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History of Narrative Genres after Foucault

Frank Palmeri

Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault have explored the role played by

epistemological paradigms in shaping and limiting how the world is

understood and what can count as true at different times. Kuhn took the natural

sciences as his subject, while Foucault focused on the social sciences. In this

essay I propose to explore the existence and nature of cultural paradigms

whose truth claims are less stringent than those made in the sciences, and to

examine in particular the close relation between cultural paradigms and

genres, including the significance of transformations within and between

genres.

The initial accounts of scientific paradigms and social-scientific epistemes

provided by Kuhn and Foucault assert their singleness and exclusivity, and

thus seem to stand in strong contrast to the multiplicity of paradigms in the

cultural field. For a number of such cultural paradigms can and typically do

coexist--in some tension with each other, and possessing a greater or lesser

authority and persuasiveness. In fact, both Kuhn and Foucault moved away

from their early and extreme assertions of the uniqueness of dominant

paradigms, even in the natural sciences and social sciences. Moreover, they

recognized either the multiplicity of artistic schools or the transitional nature of

artistic works and genres.

Kuhn had asserted the absence of competing paradigms in his earlier account,

and even his later revision lays emphasis on

"the relative scarcity of competing schools in the developed sciences." 1 [End

Page 267] There tends to be only one such school in a particular field at any

time, because it must provide the framework and rationale for problem-solving

by a limited and sometimes small scientific community. On the other hand, a

multiplicity of available schools characterizes a field before it reaches the stage

of a normal science, and competing paradigms will find adherents during a

period of scientific revolution as well. In such a revolutionary period, the

operations of normal science are suspended until a consensus develops

among those in the field in favor of an alternate paradigm.

Kuhn points out that both the social sciences and the arts stand outside this

process--the arts especially, because, unlike the sciences, they are not

problem-solving activities. In philosophy and the arts, he writes, "there are

always competing schools, each of which constantly questions the very

foundations of the others" (pp. 162-163), and each of which makes use of a

number of exemplars at any one time (p. 167). Authors of narrative, to take

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another example, will typically not write in accordance with a single cultural

paradigm because their activity does not consist primarily of identifying and

solving problems, as it does for scientists. There will thus be a number of

schools of narrative at a given time, many of them residual. The appearance of

a new genre of narrative may indicate an emerging cultural formation, one that

might later come to dominance; similarly, the reappearance of a genre in an

altered or hybrid form may reveal a shift of paradigms; and conversely, the

fading of a genre from prominence may indicate the passing of a cultural

paradigm.

Like Kuhn, Foucault begins by asserting that an episteme is exclusive, unique,

and determining. In The Order of Things, he famously writes that, "in any given

culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that

defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge." 2 Moreover, in his

account of the epistemes governing the social sciences from the Renaissance

to modern times, discontinuity plays as great a role as in Kuhn's account,

perhaps even greater. 3 The Renaissance and classical epistemes in The

Order of [End Page 268] Things are, like Kuhn's paradigms, incommensurable.

There is no progression from one to the other, and Foucault provides or

suggests no possible causes for the rupture he describes; nor does he explore

stages by which this transformation was accomplished. 4 It is striking, therefore,

that he does give a painstaking and elaborate account of the stages by which

the classical was itself transformed into the modern episteme between 1775

and 1825, noting stages and middle grounds between the two, and thus

diminishing the discontinuity involved in this shift (pp. 217-300).

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault departs from some of the more

uncompromising positions he takes in The Order of Things. Most significantly,

in the later work he does not regard one discursive practice or positivity as

defining the conditions of knowledge for all areas throughout a culture at any

one time, nor does he insist on a sudden, simultaneous, and discontinuous

transformation of all such practices from an earlier to a later state. Rather,

different discursive formations undergo similar transformations at different

times, sometimes separated by a half-century or more. 5 In this later

conception, an epistemic metamorphosis is not "a sort of great drift that carries

with it all discursive formations at once" (p. 175). Because Foucault now

observes "fragmented shifts" that take place in one area or field but not

another, his archaeology "disarticulates the synchrony of breaks" (p. 176). In

other words, continuous elements persist through the breaks and

transformations that occur. Thus, elements of multiple and diverse

epistemological formations coexist at any time; the field of knowledge is not

total or single. 6 This archaeological [End Page 269] view of unevenly shifting

discursive practices bears a strong resemblance to the understanding of the

nonsimultaneous shifts in social and cultural formation that Marx called

"uneven development."

