ABSTRACT
The interview is conventionally a numbers game, or, more exactly, a conjuring trick: it is constituted by two people (the interviewer and the interviewee) but defined by only one subject (the interviewee). It also conventionally orients social space. The interviewer asks questions and the subject answers, establishing a direction from the former to the latter. It is no coincidence that this discursive orientation is recapitulated rhetorically: the interviewer directs the interview and thereby the interviewee. The interview enacts a politics of radically asymmetrical and unequal partners. The irony is that the asymmetry of the interview is conceptually weighted in precisely the opposite direction, for an interview is generally framed in terms of the interviewee. This is why s/he is the only subject. In academic journals, if not the pop cultural worlds of Barbara Walters or Larry King, the interviewer is often rhetorically effaced, becoming so much the representative of an organization or institution that her/his very name is overwritten by the title or initials of the journal involved. But appearances can be deceiving; power is subtle in its discursive moves and disguises. Judith Butler is pertinent here. In The Psychic Life of Power, she brings Foucault, Althusser and Lacan together to argue that the subject only comes to exist through her/his discursive subjection. This is the very definition of Butler's conception of performativity: the conjuring of the subject through the summons by authority, the interpellation that Althusser famously figures by the hail of a police officer. The interview, with its only subject generated by the direction of someone who has ceased to be a subject, is a classic exemplification. Years ago, Barbara Frum became uncharacteristically flustered while interviewing Margaret Atwood when the latter started asking her own questions. The evident disruption of the interview, the unexpectedness of Atwood's inversion, proved that she had turned herself into a bad subject.
