Enunciative Modalities

I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Don DeLillo, Underworld, Part 1, Chapter 4

In ordinary life, people are as present as things. The second task of archaeological description is to delineate the presence of people in discourse, with the important caveat that, as in the case of things, the whole idea is to "dispense" with them.

I showed earlier that it was neither by 'words' nor by 'things' that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similarly, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.(II, 4)

Objectivity is to things what subjectivity is to people: in one sense, the subjective existence of people is undeniable, but this subjectivity must not be allowed to explain the formation of a particular discourse. On the contrary, the subjectivity of a discourse is what must be explained by its archaeology, by the "instrinsic description of [its] monument[s]" (I).

So instead of talking about the "subject" of a discourse, Foucault addresses its "enunciative modality". The first clue to understanding what this implies is provided by Foucault's tentative, explorative hypothesis that a discourse, like that of medical science, seems to be characterized by "a certain style, a certain constant manner of statement." (II, 2) Indeed, in order to understand what Foucault means by "enunciative modality" note how it is sometimes exchanged with "types of statement" (II, 1), "manner of statement" (here at II, 2), and "positions of subjectivity" (IV, 3). This is the sense in which a discursive formation is not just a set of things that are suitably arranged to be talked about, refered to, singled out, compared, and so forth, but also a manner of speaking or way of talking about these things, a style. Discourse seems to have a "voice", and it is this voice that the speakers of a discourse (doctors, phycisists, managers, "rocket scientists") that its speakers seek to master.

To call it a style is to simplify things too much--especially if we think of style as a sort of decorative flair. It is "superficial" to be sure, but only because discourses are not characterized by depth in the first place--everything in discourse is superficial (nothing of importance to philosophy, as Wittgenstein said, is hidden). The trick in describing the order of statements (discursive formations) is to discern the richness of its texture, not the depth of its meaning.

Foucault proposes three stylistic moments to look for, which can be thought of in terms of three questions.

(a) "Who is speaking?"
(b) "Where is he speaking from?"
(c) "Among what is he standing?"

(a) Statements, says Foucault, "cannot come from anyone". Medical discourse requires doctors who are authorized to speak it in order for it to make the sense it does. Doctors are "accorded rights" to speak as doctors just as objects are "accorded status" as objects on the surface of emergence. But to be a doctor implies a host of related functions that are not limited to the making of recognized medical statements. That is, the style of medical discourse is shaped not merely in formal documents of the trade. It depends on the speaking practices of people who engage as, for instance, doctors in social life more generally.

(b) Statements also require "institutional sites" of enunciation, places where their meaning can be heard. Foucault does not merely pay attention to the most obvious medical institutions such as hospitals, private practices and laboratories. He also identifies libraries and 'the documentary field', which coordinate the statements made in the discourse, checks and balances its informational content, and leaves its mark of both caution and confidence in the manner of the statements that are made. Foucault's historical analysis points to a curious development: "the importance of documents [relative to "the book or tradition"] continues to increase". That is, intermediary and flexible forms of text are coming to be of greater and greater practical importance. This point draws attention to the understanding of the media as institution, and hence to the importance of mediation and communication for the enunciative modality. (A weblog, we can speculate, represents its own form of institutional site. Some blogs are of negligible importance while others compete with established media and research institutions.)

(c) Lastly, in order for a subject to take up a position in discourse he must assume an attitude of questioning and listening, of seeing and of observing. He must also be able to teach and to train, to be taught and to be trained. He must cultivate specific modes of perception. It is therefore necessary to describe the myriad of relations in which the discourse is applied. Foucault here means to draw attention to the variation in positions within the same institutional sites and social roles or professions. Discourse depends on historically specific attitudes towards other objects as well as subjects. Grasping these specific relations, which are sometimes technologically mediated, are crucial for the analysis of the enunciative modality.

Much of the work of describing an "enunciative modality" can be confused with the conditions under which a perceptual experience is possible in general, and therefore lead us in search of a transcendental subjectivity to coordinate our scientific observations, or a psychological subject to centre its gestalt. But Foucault warns us not to reduce a discourse's style to some "new technique of observation", perceived from within a pure manifold of sensibility. Rather, Foucault proposes to reverse this emphasis and see any supposedly novel method as a development in a rich and very impure texture that involves the way we describe our experiences, reason about them, attribute causes to their effects, and so forth. The manner of speaking within a discourse is not just contingent on the manner of seeing within the science it communicates, rather these two are inexorably intertwined.

So in order to see in what sense a scientist, when speaking, is pretending to be exactly who he is, you must describe his function in society, the places where that function is especially supported, and the relations in which he is always already implicated when he speaks.