It is also significant that, although Foucault remains committed to tracing

transformations in systems of thought, in later works such as the second and

third volumes of the History of Sexuality, he departs from his earlier polemical

insistence on the radical discontinuity between epistemes and their

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all-encompassing singularity. Instead, in the narrative of the History of

Sexuality, he discerns in the course of generations, even centuries, a gradual

shift away from a regimen for the use of pleasures in the classical Greek world

to an anxiety in the early Roman empire about the possibly harmful

consequences of pleasure. He places more emphasis in these later works on

problematizing than on archaeological analysis, and focuses on recasting and

inverting accepted historical accounts. The form taken by such overturnings of

previous perspectives varies from Discipline and Punish to the History of

Sexuality and the lectures on governmentality, but it does not depend on

sudden, radical disjunctures between totalizing epistemes. For example, in the

lectures on governmentality, Foucault analyzes a tradition of

anti-Machiavellian thinking and writing that extends with discernible continuity

from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century--in other words, across the

break between the Renaissance and classical epistemic formations that is

drawn so sharply in The Order of Things. 7

In his writings on literature, Foucault indicates, as Kuhn also does, that

literature and the arts often stand somewhat outside the epistemic constraints

of their time. For example, " Don Quixote is the first modern work of literature"

( OT, p. 48) because it operates by means of representation, identities, and

differences, and uses Quixote's madness as a figure for the previous epistemic

regime based on resemblances and similitudes. But, we might add, the

knight-errant is also the hero of the narrative, and especially in the second part

a figure of some pathos, indicating a doubly ironic sympathy of the work with

his enchanted mental world. 8 The narrative thus has a foot in each way of

understanding the world. In addition, Don Quixote is generally regarded as the

first modern novel, [End Page 270] and it is fitting and typical, I suggest, that

the appearance of this new genre serves as an index for a transformation

between cultural paradigms. 9

Foucault's unique discussion of a literary genre also asserts the connection

between that genre and a paradigm of knowledge. In "Language to Infinity,"

written between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, he argues

that as the Gothic novel comes into existence in the late eighteenth century, it

expresses for the first time a distinctively modern desire to say the unsayable

and to write the inexpressible--not only the mad, but also the unlimited under

the guise of the morbid, the sexual, and the violent. 10 Although Foucault

generally focuses on the texts of particular authors, he sees that elements of

different paradigms come into conjunction both in individual literary works and

in genres as well, and that emerging ways of thought can find expression

alongside elements of older forms on the thresholds between paradigms.

Thus, even in the social sciences and the natural sciences, where some of

their formulations were quite restrictive, the theories of Foucault and Kuhn

allow for the possible coexistence of different paradigms--not only among

different fields, but also within a given practice during cultural transformations

or scientific revolutions. The flexible epistemic status of narratives as well as of

other nonscientific and artistic works produces a still greater multiplicity among

cultural paradigms than in either kind of science, so that typically a number of

overlapping and contradictory paradigms can be discerned in competition with

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each other at any cultural moment. 11 [End Page 271]

We have already noted that Foucault's archaeological account of

asynchronous transformations in different discursive formations parallels

Marx's account of uneven development. For Marx, the replacement of an

earlier form of social life by a later one on which it has become a constraint

"takes place only very slowly; the various stages and interests are never

completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail

along beside the latter for centuries afterwards." 12 The persistence of which

Marx speaks here does not usually occur in the sciences: because of the

strong epistemological claim they make, when one paradigm in the natural

sciences is replaced by another, the hypotheses and terms of the first generally

drop out of use, at least among scientists in the field (although they may persist

for centuries as popular beliefs and as a basis for social practices). But when

artistic or narrative practices are superseded by others, they are not dropped

entirely from textbooks, schools, markets, and other institutions; rather,

precisely because they do not make exclusive claims to truth, they continue to

find practitioners and an audience, even as forms that are not in close accord

with the latest or dominant formation or paradigm. 13

Thus, of the residual, dominant, and emerging cultural forms of which

Raymond Williams writes, survivals from past times will be most numerous at

any cultural moment; 14 there will be one dominant, or two struggling to be so;

and, of emerging formations, there will be only one or two, with few (though

sometimes prominent) exponents. We might also observe that the time when a

particular paradigm dominates in most arts and genres may be analogous to a

time of normal science in Kuhn's theory, and that those times in which residual

and emerging paradigms struggle with each other but none exercises a

persuasive dominance may be comparable to times of scientific revolution in

Kuhn or of epistemic transformation in Foucault.

