Historical Method of Marco-social Phenomena: Deconstructionist Perspective

1. Historical Method of Marco-social Phenomena:Deconstructionist Perspective EDM 6003 Historical-Comparative Method in Educational Research

2. The Roadmap of the Deconstructionist Approach • Hermeneutics: Post-structural analysis on text • Narrative: Poststructural analysis on intertextuality and history • Archaeology: Formation of discourse • Genealogy: Study of power/knowledge

3. Hermeneutics • Paul Ricoeur’s working definition of hermeneutics ‘Hermeneutics is a discipline that has been primarily concerned with the elucidation of rules for the interpretation of texts.” (Thompson, 1981, p.36) • What is a Text? (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 145-164) • "A Text is any discourse fixed by writing" (p.145) i.e. a fixation of speech act by writing. • Fixation enables the speech to be conserved, i.e. durability of text • A text ‘divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication. … The text thus produces a double eclipse of the reader and the writer.’ (p. 146-47)

4. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 131-44) • Text as language event • Distanciation between language event and meaning • Articulation of meaning in language event is ‘the core of the whole hermeneutic problem.’ (p. 134)

5. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Text as work • Distanciation between text as the work and its authors’ intention • ‘Hermeneutics remains the art of discerning the discourse in the work; but this discourse is only given in and through the structures of the work. Thus interpretation is the reply to the fundamental distanciation constituted by the objectification of man in work of discourse, an objectification comparable to that expressed in the products of his laboour and his art.’ (P. 138)

6. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Distanciation between act of writing meaning and act of reading • Distanciation between the intention of the author and the interpretation of the reader • ‘The text must be able to… “decontextualizse” itself in such a way that it can be “recontextualise” in a new situation – as accomplished…by the act of reading.’ (p. 139)

7. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Distanciation the text and the reference and denotation of discourse • The world of the text: ‘Reference…distinguishes discourse from language, the latter has no relation with reality, its words returning to other words in the endless circle of the dictionary. Only discourse, we shall say, intends things, applies itself to reality, expresses the world.’ (p. 140) • ‘The most fundamental hermeneutical problem … is to explicate the type of being-in-the world (life-world) unfolded in front of the text’. (p.141)

8. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Self-understanding in front of the work • The act of appropriation, which is a well known problem in traditional hermeneutics, refers to the application of ‘the world of the work’ to the present situation of the reader. • ‘To understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity of understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarge self’

9. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Self-understanding in front of the work • ‘As a reader, I find myself only by losing myself. Reading introduces me into the imaginative variations of the ego. The metamorphosis of the world in play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego.” (p.144)

10. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Criticism on alienating distanciation and ideology • Alienating distanciation refers to distanciation spawned from human interest, systemic distortion, and ideological hegemony

11. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Criticism on alienating distanciation and ideology • Critical hermeneutics constitutes four themes • Critiical reading of the production of the text: Emancipating the text from its immediate existence and giving the text its autonomy from (a) its author’s intention, (b) its cultural and sociological situations, in which it was produced, (c) its original addressee. (p.91) • Critical reading of the deep structure of the text (deep hermeneutic): Disclosing the depth semamtics embedded in the text, such as the narrative or the discourse working behind text

12. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Criticism on alienating distanciation &ideology • Critical hermeneutics constitutes four themes • Critical reading of the world of the text and the world of the present: “The power of the text to open a dimension of reality implies in principle a recourse against any given reality and thereby the possibility of a critique of the real.” (p.93) It also implies “the notion of ‘the projection of my ownmost possibilities’; this signifies that the mode of the possible, or better of the power-to be: therein resides the subversive force of the imaginary.” (p.93) 4.Critical reading of the (reader’s) self-understanding or the self unfolded in front of the text

13. Hermeneutics • Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation • Criticism on alienating distanciation &ideology • Critical hermeneutics constitutes four themes • Critical reading of the reader's self-understanding and subjectivity: "Reading introduces me to imaginative variations of the ego. The metamorphosis of the world in play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego. In the idea of the 'imaginative variation of the ego', I see the most fundamental possibility for the critique of the illusions of the subject." (Ricoeur, 1981b, p. 94)

