The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

164 / Joshua Kurdys

Ultimately, the invention of forms of relationships that bring individuals pleasure does not belong exclusively to homosexuals more than heterosexuals because these two forms of sexuality, among others, are implicated in the production of one another through biopolitical power relations. Moreover, these relations constitute “a legal, social, and institutional world where the only relations possible are extremely few, extremely simpliied, and extremely poor. There is, of course, the relation of marriage, and the relations of family, but how many other relations should exist, should be able to ind their codes not in institutions but in possible supports, which is not at all the case” (EEW1, 158). Accordingly, the counterexample of ancient practices of care of the self confronts the atomistic individualism of modernity with the question of what individuality can mean as a singular expression produced amid a community of contending forces and games of truth in which the paramount question “what can be played?” (EEW1, 140) becomes unavoidable.

Joshua Kurdys

See Also

Ethics

Homosexuality

Parresia

Power

Truth

Suggested Reading

Garlick, Steve. 2002. “The Beauty of Friendship: Foucault, Masculinity and the Work of Art,”

Philosophy and Social Criticism 28:558–577.

Lynch, Richard A. 1998. “Is Power All There Is? Michel Foucault and the ‘Omnipresence’ of Power Relations,” Philosophy Today 42:65–70.

McLaren, Margaret. 2006. “From Practices of the Self to Politics: Foucault and Friendship,”

Philosophy Today 50:195–201.

Webb, David. 2003. “On Friendship: Derrida, Foucault and the Practice of Becoming,” Research in Phenomenology 33:119–140.

166 / Charles E. Scott

In his 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault says that genealogical work

must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous inality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history – in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. (ELCP, 139–140)

These goals mean that genealogical research requires an exceptionally careful knowledge of details that often seem accidental to the momentous events that are usually studied by traditional historians. It also means that genealogical knowledge and thought, as Foucault understood them, do not begin with images of changeless essences or principles, an expectation of reasonable, evolutionary progress, or “the metaphysical deployment of ideal signiications and indeinite teleologies” (ELCP, 140). Genealogists look for the speciic sites where a direction of development might begin, such as efforts to see what happens inside a diseased body (a major factor in early research hospitals) or clusters of problems that within certain conditions demand resolution. Foucault found, for example, that the struggle with an intolerable cluster of incompatible problems involving concern for health and “normal” practices and values in ancient societies helped to form some of the most distinctive aspects of Western sexuality. Genealogists look for situations where traceable lines of descent began to form various practices, institutions, and accepted truths. They look for speciic beginnings and not for deinitive, original identities: “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is ... disparity” (ELCP, 142). The deinitive characteristics of things are “fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms ... [from] the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (ELCP, 142, 144). In other words, values and truths, for example, that we frequently take as unchanging and natural are in fact often the product of processes that bear many mutations and transformations of elements that are not at all like those values and truths.

Foucault, like Nietzsche, emphasized systems of subjugation and domination that accompany the formation of what particular groups of people consider routine and normal. Genealogy, Foucault says, intends to show in various lineages “not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations” (ELCP, 148). Such dominations occur by means of rituals, procedures, rights, and obligations all of which are structured by rules: “[H]umanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (ELCP, 152).

Foucault elaborates this Nietzschean thought with an observation that we will ind has particular importance for him when he gives accounts of marginalized

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individuals and effective types of resistance to centers of power: “The nature of these rules allows violence to be inlicted on violence and resurgence of new forces that are suficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent, and uninalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose” (ELCP, 151). They can be used, for example, against the people who had control over them. When that happens, individuals can “overcome the rulers through their own rules” (ibid.). This kind of reversal can happen in interpretations as well as in other kinds of political activity. For our purposes, I note in an introductory way that for Foucault genealogical knowledge can be effective in disrupting stable patterns of life that dominate, suppress, and otherwise injure other people. It can function as a “reversal of a relationship of forces,” appropriate a vocabulary, and turn it “against those who had once used it” (ELCP, 154). It can create a countermemory – a transformation of history into a totally different form of time than that found in narratives that provide uninterrupted linear accounts of causes and effects. Rather, in the countermemory that Foucault develops, there are no clear lines of eficiently caused development. There are multiple crosscurrents of circumstances and often discontinuous events in which conlicts, impositions, new problems, and networks of practices and values form unstable assemblages of identity and authority. In that countermemory formed in genealogical knowledge, such assemblages and events constitute genealogies – descents of culturally inherited traits in the ways people ind meaning and certainty, connect with each other, and organize themselves in all dimensions of their lives. “Countermemory” names the knowledge that genealogical accounts of these descents provide.

