Excavating Foucauldian Identity
Scott Roulier*
[From HUMANITAS, Volume
X, No. 1, 1997. ©
National
Humanities Institute]
One of the putative benefits of Foucault's genealogical critique is
that it bestows a lightness of being on the self of the present. The restrictive
chains of lapsed paradigms and ossified identities are burst. How does
genealogy achieve this Houdini-like escape from an inherited past? What
kind of self appears with the collapse of historical memory and the advent
of countermemory?
Any consideration of Foucault's genealogical histories and his advocacy
of what I call a "genealogical identity" immediately confronts a glaring
paradox: Foucault's own delighted embrace of an inheritance. In an early
essay—"Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History"—Foucault addresses his indebtedness
to his teutonic forerunner. The essay, a pensée on Nietzsche's own
historical meditations, details the "appropriate" use of history—the "liberation
of man by presenting him with other origins than those in which he prefers
to see himself" (the "how" of the escape). This genealogical emancipation,
in turn, "permits the dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement
as an empty synthesis . . ." 1 (the
"form" of subjectivity that emerges).
In the following pages I want to challenge Foucault's genealogical identity,
this "empty synthesis." With only a hint of rancor, I will be applying
a genealogical critique to Foucault's genealogical self. In other words,
an attempt will be made to accent what lies beneath the "anti-mnemonic"
surface of his projects. In addition, this article will examine the jarring
discontinuities and, equally important, the undeclared (and damaging) continuities
that exist between Foucault's vision and more "traditional" genealogical
forms.
The Genealogical Method and its Progeny
As its appellation suggests, the genealogical method2
involves the relentless tracking-down of the ancestral heritage of influential
ideas and social practices. However, Foucault claims his enquiry radically
diverges from traditional uses of historical analysis.3
Following Nietzsche's lead, he repudiates as chimerical the historical
quest for meaning. There is no secret to be recovered from mankind's resplendent
dawn, no fundamental pattern to be traced that would encompass all human
events and chart the trajectory and final end of human history.
Concerning the historical search for "origins," genealogists object
to the presuppositions that underlie it, namely, that certain essences
or "immobile forms"—primordial truths which antedate accident and chance—can
be apprehended (NGH, 78). Such Ur-occurrences as the Golden Age,
spoken of by the philosophers, or the Garden of Eden, the space of intimate
fellowship between humans and their creator depicted in the book of Genesis,
provide images of perfection—intimations of the spiritual purposes that
humans were designed to fulfill, standards of virtue and rational achievement
by which human progress can be measured. Instead of disclosing an "original
identity," however, Foucault says the genealogist discovers "something
altogether different" (NGH, 78). For example, Reason, as Nietzsche pugnaciously
suggests, was borne of the "passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred,
their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition"
(NGH, 78). What one finds at the historical inception of things, Foucault
concludes, is not an inviolable identity but "the dissension of other things
. . . disparity" (NGH, 79).
Foucault, as mentioned, ardently dismisses a teleological view of history
as well. Over against the progressive, "evolutionary" paradigms of the
Enlightenment and dialectical materialism, he sets the genealogist's "single
drama"—the endless play of dominations. In other words, Foucault shares
Nietzsche's suspicion of Hegelian forms of history—histories "whose function
is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully
closed upon itself" (NGH, 86). Rationalistic and theological histories
which evoke an "end of time" rankle genealogists because they dissolve
the singularity of events in a larger metanarrative. By contrast, "effective"
history—one possessed of a genealogical sensitivity—is faithful to the
uniqueness, peculiarity, and scandalous contingency of historical happenings.4
In its confrontation with history as telos and origin, the faint outlines
of genealogical history have emerged. To fill out this picture, I want
to consider the Foucauldian-Nietzschean analogy between the genealogist
and physician. Unlike the metaphysician, the genealogist does not plunge
and probe the annals of history to find a soul, a teleological or aboriginal
meaning. Rather, more akin to the medical doctor, the genealogist examines
a historical body—a "concrete body of a development with its moments of
intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its
fainting spells" (NGH, 80). Genealogical diagnostics, then, reveal an episodic
history characterized by jolts, ruptures, and fissures—the appropriate
object of historical study.
