In late January 2005, the Australian newspaper, The Age, reported that a “mystery woman” was being held as a suspected illegal immigrant in Baxter Immigration Detention Centre (Jackson 2005). Little was known by either authorities or other detainees about the woman's identity, except that she was white and German-speaking. Fellow detainees and visitors to Baxter IDC, who had serious concerns about the woman's distressed and irrational mental state, brought media attention to her case and, as a consequence, her family in Australia recognized their missing relative from her description in a newspaper article. The woman, identified by her family as legal resident Cornelia Rau, was subsequently released into an Adelaide psychiatric hospital. Her unlawful detention and the failure of authorities to provide her with adequate medical/mental health treatment for a diagnosed illness provoked public outrage. The Minister for Immigration, Senator Amanda Vanstone, was forced to publicly respond and finally, under further pressure, announced an inquiry into the case.[1] This article is a consideration of the case of Cornelia Rau in relation to recent accounts of intelligibility and recognition in the work of Judith Butler (2004a, 2004b). Our analysis of texts from the initial moments[2] of the Rau scandal draws on poststructuralist theory to consider the discursive constitution of subjects within those texts, tracing the fractures in thought that are evident within them. Influenced, like Butler, by the work of Michel Foucault on power and its operations on material bodies, and drawing as well on Michel de Certeau's notion of law as it is inscribed on the body, we analyse the discourses deployed in two Ministerial Media Releases that served to position Rau as unintelligible as a citizen, and thus, as undeserving of the fundamental rights of citizenry in a liberal democracy.[3]

We attempt this reading in a socio-political context where signifiers such as a “war on terror” and “border protection” have authorized gross abuses of human rights including prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the indefinite detention of uncharged prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and the mandatory detention of refugees and asylum seekers in remote locations in Australia and the Pacific. As Foucault demonstrated – and as the horrors of each of these sites have reiterated - power is operationalized in the most local and specific contexts and it is inscribed in the flesh of particular bodies in particular places (Foucault 1977, 1980, 1988). The circumstances through which the Cornelia Rau case emerges as a site of unintelligibility are instances of a set of institutional and political technologies operating locally and internationally that serve to efface hundreds of thousands of humans from the category of the human.

Rau did not appear in Baxter IDC from nowhere, nor did she come without a history, though her identity and background were not established by the bureaucracies under whose authority she had been placed. After her family’s disclosure of her identity, she was understood to be a 39 year old mentally ill Australian resident, who had gone missing from a Sydney psychiatric ward in March 2004.[4] She traveled north and, unable to provide identifying documentation when she came to the attention of local police, was imprisoned under another name in a Queensland jail. She was then transported to South Australia and detained for three months in Baxter Immigration Detention Centre as a suspected illegal immigrant. Overall, her incarceration lasted for 10 months during which she received no psychiatric treatment or official recognition as a person in need of, or with rights to, such assistance. Assessment in a Brisbane psychiatric hospital during her imprisonment in Queensland found that she was not mentally ill. Despite numerous reports by health professionals, fellow prisoners, refugee advocates, and other detainees concerning her apparently disturbed mental state and behaviour, her mental illness was denied and disregarded by officials. Despite copious documentation of her history held by various federal and state bureaucracies, her identity was never established through these administrative apparatus. Although she was registered on the New South Wales missing persons list, it was not until January 2005, when her family recognized her from media reports, that she was removed from detention and placed under medical supervision. Following the scandal, a parliamentary inquiry was held to investigate the case.

We are interested in tracing how the constitution of Rau as “illegal” for the ten months of her detention reduced the capacity of those in authority to recognize her as fully human. We are interested in how her mental illness was refigured as recalcitrance by those who had the power of naming at that time, and how mental illness appears to have been constructed by them as an expected and unremarkable characteristic found among those held in Australian Immigration Detention Centres (IDCs). While Rau remained unintelligible and isolated within the institutions responsible for her care, fellow detainees, themselves located at the limits of intelligibility, recognized her as mentally ill. These other detainees orchestrated her release by mobilizing refugee support networks and providing these networks with details that were circulated in media reports read by members of her family. In political terms, Rau’s story raises numerous questions about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, about the standards of medical and mental health care available to those in detention[5], about the failure of government systems and the individuals they employ to protect the human rights of those for whom they assume responsibility, and about the lack of public accountability required of the Australian Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) specifically and the Australian Federal Government more broadly when acting in such matters. Despite the findings of Palmer and other inquiries, and some subsequent adjustments to bureaucratic procedures, the relevant Minister has not been censured, the contracted detention centre management company Global Solutions Limited has not lost their contract, the Department Head of the time has been promoted to a prestigious diplomatic posting, and the IDCs remain a key plank of the DIMIA response to unauthorized immigration arrivals (DIMIA 2006).