To carry out his Nietzsche-inspired genealogical project, Foucault found that he needed to distance himself from professional philosophy as he found it in France (EHM, 575). He pulled away from the kind of philosophizing that proceeded on the basis of interpretation of canonized philosophical texts in order to expand the range of knowledge and understanding of human, social lives. The traditional approach in his judgment constituted a self-totalizing tradition that turns people away from events that happen in the world, turns them from the surfaces of living occurrences and toward abstract historical narratives and various kinds of logics and principles that developed within the canonizing traditions. Foucault found that he needed to turn away from “unceasing commentary” on philosophical texts, away from the authoritative practices, values, and critiques that originated in the Western philosophical canon. He wanted to develop a different approach and discipline, a new kind of knowledge regarding speciic people’s lives and organizations (insane people and their doctors and hospitals, for example; or prisoners and prisons and their keepers; or those with unquestioned authoritative knowledge and the people who are subject to that knowledge) (EHM, 577). He said, “I don’t think that an intellectual can raise real questions concerning the society in which he lives, based on nothing more than his textual, academic scholarly research”

168 / Charles E. Scott

(EEW3, 285). To carry out these intentions, he needed to focus on “the conditions and rules for the formation of knowledge to which philosophical discourse [for example] is subject, in any given period, in the same manner as any other form of discourse with rational pretension” (EHM, 578). “I set out to study and analyze the ‘events’ that came about in the order of knowledge, and which cannot be reduced either to the general law of some kind of ‘progress’, or the repetition of an origin.... For me, the most essential part of the work was in the analysis of those events, the bodies of knowledge, and those systematic forms that line discourses, institutions, and practices” (ibid.).

Foucault’s intense exposure as a young man to marginalized people whom he found to be repressed and silenced owing to their social identities and prevailing attitudes toward those identities had a major and formative impact on his approach to genealogy. As a young man, he had close contact with colonialized people and those who were recognized as sexually and morally deviant. The two years he spent as a psychology student in Hopital Sainte Anne had an especially strong effect. He reports that “there was no clear professional status for psychologists in a mental hospital. So, as a student in psychology (I studied irst philosophy and then psychology), I had a very strange status there” (EEW1, 123). He had virtually no supervision and was not oficially on the staff. He had no special identity within the structure of the hospital. That allowed him to talk openly and freely with the patients for hours without representing anyone or anything. He listened to them and thought with them, hearing their experiences and, in a certain sense, hearing their silence within the institution that intended to help them. Although at that time Sainte Anne’s was, according to Foucault, one of the best hospitals of its kind in France, he was aware of the disjunction between the hospital’s formation – its intentions, procedures, and understanding of mental illness – and the patients’ own lives and identities there. He heard their voices, their lack of inluence, their constrictions in both the hospital and in the larger society. Their subjugation formed their identity as insane. He formed a lasting interest in the ways such structures, authority, and practices formed as well as in the voices and experiences of marginalized people.

Like Nietzsche, Foucault needed, in order to follow the interests and directions that he found for himself, a revised vocabulary, manner of thinking, and method of research in comparison with those of standard philosophical and historical practice. Because of these shifts, his genealogical work often seems counterintuitive in the contexts of traditional good sense and what is understood as responsible methods of relection. He also found in the process of carrying out his genealogical projects that he experienced occasions of unexpected pleasure as he learned to see some aspects of the world around him as though for the irst time. His sensibility – his feelings, commitments, assumptions, and values – transformed, and he felt energized and motivated to move on toward new experiences of truth, power, and agency.