In his own genealogical investigations, Foucault chronicles the changes
that occur within various discourses, the ways in which shifts in "knowledge"
(and by association, power) constantly re-order and re-organize beliefs,
practices, and desires. Consider, for example, the intriguing results from
his analysis of discourses relating to punishment—one of the better known
of his main triad of studies.5
Foucault commences Discipline and Punish by relaying gruesome
eyewitness accounts of the drawing and quartering of the regicide, Damiens.
With this beginning, Foucault scores an emotional coup d'état, for
most readers, repulsed by the graphic details of the torture, are already
patting themselves on the back, counting their blessings that such spectacles
have receded into the penumbra of a more enlightened, humane age. This
response—a steady progression from revulsion to self-congratulation—is
exactly what Foucault intends to elicit. For in order to deflate the presumption
of our own civility, to expose the machinations of disciplinary techniques,
Foucault must demonstrate how unreflectively we inhabit the reigning episteme.
Consonant with the method and strategy he pursues in his other works,
Foucault sets out to explore the changes in the way we punish.6
Foucault argues that, since the late eighteenth century, our disciplinary
practices—both our social goals and the actual objects upon which force
is brought to bear—have been transformed. Increasingly, what the law lays
hold of is not the body but the "juridical subject." Consequently, the
rack, pillory, and thumbscrew—mere instruments of bodily torture—are replaced.
In their stead, various therapeutic techniques are applied which discipline
"in depth"—in the "heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations." 7
How does one gain entry to this interior realm? Insidiously, via the subject
herself. Through panoptic technologies,8
argues Foucault, individuals are conditioned to internalize discipline,
to police themselves.
The social aim of punishment is no longer retribution or mere deterrence
but to reform or "normalize": "to supervise the individual, to neutralize
his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies, and to continue
even when this change has been achieved" (DP, 18). And it is the claim
of "continuance" that marks the most original and discomfiting aspect of
Foucault's penal history. For disciplinary technologies, he argues, spread
to other institutions—hospitals, factories, and schools—until they became
nearly ubiquitous. Foucault observes that these disciplinary mechanisms
are co-opted by the most productive sectors of societies: "factory production,
the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the
war-machine" (DP, 211). Thus he uncovers a disciplinary operation in which
bodies and minds are harnessed—made healthy and productive—for the modern
economy.
When Foucault's observations in Discipline and Punish are combined
with his studies on madness and sexuality, an odd harmonic convergence
appears. It seems Foucault has substituted his own teleology for the Enlightenment
version—a process of ever-increasing normalization for the inevitability
of human progress. This point aside, Foucault has undoubtedly made an important
contribution to our understanding of the social operations of power. Even
if many of the specifics of his interpretations can be challenged, his
conclusions are imaginative and have opened up new avenues for social research.
I take a very different view when it comes to the "genealogical identity"
which accompanies his genealogical investigations. The self he advocates
is much less hospitable to appropriation than his insights regarding power
and practice.9 Foucault observes, for
example, that historians often prostituted themselves by peddling idealized
identities—e.g., Roman prototypes for the French Revolutionaries, knights
in shining armor for the German Romantics—for the "confused and anonymous
European, who no longer knows himself or what name he should adopt" (NGH,
93). The "new historians" (genealogists), aware that our personas are mere
markers for a spiritual void, perfidiously enter the fray,
push[ing] the masquerade to its limit and prepar[ing] the great carnival
of time where masks are constantly reappearing. No longer the identification
of our faint individuality with the solid identities of the past, but our
'unrealization' through excessive choice of identities—Frederick of Hohenstaufen,
Caesar, Jesus, Dionysus, and possibly Zarathustra (NGH, 94).
History, tradition—these are common sources for selfhood, discourses
which have helped people find fixed coordinates in a shifting world. But
genealogical history, as we have seen, contests narratives of continuity;
it dredges up a multitude of incommensurable human forms and models, begetting
a self with no prospects for synthesis, only a piercing consciousness of
the discontinuities which cross it (NGH, 93-95).