While our interest in this paper takes us necessarily into the terrain of theorizations of what it means to be human[6], and of how it is that individuals come to be rendered discursively intelligible, it is important to note that Rau is not understood here as an abstract figure in a disembodied theoretical sense, as the use of philosophical/theoretical terms and analyses might suggest. Instead, along with Judith Butler, we take the position that:

Through analysis of Ministerial media releases in relation to the Cornelia Rau case, we aim to open up a means of understanding some of the ways in which discursive and social non/viability and un/intelligibility are constructed through government rhetoric. Specifically, we consider how notions of delinquency and criminality are deployed to construct a wrongfully detained woman as the ungovernable, hence unintelligible other. We also trace the deployment of Rau’s unintelligibility as a justification for her unlawful detention by DIMIA, and explore the ways in which her detention can be understood in terms of the law’s inscription on the body (de Certeau). We want to engage with the possibilities that poststructuralist theory offers for understanding some of the ways in which the site of the body “is formed within the crucible of social life” (Butler, Precarious Life 26). In the case of detainees, in particular, the regimes of truth that have grown up around notions of ‘border protections’ and ‘national security’ construct as always/already nonviable those people whose bodies and voices are Othered through the very condition of their abject exclusion from public life. Finally, we consider the ways in which critique and dissent are foreclosed through the construction of disembodied, exploitative, and “opportunistic” Others invoked in the Minister’s comments.

Establishing Conditions of Intelligibility

Butler shows in Precarious Life (2004a) and Undoing Gender (2004b) that the stakes of intelligibility are high. Indeed, survival in both material and symbolic terms is predicated on the intelligibility of the subject within the terms and norms that shape and govern social life at any given moment. While, as Butler argues in Undoing Gender, there is a sense in which the normative aspects of social life provide the frameworks of thought and of action through which we must necessarily live, she reminds us that to deviate, or to exist outside the normative, is to jeopardize one’s viability as a social subject, so that “when we defy these norms, it is unclear whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or ever can be regarded as such” (Butler, Undoing Gender 206). In the context of the contemporary social and political climate of Australia, there are numerous examples of groups (refugees, asylum seekers, Indigenous Australians, migrants, gays and lesbians, single parents, disabled, mentally ill, or unemployed people to name but a few) whose deviation from or existence outside the normative frames promoted by the politically conservative Howard government are constructed through the parlance of government rhetoric in largely pejorative terms. The “Othering” that takes place through the language games, policy agendas and political manoeuvres in relation to such groups has a significant function in constructing those groups as discursively unintelligible.

Senator Vanstone’s first media release on February 5, 2005, just after the Rau story broke in the press, makes minimal reference to Rau’s mental illness, and does so in terms which elide her psychiatric condition through notions of delinquency and criminality:

Rau’s construction as delinquent is underscored through DIMIA’s failure to accurately assess her mental condition, and through the Minister’s reiteration of her (inaccurate) diagnosis in terms of ‘behavioural problems’:

