bonnefoy, a ‘register of speech, exchange, communication’ (27), where this project may become possible. The interview process evolved into an act of risk taking. Far from the comfort zone of commenting on his books or responding to his interlocutors, Foucault used Bonnefoy’s invitation to disentangle himself both from the power position he occupied as ‘author’ and the language he crafted for himself so that he could encounter it anew (15). He remarks: ‘I’m going to turn the sense of discourse I had directed at others against myself. I’m going to try to tell you what writing has been for me throughout the course of my life’ (30). In this endeavour he notes:

I’m trying to delineate for the first time, in the first person, this neutral, objective discourse in which I’ve never stopped trying to erase myself when I write my books (77).

As the interview progresses Foucault’s account reveals the imprints of transgenerational experience on the style and mode of operation of his writing practice. The plurality of selves that thread through discourse is not fixed in yet another sense: they emerge from changing, forming, transforming trajectories that span multiple lifetimes. Writing, besides being a ‘diagnostic instrument’ and a vehicle of exploration, also appears as a practice of resistance that has been shaped within and in opposition to Foucault’s social milieu and family environment:

I don’t write because I have something in mind, I don’t write to show what I have already demonstrated and analysed for myself. Writing consists essentially in doing something that allows me to discover something I hadn’t seen initially. When I begin to write an essay or a book, or anything, I don’t really know where it’s going to lead or where it’ll end up or what I’m going to show. I only discover what I have to show in the actual movement of writing, as if writing specifically meant diagnosing what I had wanted to say at the very moment I begin to write. I think that in this I’m being completely faithful to my hereditary because, like my father and my grandparents, I want to offer a diagnosis. Only, unlike them – and it is in this sense that I distanced myself from them and turned against them – this diagnosis, I want to do it through writing, I want to do it with the part of speech that physicians ordinarily reduce to silence (46).

Foucault’s medical heritage turns out to have informed and inspired his practice of writing in various ways. When speech lost its expressiveness around him writing became a site where a different relationship to language could be cultivated:

The physician – and especially the surgeon, I’m the son of a surgeon – isn’t someone who speaks, he’s someone who listens. He listens to other people’s words, not because he takes them seriously, not to understand what they say, but to track down through them the signs of a serious disease, which is to say, a physical disease, an organic disease. The physician listens, but do so to cut through the speech of the other and reach the silent truth of the body. The physician doesn’t speak, he acts, that is, he feels, he intervenes. The surgeon discovers the lesion in the sleeping body, opens the body and sews it back up again, he operates; all this is done in silence, the absolute reduction of words. The only words he utters are those few words of diagnosis and therapy. The physician speaks only to utter the truth, briefly, and prescribe medicine. He names and he orders, that’s all (35).

Foucault remarks that ‘when it is no longer possible to speak, we discover the secret, difficult, somewhat dangerous charm of writing,’ constructing for himself ‘a kind of small house of language’ where he could be ‘the master’ (32–33). Yet the intervention to resist such closures carries forward the energy, the imprint of the very structures from within which it emerges. What Foucault describes as the ‘profound devaluation of speech’ in his family gave rise to a desire for another modality of expression, a style of writing in his life and scholarly practice that dared to play with the power of language. It also engendered an ethos of discovery that subverted the inherited gaze set on the already known and levelled his inquiry to the realm of the not readily visible. However, the subversive power of the practice remains attached to its origins. Reflecting on the fact that some of his readers find his prose aggressive, he admits that ‘I imagine that there’s an old memory of the scalpel in my pen’ (39). He goes on to ask:

Maybe, after all, I trace on the whiteness of the paper the same aggressive signs that my father traced on the bodies of others when he was operating? I’ve transformed the scalpel into a pen. […] I’ve gone from the efficacy of healing to the inefficacy of free speech; for the scar on the body I’ve substituted graffiti on paper; for the ineradicability of the scar I’ve substituted the perfectly eradicable and expungable sign of writing. Maybe I should go further. For me the sheet of paper may be the body of the other (39).

Foucault frames his writing practice explicitly in medical terms and within the logic of medical discourse, describing himself as a ‘diagnostician’:

I’m in the situation of the anatomist who performs an autopsy. With my writing I survey the body of others, I incise it, I lift the integuments and skin, I try to find the organs and, in exposing the organs, reveal the site of the lesion, the seat of pain, that something that has characterized their life, their thought, and which, in its negativity, has finally organized everything they’ve been. The venomous heart of things and men, at bottom, what I’ve always tried to expose (41).

Foucault’s academic curiosity at the beginning of his career, too, was informed by his socialisation in a medical environment. He reveals to himself and Bonnefoy while narrating his relationship to writing that his interest in the history of psychiatry and what came to be described as ‘madness’ arose out of his personal genealogy and family history. In the medical environment where he grew up ‘illness’ was already excluded and othered: ‘to be sick was something that happened to others, but not to us’ (50). Mental illness was seen as a taboo since for ‘a real physician, for a doctor who heals bodies, even more so for a surgeon who opens them up, it’s obvious that madness is a bad disease’ (48). Furthermore, ‘if madness is a false illness then what can we say about the physician who treats it and who believes that it’s an illness?’ Making ‘madness’ the centre of his research – that of a ‘sham illness cured by sham doctors’ – enacted ‘a two-part conversion.’ Foucault looked into what was devalued and discounted by traditional medicine while he took an interest in the physicians who treated it, yet not as a doctor but an observer, engaging psychiatry as being ‘complicit with the illness it treats’ (51). It was in this effort to write about madness differently that Foucault coined a style which is both diagnostic and poetic. Besides the marks of the scalpel there is also a sentiment that does not already judge what it sees. Foucault creates an experience of the ‘zero degree’ of ‘madness’ (Foucault 2010, xxvii; Felman 2003) through which he undoes the discipline’s ‘object of knowledge’ and what structured his everyday life as a child. Liberating ‘madness’ of the grip of medical discourse and Cartesian logic unfolds at the juncture where the blade of the scalpel and the disorderly being of language meet. In a writing modality that is both analytical and suspends analysis – as Neal highlights, ‘every description is annulled within a few pages’ (2009, 542) – the power of heritage merges with the desire and actual experience of a new modality of sensing and perception. Movement emanates from the marks and energy of earlier times and as such, ‘change’ is never completely ‘new’: it is both coterminous with and transgressive of the past, at however small a scale. Neither good nor bad, yet present and effective in its singular enactment.