So far I have highlighted the correspondence between Foucault's genealogical
method and his genealogical self. Earlier, I stressed that many of the
results of Foucault's critical interpretations of various social practices
could be appreciated by a diverse range of thinkers. With this in mind,
I believe it is reasonable to positively assess the value of Foucault's
social histories and still reject or be highly suspicious of his genealogical
identity. In what follows, I attempt to articulate these reservations.
Of Monads and Morbidity
One way of registering my concern about Foucault's preferred notion of
selfhood is to underline, once more, the conceptual inversion that has
occurred within his genealogical identity. Traditionally, genealogies were
used as location devices. Genealogies excavated human "roots"—ethnic relations,
kinship ties. In large measure, what was being sought by way of genealogical
inquiry was a sense of belonging, community, solidarity. By contrast, Foucault's
inquiries seek to dislodge subjects, enabling them to strike out on their
own. On its face, I do not object to the pursuit of critical distance;
I do, however, oppose the posture of "transgression" that it often assumes
in Foucault.
To underscore this anti-communal sentiment, it is necessary to do some
excavation of my own. In a Kantian sequel—"What is Enlightenment?"—Foucault
describes the relationship of his thinking to the Enlightenment. A key
component of Foucault's analysis is his disentangling of the Enlightenment
and "humanism"—two distinct concepts Foucault believes are often mistakenly
conflated. The "humanistic thematic," Foucault points out, has recurred
throughout Western history and is "in itself too supple, too diverse, too
inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection."10
It may be fairly said that what the disparate forms of humanism do have
in common is a search for an accurate account of "humanity." Such an enterprise
has always been "obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed
from religion, science, or politics" (WIE, 44). Foucault, of course, repudiates
the notion that there is a human nature to be "discovered."
The Enlightenment, on the other hand, is a "historical event." And what
Foucault salvages from the Enlightenment is an attitude, "a philosophical
ethos . . . [which entails] a permanent critique of our historical era"
(WIE, 42). In Foucault's appropriation of this attitude, however, the shape
of critique is metamorphosed. Whereas Kant's First Critique attempted to
delineate the limits of theoretical reason, the question today, Foucault
proposes, "has to be turned back into a positive one":
[I]n what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place
is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary
constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted
in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes
the form of a possible transgression (WIE, 45).
In other words, Enlightenment critique becomes genealogical investigation,
which in due course engenders a new identity—"the possibility of no longer
being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think" (WIE, 46). This "historical
ontology" will not spawn novel "global" projects; instead, it will be experimental,
a work conducted at the boundaries of the self, upon the self (WIE, 46-47).
Yet, one must interject, the relationship between Foucault's Enlightenment
project (self-experimentation, the substitution of one way of being, doing,
or thinking for another) and certain political vestiges of the older Enlightenment
vision (the liberal state, its attendant notions of equality and natural
rights) is acutely strained. Consider for a moment that Foucault's championing
of a "permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy" seems to presuppose
a liberal model of government and society—a model that establishes explicit
zones of privacy (which allow for self-experimentation) and public control.
On this reading, Foucault could presumably endorse Rorty's liberal utopia.
Grounded in nothing more than a serendipitous (contingent) confluence of
events and vocabularies, Rorty's ideal polity would permit "its citizens
to be as privatistic, 'irrationalist,' and aestheticist as they please
so long as they do it on their own time—causing no harm to others and using
no resources needed by those less advantaged." 11
But surely this Foucault-Rorty partnership—a "Foucauldian liberalism"—is
difficult to maintain.
Foucault, for instance, has often painted a much less sanguine portrait
of the freedom afforded by liberal societies. He suggests that the egalitarian
juridical framework which accompanied the bourgeoisie's rise to power in
the eighteenth century simultaneously laid the foundation for the development
and distribution of disciplinary mechanisms: "[A]lthough the universal
juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power,
its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside
of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports,
reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits
that are traced around the law" (DP, 223). Alarmingly, Foucault claims,
the "limited" liberal state has magnified and multiplied forms of micro-power;
and the discourse of public-private conceals the colonization of the private
domain.12
Given the antinomy of Foucault's "historical ontology" and the liberal
state, one must ask whether there is an alternative, a more auspicious
socio-political milieu for self-creation. Foucault drops a few hints. In
one of his interviews ("Truth and Power") Foucault submits that the monarchies
which rose out of the feudal chaos of private quarrels cast themselves
as "referees" capable of putting an end to the terrorizing duo of pillage
and plunder. In short, the monarchs became sovereigns. Subsequent theories
of right, he avers, simply "extended" sovereignty: "political theory has
never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign." 13
What is needed, Foucault proclaims, "is a political philosophy that isn't
erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems
of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king's head. . . ." 14
The question is whether decapitating the sovereign would also entail pruning
back the "Hobbesian hedges" (the matrix of civil rights and protections)
the sovereign erected.
Such an antinomian posture, considered in light of Foucault's politics
of transgression, would be paradoxical: If law and sovereignty recede,
what would be left to "transgress"? Then again, there may be no riddle
at all. Surely social conventions (not dependent on the existence of a
network of statutes) are of great concern. This gratuitous reading nevertheless
cuts close to the anti-social bone. No doubt this new regime (for Foucault
appears to believe there is no escape from "regimes of truth") would have
its own alliance of power/knowledge. More than likely, however, it would
be sanitized of the liberal (J. S. Millian) discourse of "self-regarding"
and "other-regarding" acts—i.e., purged of timorous, bourgeois hand-wringing
over "harm." We should, Foucault once urged, "make of man a negative experience,
lived in the form of hate and aggression." 15
Foucauldian politics, I propose, incline toward Zarathustra; there are
sonorous echoes of Nietzsche in Foucault's advocacy of a "limit attitude"—both
in its incitement to overcome the "given" limits of the self and in its
contestation of social and moral boundaries. "Society," Nietzsche remarked,
"must not exist for society's sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding
on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task
and to a higher state of being. . . ." 16
A Kantian morality of ends and its concomitant egalitarian republicanism
is supplanted by a new table of values; self-creation and experimentation
tend to overshadow liberal concerns about human rights and dignity. What
is great in man, declares Zarathustra, "is that he is a bridge and not
an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going
under." 17
In an attempt over the last several pages to fill out Foucault's genealogical
identity—its limit-attitude, its exploration of the possible transgression
of the boundaries of the self (and community)—I have brought us to the
feet of Zarathustra. What can be gleaned from this connection? One way
to frame an answer would be to suggest that Foucault's opposition to "humanism"
may be more than "philosophical"; that is, beyond an innocuous critique
of Cartesianism lies a kind of subtle misanthropy.18
Hence the shift from a traditional genealogical identity (one focused on
family, race, kinship) to Foucault's is jarring. In Foucault, the horizon
of human solidarity evasively retreats.19
It is true that Foucault, at the end of his career, spoke often and
quite eloquently about "friendship"—arguably one of the most meaningful
forms of solidarity. But this too, I contend, must be viewed in a Nietzschean
context, as part and parcel of the Zarathustrian "pathos of distance":
I teach you not the neighbor, but the friend. The friend should be the
festival of the earth to you and an anticipation of the overman. . . .
I teach you the friend in whom the world stands completed, a bowl of goodness—the
creating friend who always has a completed world to give away. . . . My
brothers, love of neighbor I do not recommend to you: I recommend to you
love of the farthest.20
In the case of Foucault's own life, one could say that his companion
Daniel Defert and some others were "friends"; but for "neighbors" the true
genealogist has little use.
The plot, however, thickens. For the irony of Foucault's own appropriation
of genealogy runs much deeper (and "colder") than a rejection of human
solidarity. As is well known, Foucault was fascinated by death. "Teach
people," he proclaimed, "that there is not a piece of conduct more beautiful
or, consequently, more worthy of careful thought than suicide. One should
work on one's suicide throughout one's life."21
The discrepancy between Foucault's endorsement of suicidal preparations
and the forging of a genealogical identity is poignant; there is something
incongruous about linking a celebration of death with genos.22
Simply referring to a tension between etymology and usage, of course, is
not a forceful argument against Foucault. Nonetheless, I believe there
is more here than meets the eye: there is a profound "logic of demise"
that informs his genealogical identity.