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In 1978, Foucault said:

In writing Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic I meant to do a genealogical history of knowledge. But the real guiding thread was this problem of power.... I had been doing nothing except trying to retrace how a certain number of institutions, beginning to function on behalf of reason and normality, had brought their power to bear on groups of individuals, in terms of behaviors, ways of being, acting, or speaking that were constituted as abnormality, madness, illness, and so on.... It’s true that the problems I pose are always concerned with particular and limited questions. Madness and even prisons are cases in point. (EEW3, 283, 285)

For Foucault, orders of knowledge constitute orders of power that ind their expression in types of authority, such as in the sciences, medical disciplines, governmental agencies, and systems of education and punishment. Orders of knowledge and power also ind expression in the institutions that carry and apply the orders’ rules and procedures. They constitute networks or systems of power and knowledge that have the effect of forming individuals who direct themselves according to what is established as normal and right. They also have the effect of establishing hierarchies of importance that range from those who have varying degrees of power to those on the margins who have no constructive part in the networks of power that marginalize and silence them. Marginalized individuals in the Western lineages have included the mad, the poor, the ill, the young, women, homosexuals, the conquered, and others who appear or act in ways that are recognized as inferior or abnormal.

In Foucault’s genealogical understanding, then, individuals, institutional formations, systems of established knowledge, what is known as truth, and issues of power can be distinguished but they cannot be separated in their occurrences. Individuals are subject to them in the individuals’ social identities and in their own self-relations. By his genealogical studies of speciic lineages of established knowledge, truth, and institutional formations, Foucault intends to show how systems of authority and truth have also formed systems of subjection for individuals in various times and situations. Late in his career, for example, he emphasized that the question of power is “not only a theoretical question but a part of our experience”

(EEW3, 328). He emphasized the form of power “that applies itself to immediate everyday life and categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is forms of power that make individuals subjects” (EEW3, 331). By “subject” he means “[both] subject to someone else by control and dependence and tied to his own identity by a conscience

170 / Charles E. Scott

or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a relation of power that subjugates and makes subject to” (EEW3, 338).

Although Foucault reined his understanding of subjects and relations of power

(as distinct from a metaphysical entity called power), during his life he in fact viewed all of his work as experimental, exploratory, and subject to change. We can say that his genealogical project is given focus as well as continuous transformation and reinement by problems he uncovers in the connections among individuals, knowledge, institutions, and relations of power.

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prisons, for example, Foucault traces the formation of prisons, the modern identity of “the prisoner,” the various types of knowledge that developed during that process, and the systems of observation, control, and punishment that carried out the intentions and applied the truths taught by knowledgeable authorities (EDP). Foucault considered Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for a second example, an archaeological study of psychiatric knowledge and the silence of the insane in the formation of that knowledge (EHM). But the formation of that knowledge is also one of the sovereign powers that rationality and the institutions it formed gained in the recognition, imprisonment, silencing, and treatment (or the curing apparatus) of the insane. In both cases, the studies trace the formations of powerful institutions and knowledge, as well as the identities of separated and suppressed individuals. This frequent combination of subjection and marginalization of groups of people in lineages of emerging and developing bodies of knowledge, truth, and established forms of authority mean in part that “archaeological” studies and “genealogical” ones are not mutually exclusive in Foucault’s view. In their different emphases, they can be mutually supportive as well as interwoven. (Archaeology focuses on the emergence and formation of various mutational, regulatory, and guiding structures, such as those of accepted truths, authoritative discourses, and networks of practice and value. Genealogy focuses on relations of power and their dynamic modes of operation. In both cases, interwoven as they might be in particular studies, individuals and their subjective formations are always crucial issues.) This combination also means that alertness to the processes of formation of individual subjects, the formation of their kinds of subjectivity, which achieves strong and prominent emphasis in his later work, was signiicantly, if nascently, present in many of his early studies. The formation of institutions, relations of power, and the subjection of individuals are not separable in Foucault’s genealogical work.

