By Catarina Dutilh Novaes
I am now back to working on my conceptual genealogy project; this post is the fifth installment of a series of posts on the project. Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here.
In this section, I pitch genealogy against its close cousin archeology in order to argue that genealogy really is what is needed for the general project of historically informed analyses of philosophical concepts that I am articulating. And naturally, this leads me to Foucault. As always, comments welcome! (This is the first time in like 20 years that I do anything remotely serious with Foucault's ideas: why did it take me so long? Lots of good stuff there.)
-----------------------------------------
I hope to have argued more or less convincingly by now that, given the specific historicist conception of philosophical concepts I’ve just sketched, genealogy is a particularly suitable method for historically informed philosophical analysis. In the next section, a few specific examples will be provided. However, and as mentioned above, I take genealogy to be one among other such historical methods, so there are options. Why is genealogy a better option than the alternatives? In order to address this question, in this section I pitch genealogy against one of its main ‘competitors’ as a method for historical analysis: archeology. Naturally, this confrontation leads me directly to Foucault.
As is well known, early in his career Foucault developed and applied the archeological method in a number of works, which then received a more explicit methodological reflection in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
An “archaeology of knowledge” is an investigation that examines artifacts unearthed in an excavation, but the kind of artifact is not bone, pottery, or metalwork, it is what people said and wrote in the past: their “statements” (in French, énoncé: what has been enunciated or expressed). (Packer 2010, 345)
The ‘real life’ archeologist digs out material traces of past practices and forms of life, which are then laid out for synchronic analysis (though of course layers of sediments typically convey information about sequences of events). The conceptual archeologist does something similar with documented discourse, digging deep towards levels of unconsciousness.[1]
The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. So, for example, History of Madness should, Foucault maintained, be read as an intellectual excavation of the radically different discursive formations that governed talk and thought about madness from the 17th through the 19th centuries. (Gutting 2013, section 4.3)
The key word here is ‘excavation’: Foucault took archeology to allow for the unearthing of what is hidden and unconscious. “It allowed the historian of thought to operate at an unconscious level that displaced the primacy of the subject found in both phenomenology and in traditional historiography.” (Gutting 2013, section 4.3) (Recall Foucault’s endorsement of Canguilhem’s rejection of a ‘philosophy of the subject’ in favor of a ‘philosophy of the concept’.)
Now, just as the ‘real’ archeologist does not necessarily seek to establish historical and causal connections between different layers of time, the Foucaultian conceptual archeologist is not interested in establishing how one way of thinking transitions into another: she mostly looks at different points in time in isolation. She is of course able to notice differences and similarities between different times and their ways of thinking; but not much will be said about how such changes come about, and how specific modifications to one mode of thinking resulted in a new mode of thinking. Indeed, Foucaultian archeology is predominantly interested in rupture and discontinuity (Packer 2010, chap. 14).
In his later work, however, Foucault came to see the essentially synchronic nature of archeology as a limiting feature of the method, in particular when it came to stressing the contingency of modes of thinking (Gutting 2013, section 4.3). This is when he turned to Nietzschean genealogy (Foucault 1971) in order to fill this lacuna in the archeological method.
The shift from archeology to genealogy (which should however be viewed as an addition rather than as a replacement; archeology remains in the theorist’s toolbox) is a much-debated topic among scholars, and so any brief treatment of it is bound to be overly simplistic. But this seems like an apt description:
The much-debated question of why Foucault shifted from archaeology to genealogy can be answered in this way: whereas archaeology offers a static analysis of practices synchronically pulled from the past, genealogy offers a dynamic analysis whereby these practices can be viewed diachronically as historical processes themselves. Genealogy enabled Foucault to explain historical change and continuity. In this way, genealogy was an expansion of archaeology rather than a refutation of it—of course genealogy refutes a few assumptions made by archaeology, but on the whole it refutes these assumptions by reinterpreting the key elements of the earlier approach. (Koopman 2007; emphasis added)
I submit that the very reasons (as described in this passage) that led Foucault to supplement (and to some extent revise) his archeological method with genealogical elements are also compelling reasons to prefer the genealogical approach over the archeological one for the kind of historically informed analysis of philosophical concepts that is my goal to articulate in this paper.[2] What is needed is a diachronic framework offering the resources to explain not only each particular stage in the history of a philosophical concept, but also the transitions between stages. Nietzschean genealogy, as also developed by Foucault, offers precisely this insofar as it brings to the fore the interplay between continuity and change by means of the key notion of superimposition of layers of meaning.