Yet according to media reports, Cornelia Rau was readily recognized by others – by fellow detainees and visitors to the detention centre - within the discursive terms of mental illness, but not by those whose job it was to care for her, nor by those who were trained to recognize and meet the needs of the ‘Othered’. Many of those who recognized her as intelligible within the discursive terms of mental illness were those who are themselves in different ways ‘Othered’ by the norms of white, English-speaking Australia. Aboriginal people near Coen in north Queensland saw that the German woman camping and destitute was in need of care and took her to the police in search of it: “She seemed a bit disoriented…She looked like she needed a bit of help…She said she had no money and had had nothing to eat…” (Todd para. 6). Asylum-seekers in Baxter Immigration Detention Centre, themselves the invisible Others located outside the discourses of national security, citizenship, and human rights, recognized that she needed help and used their networks of community support to seek that help for her, telling them: “There’s a poor woman here. She’s screaming, she’s yelling, she’s eating dirt and sometimes she runs around without her clothes on” (Todd para. 6). Our intention here is not to imply a ‘natural’ empathy or insight with respect to those ‘Othered’ groups who recognized Rau through the primary discursive frame of mental illness[7], but rather it is to highlight the extent to which intelligibility is reliant on the discourses through which the “existing norms of recognition” (Butler, Precarious Life 43) are made available to, and taken up by, certain individuals and groups. Rau’s recognition by numerous others in terms of mental illness, while she was simultaneously refused recognition in those terms by DIMIA (including mental health professionals employed by DIMIA for the purposes of assessing the mental health status of detainees such as Rau) speaks to the pervasiveness of discourses of criminality in relation to immigration detainees, and to the relentlessness of their grip over current practices of Australian Immigration Detention. In Rau’s case, Aboriginal Australians, then asylum seekers and their advocates, recognized her distress and behaviour in terms of a “corporeal vulnerability” (Butler, Precarious Life 42), a vulnerability which “must be perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an ethical encounter” (43). Unlike the guards at Baxter, the DIMIA, and the Minister, they did not read Rau through a primary filter of criminality that obscured and excluded other possible readings of her mental state and behaviour, and so were moved to act on her behalf. We do not intend to suggest that institutional readings of Rau as simultaneously intelligible, via discourses of delinquency, and unintelligible, via discourses of mental illness, instantiated a hierarchy of discourse, which was inverted in the readings made of her by her fellow detainees. Rather, these (mis)recognitions demonstrate the instability of discursive regimes. Frameworks of intelligibility do not mesh together seamlessly in the construction of normativity but they clash with and contradict each other in the complex domain of the lives of individual subjects.[8]

In the Minister’s first media release, Rau is referred to as “a woman,” “this woman,” and “the woman.” Nowhere in this document is Cornelia Rau referred to by her name, the name that, on its conferral, finally secured her recognition and release from Baxter. Though the Minister at this time had knowledge of Rau’s identity (indeed, by the time of the Minister’s media release, Rau had already been removed from the Detention Centre and from the responsibility of DIMIA), she remains an unnamed body in the Minister’s text. Nevertheless, the effect of her naming in the broader public sphere is her ‘release,’ into an Adelaide psychiatric hospital. Thus her naming – seen in terms of her ‘proper’ identification with the name recorded on official documentation – has refigured the relation of her body, now recognized as a legitimate Australian resident, to other institutions of the Australian state. Her naming has conferred back upon her the rights of mentally ill and legal Australian residents for ‘proper’ (but still potentially indefinite) detention within the institution that becomes ‘proper’ within the discourse of mental illness through which she is now able to be understood.

Although the circumstances of release remain problematic in the case of Cornelia Rau, the intensity of the struggle for a site of intelligibility as a human with entitlements to appropriate mental health care is evident in the stories of her advocates – the detainees and their advocates – and their approaches to DIMIA prior to her identification. For example, the head of South Australia’s mental health service, Jonathan Phillips, argued with DIMIA about the symptoms of the detained unknown German woman. Phillips believed that she had “a probable psychotic illness,” whilst DIMIA told him that this was the sort of “behavioural disturbance [that]… one unfortunately gets in places such as Baxter” (Tippet para. 53). The norms of detention as expressed in DIMIA’s response to Phillips speak to the refusal of DIMIA staff to recognize the corporeal vulnerability of detainees, thus foreclosing the possibility of an ‘ethical encounter’ which might have motivated a more immediate and compassionate institutional response to Rau’s deplorable situation. Notions of ‘behavioural disturbance’ bound the parameters of discursive intelligibility, so that a certain ‘type’ of person (one who creates behavioural disturbances) is to be expected in a certain ‘type’ of institutional facility (the purpose of which is, by definition, the detention of those ‘types’ of people deemed undesirable by the Australian government). Through such discursive manoeuvres, even those who might be readily recognizable within the discursive terms of mental illness are reconfigured as aberrant, thereby providing justification for their detention and the refusal of DIMIA to render them intelligible for the purposes of receiving medical and mental health care. The institutional expectation of aberrant behaviour – rather than the individual corporeal needs, circumstances, and human conditions of detainees – thus sets the terms and conditions through which intelligibility is conferred or withheld.

