by Gary Gutting
(P/K, ‘Prison Talk’, 53–4)
Despite this unequivocal statement, commentators on Foucault have generally assumed that his notion of a genealogy is much the same as Nietzsche’s and, in particular, that Foucault’s close textual analysis of Nietzsche’s notion in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ is a definitive expression of his own view of what genealogy is as an historical methodology.
But this essay was written for a memorial volume in honour of Jean Hyppolite, Foucault’s teacher at the École Normale, and is cast, with elegant modesty, as a meticulous explication de texte, of the sort Foucault no doubt frequently wrote for his old master. The essay scrupulously summarizes Nietzsche’s view of genealogy but seldom comments in Foucault’s own voice about the validity of the view. For this reason, we cannot simply assume – as many critics and commentators have – that Foucault himself endorses every formulation of this essay. In some respects, it is clear that the position Foucault presents is not his own. He would not, for example, agree with Nietzsche’s frequent references to the feelings and intentions of subjects (the rivalries of scholars, the inventions of the ruling class, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, EW II, 371) as primary engines of the history of thought; nor with Nietzsche’s claim that the degeneracy of the 19th century is due to racial mixing (EW II, 384).
Moreover, as I will argue later, it is always risky to take Foucault’s general theorizings – about historical method or anything else – as more than tools for some specific purpose. In any case, there is no genealogical counterpart to the detailed retrospective methodological analysis offered in The Archaeology of Knowledge. So it makes particular sense to approach genealogy primarily through Foucault’s historical practice, not his scattered and not always consistent methodological pronouncements. Taking this approach, the first thing we notice is that there is only one clear sustained use of the genealogical method in Foucault’s writings: his history of the prison, Discipline and Punish. The first volume of his History of Sexuality is ordinarily cited as another genealogical study, but we need to remember that this is merely a general introduction to a series of detailed genealogical studies that were never written; it itself offers only a few sketches of what these full studies might have been like. Foucault also sometimes refers to his last two books, on ancient sexuality, as genealogies, but, as we will see, this is so only in a very attenuated sense that has much more to do with their ethical intent than with their mode of historical analysis.
What, then, is the historical methodology of Discipline and Punish? The first thing we should notice is the important extent to which the methodology is still archaeological. For example, Foucault presents the distinctively modern technique of punishment by imprisonment in terms of the four main categories of archaeological analysis that he distinguished in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Imprisonment constitutes delinquents as a new class of objects, characterized by the concepts distinctive of the criminal character; moreover, it distinguishes various modes of authority (that of the judge, of the parole board, of the criminologist) and alternative lines of strategic action (for example, different ways of using solitude and work in the treatment of prisoners). However, the four key archaeological categories are here applied not just to language but to practices that go beyond mere linguistic expression to produce physical changes in their objects. Discipline and Punish is concerned, therefore, not just with the language (analysed by archaeology) through which we know the world, but with the power that changes the world.
Although archaeology is quite capable of describing the conceptual system underlying a practice, linguistic or not, it is not suited to describe the effects of a practice. It is a structural, synchronic mode of analysis, not a causal, diachronic method. Foucault discusses this limitation in his Foreword to the English translation of The Order of Things, where he notes that he has restricted himself to a description of systems of thought, with no attempt to explain changes from one system to another. ‘The traditional explanations – spirit of the time, technological or social influences of various kinds – struck me for the most part as being more magical than effective.’ However, Foucault had at this point no alternative sort of explanation to offer and so thought ‘it would not be prudent … to force a solution I felt incapable, I admit, of offering’. ‘Consequently’, he says, ‘I left the problem of causes to one side; I chose instead to confine myself to describing the transformations themselves, thinking that this would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of scientific change and epistemological causality was to be constructed’ (OT, xiii).
By the time he wrote Discipline and Punish, Foucault had what he saw as an adequate method of causal explanation to complement archaeology. This was what he called genealogy: ‘this book is intended … as a genealogy of the present scientific-legal complex’ (DP, 23). What had he discovered since writing The Order of Things?
The first discovery was that changes in thought are not themselves the products of thought. This corresponds to Foucault’s earlier rejection of the ‘spirit of the time’ and similar quasi-Hegelian modes of historical explanation, such as a collective unconscious. But neither was Foucault happy with historians’ standard material modes of explanation in terms of technological or social influences. These are typically vague and general causes – the invention of printing, the rise of the bourgeoisie – that have explanatory force only to the extent that we see history as moving towards correspondingly vague and general goals, such as democracy and secularism. Foucault was sceptical of grand teleological narratives focused on such goals and proposed instead accounts based on many specific ‘little’ causes, operating independently of one another, with no overall outcome in view. On such an approach we might, for example, discuss not the ‘invention of printing’ but an entire complex of developments in the production and distribution of newspapers and magazines (new sorts of presses, styles of reporting, methods of making paper, subscription schemes, and so on) that would in turn have a wide and disparate range of social, economic, and political effects. Or, to cite an example from Foucault himself, in Discipline and Punish he shows how, among many other things, the invention of a new kind of rifle, more efficient ways of organizing the space of hospitals, and changes in the methods of teaching children penmanship all unwittingly contributed to the formation of a radically new system of social control.
