Foucault’s Extralinguistic, Literariness, and Madness: Foucault’s Impetus for Conceptualizing and Composing Qualitative Research.

• In Event: Toward the Extralinguistic: New Emergences With Foucault’s Unpublished Writings in Educational Research Methodologies

Abstract

Scholars in the field of qualitative inquiry have relied on the works of the late French intellectual, Michel Foucault to provide critical lenses into the practices and discourses of education (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1997). Foucault’s analysis of various forms of power have been used in qualitative research to expose and problematize top-down, oppressive forms of power as well as contest common taken-for-granted practices of teaching and learning . Qualitative researchers have relied on Foucault to help them challenge post-positivist epistemologies as well as reimage traditional schooling practices and educational policies (Ball, 2012; Jackson & Mazzei, 2022). Foucault provides qualitative researchers the perspective to examine disciplinary power and its panoptic influences. More recently, post-qualitatitve researchers have used Foucault’s earlier archaeological studies to highlight how conventional qualitative research is built on post-positivists principles of categorization and hierarchies as well as to contest commonly held notions of research methodologies such as objectivism, causality, data, and data analysis to name a few (St. Pierre, 2023).. Post-qualitative researchers take aim at conventional qualitative research for the latter’s reliance on a stable subject, its acceptance of language as a transparent and honest broker of experience, and its claim that knowledge and truth remain synonymous.
This paper builds on this work and includes on the previously unpublished works of Foucault in order to argue for a greater expansion for the ways that qualitative research can be articulated (Author) using what Foucault calls the “extra-linguistic” or the more-than language. It links the extra-linguist to Foucault’s discussion of literariness and madness to think through aspects of research as consisting of various and unprivileged rationalities and logics which necessitates other ways of representing qualitative research studies. I am interested in exploring this notion that literature is the “playground” of language (Foucault, 2023, p. 64) and its connection to madness to think through the linguistic and extralinguistic tools that are available to qualitative researchers to both engage in educational research as well as compose their research to share with others. Thus, how might literariness and madness offer qualitative researchers with the conceptual and compositional tools necessary to reveal the contested relationship between words and things? This will be the main question of this paper. Finally, it is the author’s contention that to literariness and madness as conceptual and compositional avenues necessitates a politics that operates out of ethics of refusal to oppressive forms of power. This paper will offer suggestions about how post-qualitative researchers can employ literariness and madness in issues of equity and social justice.

Author

• David L. Carlson, Arizona State University