Both mainstream media and witness reports on refugee advocacy websites describe how during her detention in Baxter Immigration Detention Centre, Rau was removed from the family compound and placed in the punishment sections of the prison – Red One Compound and the Management Unit – where isolation and constant surveillance are deployed to control intransigent detainees. Witnesses report that Rau was the only woman in this part of the prison, and that she was in constant sight of male guards and male prisoners, where her distressed behaviour escalated further (Project SafeCom “Finding Anna” and “Talking”; Tippet). Under these conditions, Rau’s intelligibility as a woman was simultaneously both exploited and erased. As a subject of the bureaucratic processes of immigration detention, she is recognized by DIMIA solely according to the terms of criminality, which appear to legitimate her inappropriate treatment within the terms of gender. Yet as a corporeal subject of immigration detention, her particular vulnerability as a woman under the gaze of male guards is evident in detainees’ reports that guards joked and commented as they watched her using the toilet, looked at her naked body, and took her underwear (Project SafeCom “Finding Anna” and “Talking”; Tippet). Her removal from the other women in detention, into the isolation of Red One Compound and the Management Unit, seems to have obliterated the possibility of her inclusion in the category of woman, and any access to the minimal standards of propriety afforded to women prisoners. Whilst intelligibility as criminal appears to preclude and override intelligibility as mentally ill, the two being mutually exclusive in the regimes of truth operating in immigration detention, her corporeal intelligibility as a woman provokes a particular vulnerability in her removal from the spaces for women.

Vulnerable Bodies

Butler points out that “[t]he body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well” (Precarious Life 26). The story of Cornelia Rau, among many other men and women in immigration detention on whom names were not conferred in public spaces, demonstrates the vulnerability of the body to institutional control, ineptitude, and abuse. The body of Cornelia Rau, in the family photographs and stories that flooded into the Australian media alongside the Minister’s press releases, signalled a crisis in the strategy of erasure of subjects that the immigration detention system had almost perfected.

Cornelia Rau, as a white European woman, could be constructed by Australian media and readers as familiar within the Anglocentric discourses of Australian nationalism, not only through her status as a legal Australian resident, but also through her physical appearance. Her blonde hair, white skin, blue eyes, and smiling face in the family photographs circulated in the media effectively locate her within the dominant discourse of racialized Australian national identity which continues to be constructed as ‘white’ (see Hage 1998, 2003; Perera and Pugliese 1997, 1998; Perera 1999, 2002a, 2002b; Pugliese 2002; Osuri & Banerjee 2004). This raises important questions concerning the significance of whiteness to an Australian readership’s capacity to recognize the legitimacy of her plight and her status as a victim of inhumane treatment, in comparison to non-white detainees whose government imposed nameless and faceless existence in detention centres has rendered them largely invisible from public discourse. In Rau’s case, the racial politics which function to conceal the stories and circumstances of non-Anglo detainees from circulation in the public domain operated to secure not only her release from immigration detention, but also to ignite public outrage sufficiently to invoke a public inquiry and a subsequent set of bureaucratic changes.[9]

Despite the problematic operation of racial politics which locate Rau’s story within a discursive frame of racialized intelligibility, it is important to emphasize that her corporeal vulnerability within immigration detention despite her racialized recognizability within Australian social and political discourse underscores the corporeal vulnerability of all immigration detainees, and most particularly those against whom the racist immigration policies of the incumbent Australian government were specifically directed. That Rau’s vulnerability could eventually be recognized, her release secured, and her story circulated in the public sphere as a cause of shock and outrage – while other non-Anglo/European immigration detainees subjected to human rights abuses remained largely unnamed and unrecognized – speaks to the power of racialized discourses of intelligibility within contemporary Australian life. As Butler notes in relation to practices of public recognition and naming of victims of the 9/11 attacks, (in comparison to the exclusion of countless others – those who have died at the hands of the US military, for example – from the possibility of being publicly acknowledged and mourned), the limits of human intelligibility are bounded by what can be known and understood as a grievable life. “It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds” (Butler, Precarious Life 35). What we want to mark here is precisely those ellipses into which public discourse concerning non-Anglo/European refugees and asylum seekers proceeds, and to cite the effectiveness of excluding the names, stories, circumstances, and corporeal vulnerability of non-Anglo/European immigration detainees from the public sphere in reproducing racialized vulnerabilities as a discursive norm in Australia (see Hage 1998, 2003). While Cornelia Rau’s circumstances necessarily and importantly bring to public attention the failure of DIMIA and the Australian government to adequately address the needs and rights of immigration detainees, there must also be a persistent troubling of those discursive ellipses into which the humanity and vulnerability of those rendered unintelligible might otherwise vanish.