A final discovery: that the objects of these diverse and specific causes are human bodies. The forces that drive our history do not so much operate on our thoughts, our social institutions, or even our environment as on our individual bodies. So, for example, punishment in the 18th century is a matter of violent assaults on the body: branding, dismemberment, execution, whereas in the 19th century it takes the apparently gentler but equally physical form of incarceration, ordered assemblies, and forced labour. Prisoners are subjected to a highly structured regimen designed to produce ‘docile bodies’. A Foucaultian genealogy, then, is a historical causal explanation that is material, multiple, and corporeal.
Is it then Nietzschean? Nietzsche (like Foucault himself) offers many programmatic remarks on genealogy – not all mutually consistent – among which can be found passages that match the main elements of Foucault’s practice. For example, Nietzsche speaks of genealogy in terms of tracing the Hernuft (stock or descent) of an idea or practice, which connects with Foucault’s emphasis on the body. Similarly, Nietzsche presents genealogy as naturalistic rather than idealistic and talks of explaining morality, in particular, as a contingent phenomenon that developed from small ‘accidental’ causes. In fact, however, Nietzsche’s most worked-out genealogy (The Genealogy of Morality) is very different from the project Foucault undertakes in Discipline and Punish. For one thing, Nietzsche’s effort has nothing of the careful scholarship and documentary detail of Foucault’s book. It is not the product of serious archival research – ‘gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’ (‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, EW II, 369) – but of an erudite amateur’s armchair sp
eculations. More significantly, Nietzsche’s genealogy operates with psychological causes (the pride and ambition of the strong, the resentment of the weak, the malicious ingenuity of priests), which have little to do with Foucault’s history of the body. Foucault offers no parallels to Nietzsche’s deployment of Socratic weakness and Pauline rancour as key genealogical causes. Further, Christianity – the primary source, in Nietzsche’s account, of what we mean by morality – is a global and monolithic cause, relentlessly insisting on the renunciation of this world in favour of an ‘afterlife’. Simply as historical methodologies, Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogies are quite different.
7. Nietzsche (right), with his friends Lou Salomé and Paul Rée, Lucerne, May 1882
Nonetheless, Foucault is thoroughly Nietzschean in one fundamental respect: the critical intent with which he employs his genealogy. Nietzsche used genealogy to show that our most revered institutions and practices were ‘human, all-too-human’. Foucault’s genealogies likewise deconstruct, by showing their real origin, official meanings and evaluations involved in a society’s self-understanding. ‘Historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreet like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation’ (EW II, 372). To provide a genealogy is ‘to identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or, conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that give birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us’ (EW II, 374). These quotations are Foucault’s exposition of Nietzsche, but in this case they speak for himself as well.
It may seem that this critical use of genealogy falls into the genetic fallacy, arguing from the lowly origin of something to its lack of value. Suppose Nietzsche is right that morality originates ‘in detestable, narrow-minded conclusions. Pudenda origo [shameful origin]’ (Dawn, #102; cited in EW II, 370). How does that prove that morality has no authority? Or why, as Nietzsche also suggests, should our evolution from ‘lower’ animals undermine human dignity: ‘We wished to awaken the feeling of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth; this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance’ (Dawn, #49; cited in EW II, 372).
It is not, however, the genealogist who introduces the question of origins. This is done when, for example, the Ten Commandments are said to have moral authority because God handed them to Moses on Mount Sinai, or when the subordination of women is said to be required by their biological nature. The fact of evolution does not refute human dignity, but it may help undermine, as the quote above from Nietzsche suggests, the claim that this dignity is grounded in our direct creation by God. Genealogical critique will avoid the genetic fallacy as long as it is directed at efforts to support established authorities on the basis of their origin. This understanding of genealogy is implicit in Foucault’s claim that it reveals the contingency of that which was said to be necessary. Here necessity (due to divine will, human nature, or transcendental conditions of possibility) is the general category under which fall all efforts to justify practices and institutions in terms of their privileged origin.
