Has Critique Run Out of Steam?—On Discourse Research as Critical Inquiry

Beyond Critique?

According to a prominent statement deriving from a conference at Stanford University in 2003 and published by French anthropologist Bruno Latour some years ago, “critique has run out of steam” (Latour, 2004b). In that paper, Latour starts by observing climate skepticism. He quotes an editorial in the New York Times:

Most scientists believe that [global] warming is caused largely by man-made pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a Republican strategist] seems to acknowledge as much when he says that “the scientific debate is closing against us.” His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled,” he writes, “their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” ⁶

Latour’s argument is as follows: In a world in which the experience of and arguments for contingency have become basic features of everyday life, social scientific “unmasking” of “essentialism” and “hidden agendas”—such as via social constructivist and historical analysis or social theory—has ceased to be a viable course of action. Why? Because today everybody knows about contingency, and the work of “unmasking” is very popular throughout society. Thus, as everybody does it, the special impact of the social sciences’ critical work no longer generates worthwhile effects:

What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge . . . ? (Latour, 2004b, p. 228) ⁷

In academia, science and technology studies established the fact of the social shaping of scientific knowledge, and a large range of constructivist research (e.g., Hacking, 2000) accounted for the historical contingencies of social phenomena. According to Latour, such approaches today fail simply because of their past success—everyone, everywhere now knows about contingency.

To “save the critical spirit,” he suggests throughout his essay that as social scientists we should instead try our hand at turning “matters of fact” into “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004b). This position, taken up by one of the world’s most prominent scholars in the social sciences no less, tears deeply into the heart of discourse research and into many other realms of social research and theory as well. Regardless of the different stances in this field, Latour directly challenges them all. He suggests first that there is no further need for sociological and discourse approaches labeled as critical, since everyone already knows the facts of power and domination. Thus, there is nothing more to unmask. No one will listen to such things anymore. Second, by including as targets the genealogical and reconstructive approaches of Foucauldian work and social constructivism in discourse research, Latour not only expresses a deep contempt toward time-consuming but precise empirical work linked to an urge for political action but also devalues the role such work plays in generating public awareness of contingency and possibility. Latour’s two main arguments will be considered more closely in the following.

Everyone Knows? Latour Against “Social Constructionism”

Latour begins by making an argument against the kind of genealogical work established by Michel Foucault in his studies on the history of madness, the medical gaze, discipline and punishment, and sexualities. Genealogy in Foucault, an idea closely linked and influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (e.g., Nietzsche, 1887/2006), traces historical contingencies, discontinuities, and transformations of power/knowledge-constellations that can be identified as regimes of power-knowledge through time. The analysis is about “games of power” and “games of truth,” about conflict, struggle, domination, historical ontology, and historical becoming, without assuring pathways to brighter futures and the ultimate progress of knowledge making or even Enlightenment (Aufklärung). Genealogy, according to Foucault, is a never-ending story throughout the social history of power/knowledge regimes.

But according to Latour, analyzing the complex historical becoming of such constellations of power, dispositifs, ⁸ and orders of discourse and knowledge no longer seems valuable. He argues that “social construction,” which, beyond Foucault and to a lesser historical degree, is the core argument of some branches of social constructionism (e.g., Hacking, 2000, and in a different sense, Berger & Luckmann, 1966), is outdated. Why? Because knowing about the historical contingency of everything—our political system, scientific facts, norms and values in everyday life, life forms, and so on—has become, at least according to Latour, part of common sense, used in everyday affairs to generate critique of all kind of issues, including the facts of climate change. Everyone already knows that our innovations are naturalized and hence devalued. The role model for such critique is conspiracy theory (i.e., “the twin towers were destroyed by the CIA”; “the moon landing was a fake”), which works just as effectively in popular culture as in critical social science (Latour, 2004b, p. 229).