We would argue then, that what has been obscured by the actions of DIMIA and the Australian government, is that Rau – along with other immigration detainees – is entitled to a certain standard of human rights granted to individuals and to certain bounded categories recognizable within Australian society. Yet, as Butler points out in relation to practices of indefinite detention, the suspension of international law in order to appropriate sovereign power into the apparatus of governmentality is a tactic which deprives detainees of legal and human rights, and effectively exposes them to state exercised power over life and death.[10]

As can be seen in Rau’s case, the very conditions of humanity are called into question, through the failure of the Australian government to guarantee Rau’s human rights as well as through the state sanctioned deployment of sovereign power through which her viability as a human subject could be foreclosed through the practices of indefinite detention. It is not only the limiting of Rau’s viability as a political subject, as citizen or legal resident – in other words, her “exclusion from biopolitical life” (Moore, para. 15) – which are at issue here. Rau’s viability as a human subject is effectively negated through both the Australian government’s neglect of human rights as understood globally in liberal humanist terms, as well as through exposing/subjecting her life and her living – her vulnerability, recognizability, intelligibility, and viability as human – to a self-proclaimed discretionary state power. Of crucial importance, this imposition of state power outside the limits and rule of law refuses to acknowledge either the extent of Rau’s suffering and anguish during the period of her incarceration, or the legitimacy of a national and international legal/juridical order which might otherwise have afforded her protection from such abuses.

The vulnerability and viability of life are understood here not as separate from/subject to legal and political domains, but as written by and through them. The regulatory and disciplinary effects of law are thus, according to de Certeau, ‘inscribed on bodies,’ which in turn perform their place – individually and collectively – in the juridical order:

Here we return to Butler, who argues that rather than a rights discourse reliant on an individualizing move, we might deploy a frame for understanding vulnerability and subjection which relies on relationality, where vulnerability and interdependence with others becomes the site of political responses that “tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our own, irreversibly, if not fatally” (Butler, Precarious Life 25). This vulnerability, Butler suggests, is the pre-condition for subjectivity, for the constitution of embodied subjects in the “crucible of social life” within which persons come to be intelligible as human (26). This “common human vulnerability,” as Butler says, “emerges with life itself…[yet] we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of ‘I’” (31). In applying a reconfigured poststructuralist ethics to the case of Cornelia Rau, we might begin to read our own intelligibility as humans to be contingent on the responsibility we take for those Others, like her, with whom we experience this “common human vulnerability.”