14. Hermeneutics • Levels of hermeneutics • Hermeneutics at literal level: Decoding meanings from the literal text. • Hermeneutics at ontological level: • Encoding and decoding meanings from the ontological condition of the author • Encoding and decoding meanings from the ontological condition of readers • Hermeneutics at historical and cultural level: Encoding and decoding meanings from the historical and cultural context within which the text was produced

15. Hermeneutics • Levels of hermeneutics • Hermeneutics at critical level: • Encoding and decoding “meanings” from the perspective of human interests • Encoding and decoding “meanings” from the perspective of systemic distortions of institutional context • Encoding and decoding “meanings” from the perspective of ideology of given cultural hegemony

16. The Roadmap of the Deconstructionist Approach • Hermeneutics: Post-structural analysis on text • Narrative: Poststructural analysis on intertextuality and history • Discourse: Foucaultian analysis on power/knowledge

17. Ricoeur’s Time, Narrative & History • Paul Ricoeur’s metaphor and narrative in hermeneutic understanding • Metaphor is semantic innovation “in producing a new semantic pertinence by means of an impertinent attribution.” (1983, p. ix) • Narrative is another semantic innovation in “inventing another work of synthesis – a plot”

18. Ricoeur’s Time, Narrative & History • Ricoeur’s hypothesis of Time and Narrative ‘My basic hypothesis (is) that between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a conditions of temporal existence.” (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 52)

19. Ricoeur’s Time, Narrative & History • Ricoer’s History as narrative • Historical event: “Historical events derive their historical status not only from their articulation in singular statements, but also from the position of these singular statements in configurations of certain sort which properly constitute a narrative.” (1981, p. 276) • Historical explanation: It is an act of emplotment, that is, “to interpolate” the historical events to be explained into “a type of discourse which already has a narrative form.” (p.276)

20. 1950s, Lifeboat on high tide of the cold war The aftermaths of the 1966 & 67 riots and the dominance of the subject political culture in the emerging industrial colony 1973, Admission of PRC into UN The emergence of the 1997 issue and the discourse of constitution of representative government The preparation of HK citizens for the 1997 handover by a retreating colonial government Aggressive project of democratization by the last Governor Cold-war rhetoric in Civics (1948-56) Emphasis on law and order and responsibility of citizens in E.P.A. syllabuses in the 1960s Replacement of the imagery of colony with the concept of community in the 1970s’ EPA syllabus The introduction of the ideas of liberal democracy and political inputs in the 1980s’ syllabuses The publication of the 1985 version of Civic Ed Guidance The publication of the 1995 version of Civic Ed Guidance Narrative in HK citizenship education

21. Ricoeur’s Time, Narrative & History • Ricoer’s History as narrative • Plot: “What is a plot? The phenomenology of the act of following a story. …To follow a story is to understand the successive actions, thoughts and feelings as displaying a particular directedness. …We must follow the story to its conclusion. So rather than being predictable, a conclusion must be acceptable. Looking back from the conclusion towards the episodes which lead up to it, we must be able to say that this end required those events and that chain of action.” (p.277) • History: “History could then be explicitly treated as a ‘literary artifact’, and the writing of history began to be reinterpreted according to categories which were variously call ‘semiotic’ ‘symbolic’ and ‘poetic’.” (p. 290)

22. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Narrative as a universal meta-code of humanity & culture: "To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report on the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent. …This suggests that far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted." (White, 1987, p.1)

23. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Classification of historical data • Primitive elements: traces of the past • Non-primitive elements: • Textual records, archives, relics • Annals • Chronicle • Historical discourse • Distinction between syntax of the past (the facts/the statements/the chronicle) and semantics of the past(the stories/the narrative forms)

24. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Narrativity in the representation of reality • Three basic kind of historical representation • The annals “It consists only a list of events ordered in chronological sequence. …It possesses none of the characteristics that we normally attribute to a story: no central subject, no well marked beginning, middle, and end, no peripeteia, and no identifiable narrative voice.” (P. 5-6) • The chronicle “The chronicle.. has a central subject – the life of an individual, town, or region; some great undertaking, such as a war or crusade; or some institution, such as a monarchy, episcopacy, or monastery,” (P. 16), an authority. • The historical narrative

25. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Narrativity in the representation of reality • Features of narrativity • Sequence of events • Central subject: • The legal subject (the state) • The geographical subject • The social subject/system • Plot • The plot is “a structure of relationships by which the events contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being identified as parts of an integrated whole” (White, 1987, p.9)

26. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Narrativity in the representation of reality • Features of narrativity • Explanation by emplotment: "Providing the 'meaning' of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is call explanation by emplotemnt. If, in the course of narrating his story, the historian provides it with the plot structure of a Tragedy, he has 'explained' it in one way; if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has 'explained' it in another way. Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind. ….I identify at least four different modes of emplotment: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire." (White, 1973, p.7)

27. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Narrativity in the representation of reality • Features of narrativity • Closure • Moral meaning • “A proper historical narrative … achieves narrative fullness by explicitly invoking the idea of a social system to serve as a fixed reference point by which the flow of ephemeral events can be endowed with specifically moral meaning. … (Hence), the chronicle must approach the form of an allegory, moral or analogical as the case may be, in order to achieve both narrativity and historicality.” (p. 22) • Moralistic ending • Authority of reality

28. Hyden White’s Narrative Discourse & Historical Representation • Narrativity in the representation of reality • Features of narrativity • Authority of reality: In a constructing narrative, a historian usually implies "a desire on his part to represent an authority whose legitimacy hinged upon the establishment of 'facts' of specifically historical orders." (p. 19)

29. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: The Discursive Formation • From text and narrative to discourse: • The task of hermeneutics is to ‘describes the phenomenon from the inside’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p.79), that is, to retrieves the meanings embedded in the text, and to bridge the distanciation between the ‘being-in- the-world’ of the author and reader • The task of narrative study is to reveal 'forms', 'plots', 'meanings', and narratives that historians have imposed upon 'historical data in their writings historical storylines. That is to reveal 'the content of the form' of historians' representations.

30. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: The Discursive Formation • From text and narrative to discourse: • Archaeology in Foucaultian sense look into how discourses are formed in the history of ideas and/or truth. He contends that in studying the successions of schools of thought in the history of ideas, one should look beyond the internal meanings of the school of thought under study but analyze the discursive rules in operations in a given hsitorical and socio-cultural context. “Foucault, the archaeologist looks from outside, reject the appeal to meaning. He contends that viewed with external neutrality, the discursive practices themselves provide a meaningless space of rule-governed transformations in which statements, subjects, objects, concepts and so forth are taken by those involved to be meaningful.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 79)

31. Foucault’s Essential Books Published in French • 1961 Madness and Civilization • 1962 Mental Illness and Psychology • 1963 The Birth of Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. • 1966 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences • 1969 The Archaeology of Knowledge • 1971 Nietzsche, Genealogy, History • 1975 Discipline and Punish • 1976 The History of Sexuality vol. 1 • 1984 The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality vol. 2 • 1984 The Care of the Self : The History of Sexuality vol. 3

32. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: The Discursive Formation • Statements, Discourse and Episteme • Statement “The statement is not the same kind of unit as the sentence, the proposition, or the speech act…The statements is not …a structure (i.e. a group of relations between variable elements...).; it is a function of existence that properly belong to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they ‘make sense’, according to what rule they follow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation (oral or written).” (Foucault, 1972, p. 86-87) e.g. A is insane. B is sick. C is a Band-5 and MIG-II student D failed the benchmarking assessment

33. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge : The Discursive Formation • Statements, Discourse and Episteme • A discourse “is the totality of all effectiveness statements (whether spoken or written). ... Description of discourse is in opposition to the history of thought. There…a system of thought can be reconstituted only on the basis of a definite discursive totality. …The analysis of thought is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what is being said in what was said? …what is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?” (Foucault, 1972, p. 27-28) e.g. Modern medicine as a discourse Psychiatry as a discourse Education of performativity as a discourse

34. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge : The Discursive Formation • The Formation of Object • Mapping the surface of the emergence of the object • Describing the authorities of delimitation • Analyzing the grids of specification • The Formation of Enunciative Modality/Field • Identifying who is speaking, who is accorded the right to use this sort of language, who is qualified to do so. • Describing the institutional sites from which the discourse is made and from which the discourse derives its legitimate source and point of application • Analyzing the position of the subject, in which s/he occupies in relation to the various domains and groups of objects

35. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge : The Discursive Formation • The Formation of Concepts: the formation of the organization of the field of statements where a family of concepts appeared and circulated • Identifying the forms of succession, e.g. • Orderings of enunciative series • Types of dependence of the statements • Rhetorical schemata according to which groups of statements may be combined • Identifying the forms of coexistence • Field of presence • Field of concomitance • Field of memory • Identifying the procedures of intervention that may be legitimately applied to statements, e.g. technique of rewriting , method of transcribing, mode of translating, means of transferring, method of systematizing

36. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge : The Discursive Formations • The Formation of Strategies or theoretical and thematic choice • Determining the points of diffraction of discourse • Point of incompatibility • Point of equivalence • Point of systematization • Analyzing the economy of the discursive constellation • Analyzing the other authority, e.g. functional to fields of non-discursive practice, observing the rules and processes of appropriation of discourse

37. The Methodological shortcomings of Foucault’s Archaeology • The problem of the explanatory power of discursive formation thesis • Descriptive nature of the discursive formation thesis: ‘As a fully consistent phenomenologist, bracketing reference and sense, he (Foucault) need only describe the changing discursive practices, with their apparent referent and apparent sense, that emerge with these practices. …(I)t should not claim serious meaning and explanatory power for itself. …(I)t would have to be …nothing more than “a pure description of the facts of discourse”.’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982. p. 83)

38. The Methodological shortcomings of Foucault’s Archaeology • The problem of the explanatory power of discursive formation thesis • Prescriptive nature of the discursive formation thesis: ‘Far from accepting a descriptive theory, he (Foucault seems to want a prescriptive one: “The analysis of statements and discursive formation … wishes to determine the principle according to which only signifying groups that were enunciated could appear. It sets out to establish a law of rarity.” (AK 118, our italics) At times he seems to go so far as to demand not merely conditions of possibility but total determination: “One must show why [a specific statement] could not have been other than it was.” (CE 19, our italics)’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982. p. 84)

39. The Methodological shortcomings of Foucault’s Archaeology • The problem of the meaning and seriousness in discursive formation • Nihilistic nature of the discursive formation thesis: “We can see that the truth of the past horizon was, like all truth, a mere epochal construction. We are thus led to abandon a certain naïve conception of truth as the correspondence of a theory to the way things are in themselves, and a naïve conception of the disciplines as engaged in the gradual approximation to this truth. The result is a kind of nihilism which emphasizes the role of interpretation.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982. p. 87)

40. The Methodological shortcomings of Foucault’s Archaeology • The problem of the meaning and seriousness in discursive formation • Historical and critical nature of the discursive formation thesis: “Foucault the archaeologist looks on, as a detached metaphenomenologist, at the historical Foucault who can’t, if he thinks about human beings in a serious way, help thinking in terms of meaning and truth claims governed by the latest discursive formation. …The archaeologist has to share the everyday context of the discourse he studies in order to practice his discipline. …Furthermore, it is not sufficient for the archaeologist to have an understanding of everyday discourse. Unless he understands the issues that concern the thinkers he studies, he will be unable to distinguish when two different utterances are the same serious speech act and when two identical utterance are different serious speech acts.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982. p. 87-88)

41. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • The methodological linkage between archaeology and genealogy of discourse • Archaeology as method and genealogy as goal: “F: What I mean by archaeology is a methodological framework for my analysis. What I mean by genealogy is both the reason and the target of analyzing those discourses as events, and what I am trying to show is how those discursive events have determined in certain way what constitutes our present and what constitutes ourselves either our knowledge, our practices, our type of rationality, our relationship to ourselves or to others … the genealogy is the finality of the analysis, and the archaeology is the mental and methodological framework. MJ: Just to make sure that your answer was understood, you never stopped doing archaeology. F: No, no, no, …no, no, I never stopped doing archaeology. I never stopped doing genealogy. Genealogy defines the target and the finality of the work and archaeology indicates the field with which I deal in order to make a genealogy.” (Foucault, 1972; Quoted in Mahon, 1992, p.105 & 212)

42. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • The methodological linkage between archaeology and genealogy of discourse • Archaeology and genealogy as different levels interpretation: • Archaeological level of interpretation: ”Whether we are analyzing propositions physics or phrenology, we substitute for their internal intelligibility a different intelligibility, namely their place within the discursive formation. This is the task of archaeology …Archaeology is always a technique that can free us from a residual belief in our direct access to objects; in each case the ‘tyranny of the referent’ has to be overcome.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 117) • Genealogical level of interpretation: “When we add genealogy, however, a third level of intelligibility and differentiation is introduced. After archaeology does its job, the genealogist can ask about the historical and political roles that these science play.” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 117, my italic)

43. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • The methodological linkage between archaeology and genealogy of discourse • Genealogy as study of Episteme and Entstehung: • Episteme as descents of discourses • Entstehung • ‘Entstehung designates emergence, the moment of arising.” (Foucault, 1984, p.83) • Emergence is always produced through a particular stage of forces. The analysis of the Entstehung must delineate this interaction, the struggle these forces wage against each other or against adverse circumstances, and the attempt to avoid degeneration and regain strength by dividing these forces against themselves.” (p.83-84)

44. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • Genealogy, discourse and power/knowledge • Power: The constituting base of discursive formation and practice: ‘Critical (archaeological) and genealogical descriptions are to alternate, support and complete each other. The critical side of the analysis deals with the system’s enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. … The genealogical side of analysis, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempt to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting a domain of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true and false” (Foucault, 1972, p. 234, my italic) ‘Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power… Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it. …In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions.’ (Foucault, 1978, 101, my italic)

45. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • Genealogy, discourse and power/knowledge • The concept of ‘apparatus’ and the introduction of ‘non-discursive practices’ into the thesis: • Foucault defines apparatus as ‘strategies of relations of forces supporting types of knowledge and inversely.’ (quoted in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 121) • Apparatus may include ‘discourse, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc.’ (quoted in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 121) Hence, by introducing the concepts of apparatus into the genealogical analysis of discourse, Foucault has expanded the analytical horizon from discursive practices found in archaeology to non-discursive practices.

46. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • Genealogy, discourse and power/knowledge • The concept of power/knowledge ‘It is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 100) and therefore "discourse is both instrument and effect of power." (1978, p. 101), Accordingly it is through discourse that constitutes what Foucault conceptualized the power/knowledge.

47. Foucault’s Genealogy of Power/Knowledge • The concept of power/knowledge “We should admit … that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field o knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These power/knowledge relations are to be analyzed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power/knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not the activities of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power/knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge. (Foucault, 1977, p. 28)

48. Genealogy of Subject and Power • Genealogy of body: Foucault underlines that one of the essential domains of descent is the body because "descent attaches itself to the body." (Foucault, 1984, p. 83) "Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body." (Foucault, 1984, p. 83)

49. Genealogy of Subject and Power • To Foucault, to revealing "the process of history's destruction of the body" is practically means to trace how history "transform human being into subjects" (Foucault, 1982, p. 208) According to Foucault, "The are two meanings of the word subject: (i) subject to someone else by control and dependence, and (ii) tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge." (Foucault, 1982, p. 212)

50. Genealogy of Subject and Power • More specifically, Foucault further categorize subject into (Foucault, 1982, p. 212) • Domination: It refers to "subject to someone else by control" such as ethnic, social, and religious subjection. • Exploitation: It refers to subject to someone else by constituting dependence, especially economic dependence, which "separate(s) individuals from what they produce." • Subjection: It refers to submission of subjectivity to forms of conscience or authority, which constitute in configurations of power/knowledge and discourse.