This polemic leads Latour directly to his attack on the second version of critique, that inspired by pre-established social theory. Latour refers here to the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu or, to be more precise, to an effect of a “too quick reading” (Latour, 2004b, p. 229) of Bourdieu’s work, as he argues with caution. Shorthand Bourdieusianism also implies strong affinities with “conspiracy theory” as practiced in everyday life. But this time, it is performed in social theory:

[. . .] you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusio of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intent, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below. What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique? (Latour, 2004b, pp. 229-230)

One might ask whether Latour’s referring to “theory” in both conspiracy theory and social theory here is not a strange case of blurring genres and words. Next, in the following, Latour (2004b, pp. 237-239) accounts for two main explanatory, or perhaps clearer, revelatory strategies of such “critiques by theory.” First, the so-called “fairy position” states that the world as perceived is nothing but a projection. If you think elites and gods are powerful, indeed it is you yourselves, the people, who via projection create and allow the power of elites and gods! The second argument—the “fact position”—can be summed up as follows: You, the everyday woman or man in the street, think you know the world as it is. But you are wrong, because you are a prisoner of illusio, of the secret structural forces that are working under the surface of reality, called habitus and field, called discourse, class, intersectionality, or neoliberalism, or whatever other concepts have been invented in social theory.

Both of these stances allow—please remember, according to Bruno Latour—for the critical social scientist to occupy a superior and extremely comfortable position, perhaps not quite godlike, as Donna Haraway (1988) would have put it, but somewhere “above” the others. Furthermore, we must remember here that Pierre Bourdieu (1991, 2004/2007) conceived his sociological diagnostics as “socio-analysis,” explicitly referencing psychoanalysis and thereby claiming a grasp of the process of revealing, via his sociology, the secret forces that drive our collective life. ⁹ Socioanalysis, by the way, is superior to every other position taken in academic research because it not only breaks, via its epistemology with everyday doxa and native-naive sociology, but with naive social science too! Only Bourdieusian theory is able to objectify social scientific objectivization and place itself in a third-order observer position above the fracas (Bourdieu, 1980/1990).

To sociologists who reserve the term social constructionism for particular approaches, such as that of Berger and Luckmann (1966), the line Latour draws between social constructivism and critical sociology is striking. Moreover, in a related paper on the “promises of constructivism,” Latour (2003) explains that “everything is wrong with constructivism,” although it seemed—even to him!—a very good idea at the beginning. ¹⁰ First, it is wrong because it explains too much solidity by the effects of the “social.” Here again, Bourdieu’s sociology in particular and critical sociology in general are cases in point for attack (and theories of de-construction too). Second, it is wrong because it suggests a master (plan) of construction. Third, it is wrong because it lacks a concept of materiality. Furthermore, it is wrong because of its ubiquitous use throughout the humanities (see Hacking, 2000).

Matters of Concern—Toward a Renewed Ethics of Discourse?

Against the simply “good feeling of being a critical mind” (Latour, 2004b, p. 238) ¹¹ and the “euphoric drug of critique” (Latour, 2004b, p. 239), and against the general misery of critique he feels, Latour then claims a strong realism.

What I am going to argue is that the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. (Latour, 2004b, p. 231)

But, you may well ask, how does Latour intend to save critique? Referring to the linguistic and philosophical etymology of the word thing, Latour proposes to conceive of things—such as facts, objects, and we may add institutions, organizations, and discourses—as “associations” or “assemblages” of different elements, that is as fora or agendas, as compositions to involve all kind of concerned actants:

. . . Give me one matter of concern and I will show you the whole earth and heavens that have to be gathered to hold it firmly in place . . . The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing. The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts. (Latour, 2004b, p. 246)

It seems that Latour’s sketch for new democratic institutions as presented in the very same year to the English speaking public in Politics of Nature (Latour, 2004a) delivers a kind of role model for a new political sphere in which such matters of concern can be dealt with. In this book, Latour presents a general template for a “new constitution,” introducing the “parliament of things,” an institutional device that is used to represent, discuss, evaluate, and judge such matters of concern.