In the context of this discussion, genealogical ethos means a sensibility and disposition that pervade Foucault’s genealogical work. When people, for example, are attuned in a particular study to the way he thinks, the operation and deinitive attitudes and intentions in it, and the feelings and conceptual structures that compose it, they will probably experience a considerable departure from many familiar and

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“normal” types of scholarly, thoughtful writing. They will see the importance of all manner of records, documents, diaries, codes of conduct, and instructions that are relevant to the subject at hand, such as hospitalization of patients in the eighteenth century or ancient sexual practices. They will confront the questionability of many assumed values, such as the primary importance of certain types of argument, knowledge, and logic, the value of the “enduring questions” of Western philosophy, or the unquestioned value of many accepted truths. Foucault’s intentions were to interrupt particular normal practices of professional thought and scholarship, to put in question his own authority as well, and to encourage options that might occur to the reader rather than provide deinitive answers. Indeed he intended to create an atmosphere that allows the emergence of alternatives to normal attitudes and ways of life (including his own). He wanted to pose problems that nag people. He wanted to write works that are a source of disturbance and irritation to comfortable recognitions, categorizations, and assumptions, and to put in question knowledge that contributes to oppression and marginalization of other people (as well as of ourselves).

In his genealogical work, as we have seen, he traced the lineages of the formation of such things as particular truths, normal practices, pervasive attitudes, and institutions that play major roles in a society. These intentions and projects create a sensibility that people can experience as they read him and think with him. It is one that leaves readers free to consider the problems and questions that emerge in the course of the study without authoritative resolution of them. At best, from Foucault’s point of view, readers will feel as they read his writings at least a degree of liberation from subjecting formations in themselves and their societies, feel free enough to engage them, question them, and see alternatives to them. The ethos of Foucault’s genealogical texts does carry with it values, knowledge, and movements of thought that make claims on the way readers live as well as disturb some of the certainties in what and how the readers know. But these claims happen within an approach that attempts always to describe how various structures, practices, and relations of power operate rather than to state what the essential nature of anything is. As Foucault said, “the problem is how things happen,” and not what things are (EPK, 50). He wanted to know, for example, how relations of power are speciically exercised and how individuals and agencies exert power over others (EEW3, 357).

This move to the priority of the “how” and away from essences in his work engenders an expectation of change rather than enduring truths, of the possibility to transform what has seemed inalterably ixed. It can engender energetic political activity with a sense of caution about all solutions and most particularly one’s own preferred solutions (EEW1, 256). Within his work, readers “know” that essences are mutable and metastatic. Foucault was not drawn to fatalism. He intended to make evident the way subjection happens and the ways it developed in an atmosphere that accentuates the possibility of its transformation. We are speaking of an ethos that

172 / Charles E. Scott

stimulates varieties of active commitments in spite of the absence of metaphysical foundations as well as stimulating in some cases feelings of elation in the emergence of options for life changes.

Although Foucault’s emphasis on relations of power, institutions, and forms of recognition might seem to ignore the importance of individuals, he wrote in an essay published in 1982 that the goal of his work since the early 1960s “has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.... [I]t is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research” (EEW3, 326–327). He then proceeded in the remainder of the essay to discuss relations of power and strategies to resist some of them. The point in the quotation is that he is interested in the ways subjection happens, and he could not carry out that interest if he analyzed phenomena of power. The latter would be no more than a theoretical and generalized undertaking. He wanted to create an account, a genealogical history, of the speciic ways people are made into either objective subjects by some types of disciplined knowledge (such as the subject who produces or labors or is merely an example of a larger category like that of biological life) or made into individuals who subject themselves by the way they identify and objectify themselves. He wanted to develop knowledge of speciic lineages of relations of power in order “to know the historical conditions that motivate our [objectivizing] conceptualization.” To develop the knowledge he wanted, he said, “we need a historical awareness of our present circumstance” (EEW3, 327), adding,

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way that is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and one that implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists in taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.... [I]t consists in using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, ind out their point of application and the methods used.... [I]t consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. (EEW3, 329)

Although in these statements Foucault pointed toward an expanded strategy for exposing certain power relations in order to understand types of individual selfrelations, he is also tacitly stating a primary aspect of his own genealogical thought. Early and late, he developed strategies to interrupt and put in question all manner of power relations and the effects of those relations on individuals. His purpose was to expose particular networks of “normal” and largely unnoticed power that subjugate people, teach them to make themselves subject to these subjugations, and establish