les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

Turn to 1976, Foucault sort of changed his focus from purely medicine, biology, and psychoanalysis to discipline, and political economics. But, what had never been changed was his purpose to revealing a real history of knowledge by conducting an archaeological research and endeavouring to found the genealogical relationships that modernity might build upon. That is why he has often been classified as a post-modernist as being critical, or sometimes sceptical.

As Foucault asserted, being criticism it should be identified to be local. Namely, in reality it is an autonomous, non-centralized kind of theoretical production, one that is to say whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established regimes of thought. This local criticism would have proceeded by means of ‘a return of knowledge’. In this regard, Foucault pointed out the marginality of the buried knowledges of erudition and those disqualified popular knowledges as defined by him that it should be different from being general common-sense knowledge. Then he went further onto a historical knowledge of struggles, with what in fact were these buried, subjugated knowledges really concerned. Hence, he refine the term of ‘genealogy’ as the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.

That is to say, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth or totality of ideology within the time period in question, as opposed to focusing on a singular or dominant ideology. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the ideologies in question, for the conditions of their possibility. It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Nietzsche.

For Foucault, genealogy was expanded into a counter-history of the position of the subject which traces the development of people and societies through history. His genealogy of the subject accounts for “the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.”

Overall, what genealogy does is to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which hierarchise themselves as truth in order to constitute such a science. Through the rediscovery of the discursivities of those erudite or popular knowledges which were buried and disqualified. Foucault called such a work as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.

Although genealogies are anti-sciences, according to Foucault, it does not mean it is of ignorance or non-knowledge, just that they are more concerned with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed to the effects of the centralising powers which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse within a society such as ours. In fact, observed from his essay titled with Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault’s ideas of genealogy were greatly influenced by the work that Nietzsche had done on the development of morals through power.

As one of the important theories of Foucault, genealogy deconstructs truth, arguing that truth is discovered by chance, backed by the operation of power or the consideration of interest. Therefore, all truths are questionable. Pointing out the unreliability of truth, which is accused as “having tendency of relativity and nihilism”, the theory flatly refuses the uniformity and regularity of history and sciences, emphasizing the irregularity and inconstancy of truth and toppling the notion that history progresses in a linear order. Based on this, Foucault had been particularly aware of the trap of colonisation of knowledge, when he was asked to construct unitary discourses of those liberated fragments. In contrast to power relationship, by means of archaeology, local knowledges can only be disinterred, not established.

Thus, the practice of genealogy is inevitably linked to archaeology. According to the script of an interview in 1997 titled with What is Critique?, he concludes that “it seems that from the empirical observability of an ensemble to its historical acceptability, to the very period of time in which it is actually observable, the analysis goes by way of the knowledge-power nexus, supporting it, recouping it at the point where it is accepted, moving toward what makes it acceptable […] This is what can be characterized as recouping it in its positivity. Then, here is a type of procedure, which […] runs through the cycle of positivity by proceeding from the fact of acceptance to the system of acceptability analysed through the knowledge-power interplay. Let us say that this is, approximately, the archaeological level.”

All in all, what is the most crucial in these genealogies is the nature of the power. By asking the question that “is the analysis of power or of powers to be deduced in one way or another from the economy” and by looking into the liberal conception of political power of 18th century and the Marxist conception of 19th century, Foucault asserted that, in furtherance to the interrelation between power and economy, “power is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and that it only exists in action;” and “power is not primarily the maintenance and reproduction of economic relations, but is above all a relation of force.”

So what does power exactly mean? Foucault restarted with repression, since “power represses nature, the instincts, a class, and individuals.” As an analysis of the mechanisms of repression should be foremost in the analysis of power, he then went onto that in terms of struggle, conflict and war. In this regard, he reversed Clausewitz’s assertion that “war is politics continued by other means” by holding that “power is war itself, which continued by peace but ended with war”; namely, repression is nothing other than the realisation, within the continual warfare of this pseudo-peace, of a perpetual relationship of force.

After all, repression could be seen as the political consequence of war, somewhat as oppression was seen as the abuse of sovereignty in the juridical order under the classic theory of political right. That is to say, as suggested by Foucault, there can be 2 schemes for the analysis of power: first, the contract-oppression schema, which is the juridical one with the pertinent opposition is between the legitimate and illegitimate, and second, the struggle-repression schema for which the pertinent opposition is between struggle and submission.

By analysing how power to be exercised and enforced, so that Foucault could be able to tell which schema his work couched in, that is, the one of struggle-repression. I think this conclusion is quite obvious, if we observe those subjugated or marginalized that Foucault had been concerned with, such as the history of penal right, psychiatric power, and the control of infantile sexuality etc. etc.. This is why I agreed upon Mitchell Dean’s comment upon Foucault, who offered a perspective of critical and effective history, and hence beyond a post-modernist, I prefer viewing him as a historical sociologist.

On the relationship of power and knowledges, the latter in our time signifies the modernity distinct from the Classical, but what if they are not true but simply constructed as a superimposition among us. With such a question born in mind, that is why I think we social scientists, as inspired by Foucault, should always be able to conduct an archaeological work upon the knowledges that we were made believe, so that can we picture a genealogy of the realities of history as a whole by annexing those which were hidden or excluded, since “power is everywhere”.

Lastly, I’d like to share 4 questions with you that I have been thinking over for these days since I began to read Foucault:

1. As Foucault contended that sciences de l'homme will disappear as soon as the episteme discovers a new form, so if each knowledge at a certain epoch can be distinguished from the one before it, and if such a discontinuity really exists, then should it also exist between the ages of modernity and of postmodernity? If so, there should not be a postmodernity yet, shouldn't it?

2. With regard to the concept of human rights which according to his idea can be said as well to be a product of ‘modernity’, but that might suggest that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” be untrue. That is, if such a discontinuity exists, doesn't it also imply that human rights are not universally and intergenerationally applied, when thinking of being in the context of the Classic and Postmodern ages?

3. Methodologically, Foucault admitted that conducting an archaeological research upon an epistemological field can be, and must be, temporally and spatially constrained, since the mode of being of things, and of the order are according to the culture and the age in question. However, can it be possibly ‘selective’ at the same time, especially concerned with the materials, historical events, and even the people who are being studied?

4. In terms of the genealogies themselves, on one hand, they are supposed to be used in order to rethink the construct of the cultures and the knowledges therein, but on the other hand, how should the society of the original state be expected to respond to the orders and the identities of the Other resulted from a more reflexive and critical outcome of an archaeological research?