It's great fun to teach rhetorical analysis in 39B with Foucault's Archaeology of Knoweldge by my side. Analysis of surfaces, not of deep or hidden meaning. Analytics of relations and functions. In commenting on a student paper, I was almost unconsciously paraphrasing Foucault. I wrote in a margin: our primary concern here is not to interpret the meaning of the text, but to analyze its functions from the viewpoint of pragmatics of the text. But then a pedagogically-minded, pragmatic voice whispered in me that a science-major undergrad would not get what I meant by "pragmatics," and I ended up deleting this word.