Yet we do not mean here to adopt a patronizing tone towards those who are detained and, through that condition, excluded from the norms of intelligibility.[11] The ‘human’ is, according to Butler, not only a discursive site within which we are written and spoken by, for and in dialogue with others, according to prescribed norms, but it is an excessive site. Indeed, the human subject might be seen to emerge through its insistence on the excesses and particularities of language and the speaking subject. In her discussion of the case of David Reimer, Butler notes David’s capacity to speak himself and his worth although he was not “fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable” within the binary norms of gender. He emerges – a fragile “desubjugated” subject – at the “limits of intelligibility” of those norms, positioning himself in speech “somewhere between the norm and its failure” (Butler, Undoing Gender 73-4).[12] Cornelia Rau also demanded speech. In her months in the Queensland prison she gave tape recorded evidence in an investigation into the treatment of women prisoners. Throughout her contact with the advocacy group, Sisters Inside, she kept documenting her “day-to-day trauma” insisting that she had done nothing wrong and should not be imprisoned. To her advocates there, she was markedly “not OK…distant…distressed…upset” (“Queensland” para. 10). Later, in the Immigration Detention Centre, where she was not an appropriately compliant subject, her demand for speech continued and expanded and was heard there as “screaming” and “yelling” (Todd, para. 6). The excessive speech taken up by Cornelia Rau demonstrates, perhaps, what Butler argues is “an understanding [of the human] …that exceeds the norms of intelligibility itself”(Butler, Undoing Gender 73). Rau may be said to be struggling, like Reimer, and from another position of extreme vulnerability, to “[refuse] the interrogations that besiege [her]; [she] might be attempting to “[reverse] their terms” and to “[learn] the ways in which [she] might escape” (73). Emergence of the human subject – she/he to whom we must attend and upon whose emergence our own humanness becomes contingent – comes through a relationality into which we are called through excessive speech and action.

Opportunistically Speaking…

We return in this final section to the Minister, Senator Amanda Vanstone, and the shifting discursive positions evident in the press releases that followed the recognition of Cornelia Rau. In her first press release, the Minister claims a beneficent agency for DIMIA in solving the problem of Cornelia Rau: as “the issue of the woman’s identity was finally resolved …[and] contact was made with the woman’s parents, who were extremely relieved to learn of their daughter’s whereabouts.” The Department had gone “to great lengths to resolve” this “very sad case.” In the discursive space of Ministerial and Departmental responsibility, their complicity in exacerbating Rau’s mental illness becomes unimaginable and unspeakable. The Minister makes this clear in the final line of the press release with: “To criticize those who have worked to care for the woman and determine her identity is opportunistic in the extreme” (DIMIA, “Sydney Woman” para. 12). This comment (and those which appeared in the following media release some three days later) raises questions about the crucial role of critique and dissent within the public sphere, and highlights the anti-democratic agenda that attempts to delegitimate those voices which would call decision-makers to account:

The conditions of privacy and brevity, read by many critics at the time as intended to reduce the effectiveness of any inquiry, are constructed instead as apparent marks of sensitivity and respect to this now unfortunate victim of a sequence of events which have subjected her to public view:

Though the Minister's preference appears to be the closing down of criticism, we join here a wave of protest intended to hold spaces open where we might begin to, paraphrasing Foucault, uncover thought and try to change it, to show that things are not as obvious as might be believed, and to disrupt what is taken for granted so that we might "make harder those acts which are now too easy" (Foucault, "So Is It Important to Think?" 456-457). We aim here to name the collective loss - through the state imposed erasure and invisibility of immigration detainees - of those Others whose vulnerability contributes to our own subjectivity as relational and human, as formed in "the crucible of social life" (Butler, Precarious Life 26). Thus we must recognize that we, too, use the figure of Cornelia Rau opportunistically. As soon as any text enters discursive space - the story, the woman, the news photos of healthy happy 'Aunt Connie' with her nieces some years ago - there is no avoiding their opportunistic use. Any reference to these texts, to facts and stories already in circulation is always already deployed in some sort of discursive space, for some purpose. Our purpose is to trouble "thinking things the way they have been thought" (Foucault, "So Is It Important to Think?" 457).

What happened with the story of Cornelia Rau, perhaps, in provoking sufficient outrage that the Minister announced her first ever inquiry into a specific case of detention in DIMIA facilities, is that many Australians perceived and recognized a vulnerability in her figure that called them into something like what Butler calls “an ethical encounter,” that conceivably served, for several days at least, as a site for our mutual “humanization” (Precarious Life 43). But while Butler talks about the necessity for reciprocity in a relation of recognition, such reciprocity is made impossible when those Others in an exchange are silenced and locked away from discursive space (45). Our intention here, then, is that our work as academics, as activists, as citizens, be understood not merely in terms of critique and dissent, but also in terms of critical and theoretical work that seeks to open up discursive possibilities for reciprocity. While reciprocity can take many forms, a fuller discussion of which is beyond the scope of this paper, what we want to emphasise here is that ours is a position which sees the work of speaking and of writing as constitutive – work which can be read, alongside the voices of others who recognize, with Foucault, that: