New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Bakhtin’s Carnival, Genealogy, History

By Gordon Hull

Foucault’s use of Nietzsche to make the distinction between history and genealogy in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” is well-known.  What is less well-known, I think (perhaps I am projecting again, but I had forgotten this passage until I saw a note I’d made to it the other day), is a very clear presentation of the distinction in Society must be Defended.  Here I want to tentatively suggest some connections between the language of SMD and some of Foucault’s other writings.  The SMD context is a discussion of state historiography and archiving in the 18^th Century.  Foucault announces “another new excursus,” and writes:

“The difference between what might be called the history of the sciences and the genealogy of knowledges is that the history of sciences is essentially located on an axis that is, roughly speaking, the cognition-truth axis, or at least the axis that goes from the structure of cognition to the demand for truth. Unlike the history of the sciences, the genealogy of knowledges is located on a different axis, namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice-clash of power axis” (SMD 178).

He then suggests that if one is to do a genealogy of knowledges of the 18^th Century, the first thing one needs to do is to “outwit the problematic of the Enlightenment” (ibid.), which is to say that one has to avoid the urge to talk about the emergence of reason, the fading of ignorance, and so forth.  In other words, one has to avoid the era’s framing of itself.  Instead, one should see:

“an immense and multiple battle, but not one between knowledge and ignorance, but an immense and multiple battle between knowledges in the plural—knowledges that are in conflict because of their very morphology, because they are in the possession of enemies, and because they have intrinsic power-effects” (SMD 179).

I want to flag the text here because it helps to illuminate the political stakes of genealogy, and thus of writing history, quite clear.  This is of course also in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” especially when he talks at the end about what genealogy might do.  I want to focus on the first, which is parodic or carnivalesque.  Foucault comes across there as somewhat cryptic; the genealogist “will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing” and so “genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival” (Foucault Reader, 94).

Return to “What is an Author”

By Gordon Hull

I’m teaching a Foucault seminar this term, and one of the things I’m trying to do is get better on the doxography of his essays.  That led me to a discovery about “What is an Author” that I’m going to share on the (hopefully not hubristic) assumption that other folks didn’t know it either.  The essay has been of interest to me for a while, largely because of my work on intellectual property.  There, the link between copyright and the juridico-political function of authorship Foucault identifies is fairly clear, and has been ably explored in the context of trademark by Laura Heymann.

What I didn’t know is that Foucault’s essay was originally presented as a seminar (Feb. 1969) – with responses from the likes of Lucien Goldmann and Lacan.  The version translated into English and that makes its way into the Rabinow-edited Foucault Reader and subsequent English editions is based on a revised version that Foucault gave the following year in Buffalo.  As a result, we don’t get the commentaries.  The version in Dits & Écrits I (#69) is thus worth a look for a few reasons.