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The interview is a modern formulation of rhetorical strategies that can be traced as far back as Plato's dialogues. These rhetorical strategies are the initial departure of philosophical, religious, and scientific investigation. As such, they are the foundation of western heuristics and western thought.
In my dissertation, I argue that the interview is not merely a recent phenomenon. Interview strategies and devices can be found at the foundation of investigative fields such as philosophy (the Socratic dialogue), religion (the confession), and medicine (psychoanalysis). Although these investigative approaches represent diverse fields and times, they nonetheless possess common traits. The interview is an expression of a heuristic method driven by a desire for proximity, affinity, and understanding of others, a desire that is timeless. However, the manner in which the subject of the interview is thought of and approached is specific to the ontological assumptions of the questioner. Interviews are improvisational and seemingly entropic; a dynamic happening confined within a private space. Yet the structure of the written interview strives to bring the dynamic discourse and an individual subject to a public audience. As readers, we consume written interviews as if were a part of the extemporaneous conversations, and we assume that the inscribed words deliver the subject of the interview. Traits of interviewing and interviews, which I call the "technologies of abduction and dissemination," produce this misconception in the reader. These technologies include the structure of the interview, the topography of the interview, and the traditional forms of written interviews.
In my final chapter, I argue that the interview provides for a profundity other than the traditional profundity of dialectical discourse. The interview makes a part of its form the ambiguous qualities of language. The combination of these two capabilities into a formalized structure provides for a constant challenge to dialectical, objectifying discourse. This in turn allows for a more just relation with the Other.