This could serve as a reminder that what may appear as ‘method’ has once been someone’s unique engagement with a multi-faceted life experience shaped by forces transcending their lifetime. A response – a mode of acting, a way of being that generates alternative knowledge practices and new understandings – arises out of the often painstaking and always fragmentary negotiation of worlds colliding, coming together, falling out or falling apart. This implies that no ‘method’ is ready-made for any situation and that the work of continuous translation and actualisation for the demands of the present cannot be spared. At the same time, ‘methods’ may already be emergent under the threshold of (academic) recognisability. Turning back on and inquiring into the trajectories of our own formation both as knowing subjects and living beings could yield a deeper insight into the questions and ambitions, as well as the unconscious wiring that drive us. Yet not only that: a complex, living archive of our own intellectual and affective labour in working things out, in and beyond the classroom. Drawing resources from Foucault’s challenge for himself in narrating his becoming as writer as life method, we could expand the horizons of our sense-making practices as well as the purview of our questions by asking: what is the method that is implicit in the writer’s gestures and also in our own? This could lead us to ponder: what other methods of living, acting, and being-with others, which may not have an academic name yet, may already be at our disposal?

Openings

To find out what it might mean to become ‘a bit better than the previous generations’ as framed by a student requires individual and collaborative effort at multiple planes. I continue to dwell on the yet unprocessed and therefore potentially transformational registers of the classroom encounter in me. I notice that besides the question directed at my responsibility as a teacher who at one level guards the proper insertion of authors-to-be within the disciplinary aesthetics of IR, openings and openness for knowledge practices of another kind were already present. This remark now hits my ear afresh: ‘So I am thinking, what could I do with the knowledge that I possess right now?’ I realise that in writing this paper I have been guided by a resonant sentiment. How can I work with my own experience in a way that beyond the shock of war and the disappointment attached to a quest for certainty more life-affirming horizons could open for everyone involved?

Both my (by now former) student and I could perhaps carry on by probing deeper into the imprints of what there was and what there is, within us and right front of us. Re-entering Foucault’s scholarly ethos from within the affective landscapes of the class – its needs, wounds, desires, and curiosity – a range of specific processes and invitations present themselves as possible entry points for cultivating transformational practices.

We could explore writing further as a vehicle to undo common sense and fixity, including our own identity. We could write with the intention to reveal and appreciate the complex life worlds of sense-making.

We could experiment with performing academic routine differently and see what new insights may emerge.

We could find ways to be with, sit with questions, allowing the empirical richness and creative potential of the space opened by them to inspire new thought, and new forms of being and action.

We could take more seriously our transgenerational heritage as a site of inquiry that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge. We could learn to see and acknowledge the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the making of the text.

We could give ourselves and others the authorisation to embrace the non-linear, fragmented and fundamentally inconclusive nature of learning.

Whichever trajectory we may choose to embark on, however, any sense of transformation will only be likely to arise from carrying through with the practice and making careful and honest observations on the way. Writing this piece has been an attempt to work myself out of the hold of powerlessness engendered by both the war and classroom ‘failure’ while seeking out openings within these ruptures for thinking, feeling, relating and becoming otherwise. I have journeyed with the practice of reading and writing through the cracks of the ‘normal’ with reparative intentions and renewed curiosity. In this ongoing effort I have tapped into the generative power that lies with considering how to work with what has stayed, what nags and bugs, the intensities that have remained. As a comment on authorship and authority, I have given myself the authorisation to narrate this experience, offering it as an archive of self-reflexive, creative labour in and as research and pedagogy. The marks of the post-Soviet space and Westernisation, as sparks for a yet unrealised transgenerational inquiry, invite further stories to shed light on the often-unconscious life methods that are implicit in (academic) practice, including those that may make the ‘void’ of the Second World and its hybrid imbrications sensible (Tlostanova 2012, 131). This account, which continues to evolve as ‘murmur’ between thought and language, could perhaps also be approached as encouragement and experimented with as a method, which among other possible results, may facilitate befriending uncertainty.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Erna Burai, Catherine Chiniara Charrett, Kristin Eggeling, Richard Freeman, Nicholas Gribble, Rahel Kunz, Vladimir Ogula, Alister Wedderburn, two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this Special Issue for their extremely helpful comments and generous engagement with the project, which made the final version of the text so much better. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at BISA and the EWIS Writing International Politics workshop in 2022 – I would like to thank the participants and organizers of these events for their kind encouragement and valuable insights.

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Erzsébet Strausz

Erzsébet Strausz is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Central European University, Vienna. Her research focuses on critical pedagogy, alternative knowledge practices as well as creative and narrative methods in the study of world politics.