Another valuable component of Foucaultian genealogy for the present enterprise (which it shares with Foucaultian archeology) is its focus on discourse. Recall that the main object of analysis for the theorist engaged in the kind of conceptual genealogy that I propose are philosophical texts. I take it to be of paramount importance that the analysis be firmly grounded in existing documentation – in this case, primarily but not exclusively philosophical texts[3] – rather than being merely speculative. (I am concerned about the risk of producing philosophical ‘just-so stories’.) Nietzsche himself already stressed that genealogy is about “that which can be documented, which can actually be confirmed, and has actually existed” (GM Preface, 7).[4]
The focus on texts and documentation naturally still leaves margin for the emergence of selection biases: which texts the theorist will include in her analyses will significantly influence the results, hence the need to be both inclusive and to consider a large number of sources (which will of course still typically be a selection). Indeed, a judicious choice of the textual material to work with is one of the main methodological challenges for a conceptual genealogy of philosophical concepts; in particular, it is important to resist the temptation to focus exclusively on a few canonical texts by canonical authors. (In this sense, my proposal differs somewhat from Foucault’s archeology, which tends to focus on “pronouncements made by figures of authority in positions of power” (Packer 2010, 345).)
Finally, another commitment that Foucault and Nietzsche seem to share, namely a focus on practices and ‘forms of life’ (to use Wittgensteinian terminology), represents a useful reminder for the (analytic) philosopher. Analytic philosophers tend to view philosophical theories as ‘disembodied and dis-embedded’, as if the larger material, social, and cultural contexts in which they emerge were unimportant (Akehurst 2011). Now, while conceptual genealogy is not the same thing as ‘history of ideas’, it does recommend that elements outside the purely textual sources be taken into account – including (but not restricted to) facts about circulation and dissemination of texts such as availability of translations, number of extant copies (in the case of manuscripts) etc. Moreover, the dynamics of how a particular instantiation of a concept becomes influential at the expense of others will often be related to, among other factors, institutional facts pertaining to curriculum and structure of education. Such elements (which both the Nietzschean and the Foucaultian would probably be happy to describe as ‘power relationships’) should also be taken into account.
Summing up: in the context of the methodological proposal being articulated here, a genealogical approach is to be preferred over its close cousin archeology for a number of reasons, but most importantly because genealogy is largely diachronic while archeology is largely synchronic. Foucault correctly identified this limitation in his earlier archeological method, and his turn towards Nietzschean genealogy provided the required remedy.
[1] See (Kusch 1991, Part I, chap. 2) for further comparison between what a ‘real’ archeologist does and the Foucaultian archeologist, as well as for the influence of psychoanalytic concepts. Kusch also documents the pervasiveness of the concept of archeology among Foucault’s teachers and intellectual influences – in other words, the idea of archeology for conceptual analysis is not a Foucaultian novelty.
[2] A small autobiographical note: I also started thinking of this enterprise in terms of archeology, but gradually came to realize that what is really required is the genealogical perspective.
[3] I do make a plea for taking into account the larger historical and cultural contexts for the production of philosophical texts, in particular in connection with the embedding of the philosophical theories into broader institutional and social practices. In this sense, documentation going beyond purely philosophical texts is also relevant for the analysis.
[4] Leiter (2015, 134) reads this passage as suggesting that the Nietzschean genealogist is interested in essences, real things. I abstain from getting involved in this debate, but in any case I very much share Nietzsche’s concern for proper documentation and a rejection of ‘hypothesis-mongering’. I take it that Foucault’s focus on discourse is also in the spirit of concern for proper grounding and documentation.
Recent Comments