The problematic individual as a product of discursive formations: the archaeological approach to “case reports” in social work and education

The paper presents the clinical-archaeological approach to case reports, elaborated in the Italian context by Barone (2019; 2024). This methodology examines, from a critical and deconstructive perspective, the documentation written by the operators (educators, psychologists, social workers, neuropsychiatrists, judicial services) about the people who attend social-educational services. In fact, this type of document can be considered as a discursive “node in a network” (Foucault, 1971) which has the effect of “introducing individuality into a documentary field” and “making each individual a case” (Foucault, 1976), designating a describable, measurable, evaluable, comparable subject on which power can be exercised (a subject to be trained, corrected, classified, normalised, cured). The approach is realised by excavating within documents to identify discursive formations and rules of formation that define existential conditions of expressions, concepts, and objects that structure the document on “the case”. This deconstructive work on the text is based on two theoretical orientations: Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeology of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1971; 2000) and Louis Althusser’s ‘second reading’ or ‘syntomal reading’ (Althusser, Balibar, 1968). Through these references, the approach identifies three different dimensions of the discourse stratified in the document: the objects to which the discourse refers (referential dimension), the scientific models, models, knowledge on which it relies (linguistic universe of the discourse), the ‘implicit’, the ‘absences’ and the ‘unspoken’ that support its structure and narrative (syntomal dimension). This analytical operation makes it possible to trace the plan of the economy of discourse, i.e. the effects that discursive formations produce in terms of interpretative conclusions and consequent operational choices on the ‘case’. The proposed methodology aims to problematise the ‘diagnostic temptation’ that pervades the social professions and from which the pedagogical professions do not shy away, unmasking the ‘need’, constitutive of all human sciences, to ‘know’ the subject and to bring individuality back into a descriptive field that allows it to be placed in an organised framework of classifications and categorisations. It is believed that in the debate promoted by the symposium, a fruitful comparison can be made between the clinical-archaeological approach and Critical Discourse Analysis, opening up new possible methodological contaminations and research horizons.