2
In several interviews near the end of his life, Michel Foucault expressed his dislike of
polemics: A polemicist, for Foucault, “turns those who disagree into enemies; she attempts to
silence other possibilities by invoking her authority and right to speak while simultaneously
undercutting the authority and rights of others to participate in a dialogue.”
1
A problematization,
for Foucault, is the opposite of a polemic. A problematization raises questions; it does not
provide answers. It focuses on highlighting the problem at hand rather than responding with a
preexisting party line. It about taking risks, questioning rights, disrupting legitimacy, even,
perhaps especially, one’s own. Opposing a polemic with a polemic often leads to an impasse (or
insults or even violence), as participants focus inward in the consolidation of already established
truth claims or outward in the delegitimizing of their opponent. Opposing a polemic with a
problematization, however, opens up the potential for a rethinking on all sides of the argument.
Genealogy was the term Foucault used to describe his problematizing approach to analyzing the
power/knowledge regimes of modernity. This paper argues that the satirical “news” program,
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, can also function as a problematization, albeit of a very
different kind from Foucault’s genealogical investigations, through the use of incongruous
reframing.
On Problematizations
“Problematization” is not in the dictionary, but the verb form, “problematize” is defined,
simply, as “to pose problems.”
2
We do this quite a bit in academia – usually in the guise of
“posing a problem” in order to answer it.
3
It is the answer that usually receives the most
attention; the question is only a means to its own end. I, however, am more interested in the
question, specifically how we open something up for questions. How does something previously
part of our background assumptions, something we have considered natural, normal, or part of
Convention