Ten years later, in 2014, he writes about “situations” he has arranged, in which differing claims of reality descriptions meet, demonstrating that there is a pluriverse rather than a universe (Latour, 2014, Lecture One, pp. 17-19). But we might well ask: Does this not somehow end up as a recycled ethics of discourse similar to that established in the early 1980s by German Philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1981/1984, 1981/1987, 1983/1991, 1993, 1992/1996)? A reminder: Discourse ethics was presented as a contra-factual idea, as an organizing device and setting for conflict resolution, to clarify distinctions between “factual truth” and normative rules, especially in the context of public deliberations and environmental concerns. Based on a universal pragmatics of language use, Habermas distinguished between factual, normative, and expressive statements. Factual statements refer to the “objective world” and its materiality out there. Normative statements are about the value and justification of social norms. Expressive statements are about inner-personal states of mind (like feelings). According to Habermas, a practical discourse is a concrete, situated, institutional device and setting focused around an issue of concern—for example, a planned waste treatment infrastructure, a new technology with far reaching consequences such as genetically modified organism (GMO) or nanotechnologies—in which all the concerned parties assemble, having the same rights to speak and argue their case along the three dimensions of language use. ¹²

Is this what Latour is reincarnating? Social actors, representing divergent interests and facts, assembled around a table, arguing about the evaluation of factual claims? Deciding, in a setting “free of domination,” upon “hierarchies of concerns”? And the better argument wins? To me, it appears close to this, despite the long detour Latour traveled through the science studies. But was Habermas not even more concrete, providing a rationale for discussion, whereas Latour stops at the very idea of bringing different people and interests together, simply bypassing the question of how to decide, for example, on red tuna vs. the Japanese (Latour, 2010)? And if not, what would a mix of Habermas and Latour look like today?

The Need for Evaluating Matters of Concern

Certainly there are advantages in such settings. Nevertheless, as Keller and Poferl (2000) argued, the basic problem is the contra-factuality of the setting itself. In order to work, it implies an equal access to knowledge, its resources and production, the capacity to “make” evidence, and so forth. SKAD argues that social sciences discourse research is about the discursive construction of reality, that is, social relationships of knowledge and politics of knowledge (Keller, 2005/2011, 2011). The former refers to the idea that societies establish hierarchies of truth, moral order and institutional claims to reality. The latter refers to competing actors engaged in discursive struggles on the “definition of the situation” (William I. Thomas & Dorothy Thomas). Social relationships of knowledge are asymmetric relationships of power. Material and symbolic resources for politics of knowledge are anything but equally distributed throughout society. So the idealized setting proposed by Habermas, viewed from a Foucauldian angle, simply ignores the complex hierarchies existing in all power/knowledge regimes. Nor does Latour tell us how to deal with competing claims or concerns in such a parliament or situation. So is his suggestion only about introducing more issues and actors into established playgrounds of political powers?

Recently, Puig de la Bellacasa pointed out as well the lack of criteria in Latour’s position concerning how to proceed in such settings. Picking up on one of his cases in point, a conflict between a “hardcore” ecologist and SUV drivers, she resumes his argument against the “fundamentalist ecologist” who is advised to respect and attend to the interests of the SUV owners. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) therefore asks, “. . . do we not still need critical approaches to play a role in the assembling of concern?” (p. 89). She further states,

My problem here is with how the problem is presented, and how the argument for care is mobilized to protect the SUV issue from its objectification by a critical participant—an angry and fairly disrespectful environmentalist. Respect for concerns and the call for care become arguments to moderate a critical standpoint. (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 91)

Drawing on Donna Haraway’s and other feminist work, Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 2012) argues for an “ethos of engaging with care,” for a “speculative commitment to neglected things” and “matters of care” as additional principles necessary to address such situations. ¹³ Such an ethos introduces a critical rationale for evaluation into the realm of “matters of concern” and fully acknowledges that not all stakeholder positions can be considered equal in the way conceived by Bruno Latour.

My own argument, presented next, raises yet another objection that in principle goes along with Puig de la Bellacasa. I explicitly refer to the ongoing importance of empirical analysis and of genealogical and reconstructive discourse research to make visible the asymmetric relationships of knowledge and the work of knowledge politics implied in such “arguing cases.” Mere claims of critique are not enough.

Moral Orders and Critique

Before we return to Latour, another (and also French) approach to revitalizing critique will be addressed, which seeks to replace critical theories (e.g., the Frankfurt School) and critical sociologies (e.g., Bourdieu’s) with a sociology of critical capacities. This refers to the work of French sociologist Luc Boltanski and French economist Laurent Thévenot (see Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006, 1999) on the moral orders of judgment/“economies of worth” and their analysis of critique in social life. As will be argued, Boltanski and Thévenot point to very interesting issues for contemporary discourse research but without exploring their full potential. And unfortunately, Boltanski (2009/2011) also fails to transform the analysis of critical capacities into a new haven for critical sociology.

For Luc Boltanski, too, Pierre Bourdieu is the main enemy—French academia is a small world. After his theoretical and personal split with Bourdieu in the 1980s, Boltanski advanced arguments for sociological inquiry into the processes and procedures of critique in everyday life, into how common people as well as organizations make, establish, defend, and evaluate critical arguments and interventions. Let me sum up the basic arguments. ¹⁴ Boltanski and Thévenot argue that throughout its history, French society has established several economies of worth, that is, hierarchies of evaluation to decide upon the “worth” of a person, organization, practice, or object. For example, the economy of inspiration in the field of the arts places very high value on the creative individual, and much less on one who merely copies what others have done. The economy of the home, the domestic world, creates hierarchy in processes of belonging. One should note that the identified orders (or “worlds”) here are not causally linked to a special field of practice.

The Critical Work Common People Do

In the everyday lives of people and organizations, such orders of worth are used in situations everywhere, much like a grammatical system, to evaluate and judge situations, objects, phenomena, and people. They are also used to present critique, such as addressing the question whether some order has been correctly applied, or whether the present order of evaluation should be replaced by another. For example, in universities, grades given in oral exams or for reports are indicators of concrete work done by some person. They evaluate the contribution to science. But there are (and always have been) disputes regarding the form and quality of evaluation. Do grades evaluate what they should evaluate (intellectual contributions)? Or do they evaluate in relation to social attributes and identities (such as ethnicity, race, class, gender), which should not matter? Could evaluation processes be improved? Should they be replaced? What procedures of evaluation would then be the best to account for the capacity (such as “intellectual contribution”) one is seeking in a particular situation?

Significantly, this is not presented as some kind of self-sufficient endeavor. Rather, by insisting on the critical capacities of everyday people, Boltanski (2009/2011) argues that they understand their own situations quite well. ¹⁵ There is no need for critical social theorists, placed in privileged observer positions “outside the game,” to explain to them their alienation due to structures of power and dominance. Viewed from this angle too, critical sociology and critical thinking in general have run out of steam.

Problems of the Sociology of Critical Capacities

Several arguments have been made against Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s framework. Leading German critical theorist Axel Honneth (2008) wondered why so many classical French philosophers were dominant in the presentation of economies of worth. He was also surprised at their small number—why should there be only six such economies? Furthermore, given that Boltanski and Thévenot basically argue with French philosophy and empirical research, is their theoretical elaboration and empirical account valuable for other societies beyond France? French sociologist Francis Chateauraynaud (2003) further objected to the rather proof-oriented empirical research ethos present in Boltanski and Thévenot. According to him, they were, at least for large parts of their empirical work, not interested in empirical analysis and new results, but only in demonstration of the value of established concepts—theory testing rather than empirical research. ¹⁶

Nevertheless, Boltanski (2009/2011) wants to explore, via his sociological analysis, the path that leads from everyday critique to an immanent critique of societies. Can a new critical sociology be established on those solid grounds of immanent critique? Can it be grounded in the auto-critical capacity of societies or social collectivities? This is how Boltanski aims to avoid an external god/observer position (which Bourdieu held) as well as the classical critical theory position that grounds its observations in philosophical reflections (or imaginations) of un-alienated life.

