Emersonian and Foucauldian Resistance: A Qualitative Document Analysis of Scholarly Texts

• In Event: Roundtable Session 65
  In Roundtable Session: Applying Foucault to Qualitative Inquiry in Education: Looking at Resistance as Opportunity for New Knowledge

Abstract

Poirier (1987) asserted Ralph Waldo Emerson challenged commonsense ways of understanding and knowledge claims that antedated the work of Foucault and Nietzsche. In Wider’s (2000) reading of Poirier, she wrote, “Poirier suggests readers turn back from their Foucault and Nietzsche to the thinker who first articulated the concerns of the fatally trapped human consciousness” (p. 188). In contrast to Poirier’s work of allocating ancestral privileges to Emerson, this author took as a point of departure the corpus of Emerson’s writings on reading to see how it may have resonated with Foucault’s (1984/1986) work on care of the self.
This study used a document analysis approach (Prior, 2003) to examine the textual works of Emerson and Foucault. According to Prior, all texts are data and thus merit analysis and interpretation in the social sciences. During the initial stage of analysis, the author read the entire one-volume anthology of Emerson’s (1983) essays, addresses, and lectures published by the Library of America and Foucault’s (1984/1986) work on care of the self. For the second level of analysis, the author re-read Emerson (1983) and Foucault (1984/1986) and expanded those readings to include Emerson’s (1870, 1875, 1884) essays as well as Foucault’s (1994/1997, 2001/2005) work on ethics in order to generate a bank of excerpts and quotations that documented how each author resisted taken for granted notions of science and knowledge. During the last tier of analysis, the author employed Charmaz’s (2006) work on grounded theory and Freeman’s (2005) articulation of the constant comparative method to cultivate themes, note complications in the data, and formulate claims about the work of these two scholars.
Early results of this study were telling. Briefly, Emerson (1970) argued that “[Progress] is learning the secret of cumulative power, of advancing on one’s self. It implies a facility of association, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas” (p. 22). Echoing Emerson, Foucault’s (2001/2005) care of the self saw the reciprocal acts of caring for oneself and caring for others as a means of interrupting the status quo and inciting people out of the stupor of commonsense ways of being to see life as an embracement of change and challenge. As Foucault wrote, “The care of the self is a sort of thorn which must be stuck in men’s flesh, driven into their existence, and which is a principle of restlessness and movement, of continuous concern throughout life” (p. 8). Further, Foucault stated, “The practice of the self is established against a background of errors, bad habits, and an established and deeply ingrained deformation and dependence that must be shaken off” (p. 94), which resonates with Emerson’s (1983) claim that “By persisting to read or to think, this region [of life] gives further sign of itself, as if it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose…” (p. 484) by seeing life as a continual process of reading and thinking in order to see newer ways of engaging life and envisioning the world differently.

Author

• Michael D. Boatright, Colorado State University