In literature, the appearance of a new genre can indicate the recent or coming

formation of a new cultural paradigm. We have already [End Page 272] seen

that Foucault considers this to be the case when he takes Don Quixote as

establishing an early satiric break with the mental world of Renaissance

romance, or sees the Gothic as an anticipatory instance of modern literary

attempts to break through the limits of language. Moreover, just as Don Quixote

relies on elements of the Renaissance paradigm even in repudiating and

mocking it, evincing some nostalgia for the signifying richness of such a world,

so do the early Gothic novels make use of residual elements, such as the

presence of the supernatural from medieval and Renaissance romance, and a

desire to bring secrets to light from the Enlightenment (although both are

subordinated in this genre to the drive toward extremes of sex and violence).

One might argue that all genres are made up in such ways of multiple,

discordant, and nonsynchronous elements. Because these hybrid elements in

genres have parallels among the elements in cultural formations, not only can

the appearance of a genre anticipate a cultural formation, but its duration can

also register the persistence, or indicate the passing from dominance, of a

larger formation.

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The view of genres proposed here has much in common with Fredric

Jameson's conception of genres and their history in The Political Unconscious.

For Jameson, as a given society at any moment is shaped not by one but by

many forms of production, including vestiges and anticipatory tendencies, so

texts are shaped by a comparable variety of modes of cultural production at

work at any one time. 15 As he sees it, when a genre emerges in its "strong"

form, it expresses an ideological message, a symbolic resolution of a historical

contradiction (p. 117). This ideology of the form persists into later, more

complex and hybrid structures as a sedimented layer deposited by the

conditions of the earlier time (p. 141). Thus, in the narratives he analyzes,

"distinct and sedimented types of generic discourse" constitute "the 'raw

materials' on which [later forms such as] the novel as a process must work" (p.

144). Jameson's argument might be revised and extended by including new

and emerging genres in this process of hybridization. The idea that genres

emerge in a "strong" or unmixed form cuts new genres off from earlier cultural

history. 16 In my view, all genres are formed by adapting elements of [End

Page 273] other, earlier forms and working them into a distinctive whole that is

appropriate or useful for the time in which they appear.

Some of the formulations of Mikhail Bakhtin also usefully support and

supplement the view of genres proposed here. Like Jameson, Bakhtin

emphasizes the heterogeneous elements that make up individual texts--in

particular, the layering or sedimentation by means of which languages from

different times can combine to produce their distinctively composite narratives:

"At any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods of

socio-ideological life cohabit with one another. . . . [The language of prose]

represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the

present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different

socio-ideological groups in the present, [and] between tendencies, schools,

circles, and so forth." 17 Bakhtin contrasts prose narrative with lyric poetry,

which, as he understands it, expresses a single point of view and a single

pathos in an elevated style. Prose and narrative, on the other hand, deploy in

dialogical confrontation with each other the diverse languages of the street,

shop, and office, of journalism, popular novels, and official discourses, along

with the divergent and opposed interests and views of the world that all these

languages express. Prose narratives capture and shape deposits and

survivals from earlier periods, although they are often in conflict with the

dominant languages of the present.

Bakhtin also sees genres not as a series of formal conventions, but as ways of

conceiving the world: "Every genre has its own orientation in life, with

reference to its events, problems, etc. . . . We may say that every genre has its

methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality." 18 Such a

conception of genre plays a significant role throughout Bakhtin's writings, from

the essay on chronotopes and the study of the Bildungsroman to the late

additional chapter on carnivalesque genres in Problems of Dostoevsky's

Poetics. 19 From this perspective, genres within cultural paradigms may be

considered as roughly comparable to theories or hypotheses within scientific

paradigms. Genres and theories both shape a view of the world and an

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Palmeri Discourse Theory - History of Narrative Genres after Foucault 2003.pdf

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