However, a closer examination of Boltanski’s texts reveals that, despite arguing convincingly about the conditions of the emergence of critique in social worlds themselves, such as the eternal gap between collective institutions and human self-interested role players, he fails to relate the sociological analysis of critique to sociological assistance to “the people” to achieve their emancipation. As a true French thinker, he is not interested in “voice” or “action research.” Rather, he seeks to assist the more or less ignorant everyday people in their fight for a new world by attacking in a rather simple manner the greedy deeds of powerful men governing the world. Moreover, he does not hesitate to point ultimately toward “revolution” as the goal. Thus, in his later days, despite rhetorical distanciation, Boltanski (2009/2011), in fact and in words, re-joins his former colleague Pierre Bourdieu in mounting polemics against “the ruling classes” and “the system”—a position particularly difficult to ground in the theoretical diagnostics of economies of worth.

Interpretative Analytics and Critical Effects

By now you may consider the author of this article a rather old-fashioned European sociologist struggling with conceptual ghosts from yesteryear. But please allow me in my conclusion to sum up my arguments against the positions presented.

First, I wish to emphasize the possibility and capability of emerging critical effects of all kinds of solid sociological research and arguments that help to expand the “action repertoire of societies,” as German sociologist Hans-Georg Soeffner put it in an interview (see Reichertz, 2004). “Solid” here does not refer to some positivist ideal of science, but, as the endless ideological and rhetorical work of simplification abounds in the public domain, to carefully executed theoretical and empirical work that engages with the complexities of today’s social agendas (see Clarke & Keller, 2014) for “telling about society” (Becker, 2007).

Significantly, this is not the exclusive jurisdiction of explicitly “critical” approaches. And it holds not only for empirical analysis but also for theory and diagnostics of a different kind, as the work of German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2008) has impressively demonstrated. For example, his ground-breaking arguments on risk society and individualization, based not on his own empirical research, but on informed sociological reading and “sociological imagination” (Mills, 1959/2000) pointed to inequalities of risk definition and risk exposures and very much changed public awareness and possibilities for (and even perhaps: realities of) action in contemporary societies.

Second, to return to discourse research, I insist on the ongoing usefulness of genealogical inquiry and interpretative analytics regarding power/knowledge regimes. Such genealogical inquiry, according to Foucault, implies carefully conducted empirical research. Herein, social phenomena are conceived as crystallized effects of complex constellations and historical becoming that cannot be explained using a one-theory-fits-all rationale. They exist, in the words of Max Weber, as “historical individuals.” Therefore, they cannot be accounted for via simple cause-and-effect assumptions, but demand careful research into their always and ever particular features. The term interpretative analytics was coined by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) to describe Foucault’s work and methodology. “Interpretation” therein refers to the far reaching societal diagnostics proposed by Michel Foucault, as in concepts such as “disciplinary society.” “Analytics” points to Foucault’s distancing from pre-established theoretical explanations such as those of Karl Marx or Pierre Bourdieu (and perhaps we should add Bruno Latour and Luc Boltanski), which deductively account for social phenomena by the same assumptions regarding the always already-known “most important” elements and relations. While SKAD uses this idea of analytics, it prefers a different connotation of “interpretation,” one anchored in the interpretive tradition of sociology (Keller, 2011, 2012a).

A Never-Ending Story: De-Objectifying Against Simplification

Societies are made up of competing worlds, hierarchies, and structures not only of domination, hate, and violence but also of pleasure, community action, human care, and friendship. And the conflicts, issues, commitments, and resources available for the definition of collective situations—including things, actors, animals, objects, values, ways of doing, justifications, and so on—never cease. Pretending that reality is the way it is and must be the way it is surely is an ongoing business in which lots of sciences are active partners. Therefore, discourse analytical reconstruction and genealogical analysis remain useful and timely tools with which to establish contingency. Latour’s “solution” of transforming “matters of fact” into “matters of concern” is like the white rabbit springing out of the magician’s hat—if it is not grounded in discourse, analytical reconstruction of implicated constellations, contingencies, and silenced actants, in the carefully done analysis of social relationships of knowledge and politics of knowledge—the realms of discursive construction of realities. How else could you, as a scientific worker, seriously be able to establish a “thing” as a matter of concern? ¹⁷