Foucault sums up the value-orientation of genealogy by saying that it is a ‘history of the present’ (DP, 30–31). This is so in two senses. First, the subject matter of the history is the origins of present rules, practices or institutions that claim an authority over us. Second, the primary intent is not to understand the past in its own terms or for its own sake, but to understand and evaluate the present, particularly with a view to discrediting unjustified claims of authority. As a proponent of the idea of a history of the present, Foucault stands firmly with Nietzsche, however much the claim that their historical methods are the same must ‘distort’ Nietzsche’s own practice, and ‘make it groan and protest’.
There is another crucial area where Foucault’s genealogy obviously evokes Nietzsche: in its claim that there is an intimate tie between knowledge and power. This claim develops Foucault’s basic insight that changes in thought are not due to thought itself, suggesting that when thoughts change the causes are the social forces that control the behaviour of individuals. Specifically, given Foucault’s archaeological view of knowledge, power transforms the fundamental archaeological frameworks (epistemes or discursive formations) that underlie our knowledge. Foucault is here staking out a position between the extremes of reducing knowledge to power (that is, the identification of ‘A knows that p’ with ‘social forces compel A to accept p’) and asserting the essential independence of knowledge and power (that is, the Utopian claim that ‘A knows that p’ implies ‘A’s acceptance of p is causally independent of all social forces’). To know is not simply to be affected by power; as Foucault once said of power and knowledge, ‘The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them’ (‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, 43). On the other hand, knowing does not involve a total escape from power relations.
Moreover, Foucault claims that power has a positive epistemic role, not only constraining or eliminating knowledge but also producing it. Classical economics, for example, is a product of the capitalist socio-economic system that, despite obvious limitations due to its origin, has achieved a distinctive body of knowledge that would not exist without capitalism (AK, 186). Further, knowledge can have a transforming effect on the power structures that give rise to it. For example, governments that claim justification on the basis of a given body of knowledge (for example, of a people’s history) can be challenged on the basis of those facts. Think of the political significance in Israel of new archaeological findings that can be interpreted as supporting or undermining Biblical claims about the early Judaic nation.
The idea that power and knowledge are closely bound readily recalls Nietzsche’s obscure and controversial conception of the will-to-power, which he presents as the source of systems of thought (for example, Platonic philosophy, Christian theology) that claim to express pure, objective knowledge. Foucault had no sympathy for the metaphysical theorizing that is sometimes the context of Nietzsche’s talk of will-to-power. But he was clearly impressed by and adopted Nietzsche’s technique of looking for power behind sciences, religions, and other cognitive authorities that present themselves as grounded in nothing more the force of disinterested evidence and argument.
It is less clear that Foucault owes very much to Nietzsche for his idea that power can be productive of genuine knowledge. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, at least, considers only the negative results of Nietzschean genealogy. Power for Nietzsche, as Foucault reads him, is always violence. Humans do establish systems of rules (social and, presumably, also epistemic), but these are merely vehicles for violent domination:
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.
Interpretation, certainly an essential part of any system of knowledge, is for Foucault’s Nietzsche ‘the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules … in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a new game’ (EW II, 378). It is hard to see how power that expresses itself exclusively in violence and domination can produce knowledge.
On the other hand, we may find it implausible to think that power can ever produce knowledge. Such doubt underlies the persistent claim (sometimes presented as criticism, sometimes as plaudit) that Foucault leaves no room for objective, non-relativized truth. If, the thought goes, everything I believe is determined by the power structures of my society, how can any of my beliefs have validity except relative to the standards of that society? And, although there are some who praise Foucault for jettisoning outdated and repressive notions of objective truth, there seems to be much more point to the critics’ argument that such a position is self-refuting. If all beliefs are valid only relative to the power s
ystem from which they originate, then Foucault’s relativist claims themselves have at best only this restricted validity. If we are subject to the same power regime as Foucault, presumably we already accept his position. If we are not, it has no relevance to us.
But why think that power cannot produce genuine knowledge? Of course, there are familiar cases such as brainwashing in which the causal production of belief by power relations negates the very possibility of knowledge. If you have forced me, through sleep deprivation and sensory disorientation, to believe that the Party’s aims are good, then I cannot be said to know this, even if it happens to be true. But this does not mean that there are no forms of training and guidance (education, we might call it) that can produce genuine knowledge. Surely this is how children are initiated into the rudiments of mathematical, historical, and moral knowledge. As we grow up, a certain amount of what we have been taught becomes subject to reflective assessment, but certainly much of what we believe remains the result of social conditioning. Such examples, of course, are on the level of the conscious knowledge of individuals (connaissance, in Foucault’s terminology), whereas Foucault is concerned with the underlying archaeological structures of knowledge (savoir). But the principle is the same in both cases: the mere fact that a cognitive state is an effect of power does not exclude it from the realm of knowledge. Power and knowledge are logically compatible.