In working against processes of “objectification” and “reification” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, pp. 106-107), sociological and discourse analytical work helps “de-objectify” reality. Therefore, Latour’s core argument for saving critique is not an alternative to discourse research and social constructionism, but the direct outcome of such research. The effects of Foucauldian work are the most obvious arguments for such an evaluation. The ethos of enlightenment, according to Foucault (1984), implies never-ending effort.

Discourse Research as Sociology of Knowledge

To do such research, sociology and the social sciences in general must reexamine the concept of discourse: Discourse is not language or language use. It is not only a framing of phenomena but also, following Foucault, a heuristic device for exploring the making and unmaking of knowledge/power constellations. The SKAD therefore articulates Foucauldian work with Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge and pragmatist interpretive sociology. As Adele Clarke (2005) has argued, we are awash in seas of discourses, and discourses are inherent parts of all situations. Accounting for this does not reduce discourse to linguistic features, but implies a different conceptual and analytic move. The SKAD therefore addresses these challenges by inquiring into social relationships of knowledge and politics of knowledge. It is not interested in discourse as a linguistic phenomenon or language game, but in discourse as process and structuration of knowledge production, circulation, and transformation, including establishing “facts” and “norms.” Such processes operate not only in the fields of science and technology studies, but everywhere in society, in religion, as well as in politics, for example, and most of all transversally across such fields.

SKAD (Keller, 2005/2011, 2011, 2012b, 2013; Ulrich & Keller, 2014) ¹⁸ is interested, to use the old words, in the social and the here and now: discursive constructions of reality. Close to Foucault, but integrating Berger and Luckmann (1966) and interpretive sociology as established by the pragmatist tradition, it takes up Ulrich Beck’s notion of “relationships of definition” (Beck, 2008, pp. 24-46). Beck proposed these in close affinity to Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s concept of “relationship of production” or “relationship of domination.” Thus, relationships of knowledge refers to how our societies establish hierarchies of knowledge, belief, ideologies, technical norms, social values, and so on in their attempts at ordering and organizing the world. Politics of knowledge refers to the processes of establishing, objectifying, evaluating, and transforming realities, for example, via religions, political ideology, and the sciences.

The Seriousness of (Discourse) Research as Experimentation

In interpretative analytics, reconstruction is not a simple representation of how things went on. Reconstruction is a process of theoretically informed empirical inquiry in the pragmatist sense. It is not a theorism that applies pre-established categories on empirical data, a procedure classifying data as proof of theory. Instead it takes seriously the capacity of empirical work and data to challenge thinking and to allow or even make us create new concepts to tell new stories. For example, much work in governmentality studies ends up by simply identifying “neoliberal governmentality” and “biopolitics” or “biopower.” This is neither analysis nor explanation, but classification into established categories, which does not cause any surprise. In a recent critique of some work referring to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg (2014) made the very same argument:

Such efforts to diagnose contemporary power appear to be driven by the theoretical concepts. The concepts are not treated as tools and are no longer open to the challenge of a revitalized empiricism. Instead, the world is reduced to the concepts themselves, without the necessary complexities that define the concreteness of any context. Empirical realities do make their appearance, but their promise is almost always guaranteed in advance. The demands of theory overpower the demands on theory. . . . As a result, one inevitably finds what one looks for. (p. 13)

Foucault worked in a rather different way to create new concepts via empirical work. As he said in an interview (Foucault, 1984/2000), he lives through research as experimentation where you do not always already know what you will see and get—the interest lies in changing one’s own thinking about the ways things are. To me, this is today’s challenge to the sociological imagination C. Wright Mills (1959/2000) argued for so intensely.

Therefore, discourse research needs tools (concepts, methodology), but not a pre-established theory of discourse. And it needs good questions, questions that matter. ¹⁹