To explore this claim, I turn to his observations on the "Right of Death
and Power over Life" in his history of sexuality. As described earlier,
in his studies on madness, punishment, and sexuality Foucault uncovered
an insidious process of normalization and control that ramifies throughout
modern institutions and social practices. Of special concern for Foucault
is "bio-power"—the mechanisms of power that generate life forces, make
them grow, and order them for social use (HOS, 136). Whereas the early
modern sovereign had the power of "deduction," to "take life or to let
live," the modern state establishes its dominion over life's unfolding
(HOS, 138).
But according to Foucault, at precisely this juncture—the manifestation
of the state's gargantuan power over life—the "power of death" is revealed.
For "death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it" (HOS, 138). Foucault
notes that it is no accident that suicide, in the course of the nineteenth
century, became
one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis;
it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders
and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. This determination
to die, strange and yet so persistent . . . was one of the first astonishments
of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of administering
life (HOS, 139).
Taking one's own life, as Foucault sees it, is empowering—an act of
defiance, a glorious gesture of resistance. Foucault seems to propose that
there is a measured proportionality between the "power" of death and the
"power" of bio-power; as the latter increases, so does the former.
I want to claim, however, that apart from the limit mortality imposes
on power, there may be, in addition, a logic of death intrinsic to genealogy
as Foucault interprets it. Foucault, again following Nietzsche's lead,
mocks the notion that "things are most precious" at the moment of birth.
"We tend to think," he remarks, "that this is the moment of their greatest
perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator or in
the shadowless light of a first morning" (NGH, 79). Similarly, notions
of providence or a final cause are a sham—Condorcet's "Sketch," Marx's
"Manifesto," and the book of "Revelation" must be discarded. And what is
the case of the species is reenacted in the life of the individual. One's
birth, one's ancestry, is of no consequence; there are no embedded ends
to be realized—no zoon politikon, no beatific visions.
The horizons of past and future rapidly and violently contract upon
a perishable present. On such a Foucauldian stage, where naissance and
(all forms of) immortality have faded to black, the spotlight casts its
brilliant and excruciating light on the only "end" remaining.
Beyond Either/Or: The 'Revaluation' of Traditional Genealogy
There are, then, at least two characteristics of Foucault's genealogical
identity that hoist a red flag—the rejection of human "connectedness" and
a glorification of death. As a way of foregrounding these tendencies, I
have tried to indicate how Foucault's notion of genealogy drastically veers
from more conventional understandings. But there are still reasons to resist
putting aside the Foucauldian model. For example, there is the Foucauldian
worry about the restrictions traditional uses of genealogy impose on the
self—the burden of an inherited script. This is a legitimate concern. I
am convinced, however, that there are alternative ways of addressing the
problem.
Having analyzed the classical period and its subsequent unfolding in
books ranging from The Order of Things to volume I of The History
of Sexuality, Foucault, at the end of his career, turned his sights
on antiquity. In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self
(volumes II and III of his history of sexuality), Foucault examines the
way we constitute ourselves as moral agents by employing various "technologies"
of self-creation.23 In order to show
how the value of traditional genealogical thinking is severely underestimated
in Foucault's philosophy, I will take his cue, step back into antiquity,
and consider, as he did, the Greeks and early Christians. Specifically,
I want to look at two examples of genealogy, one from the genre of Greek
tragedy and one from the genre of gospel.
As we have seen, the Foucauldian "purpose" of history, directed by genealogy,
is not "to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to
its dissipation" (NGH, 95). Foucault reminds us that Nietzsche objected
to "antiquarian history" (more or less what I have referred to as "traditional"
genealogy) because it tended to block creativity in the name of fidelity
(NGH, 95). But is this not a false dichotomy, to force a person to choose
between creativity and fidelity? It seems to me that such a dichotomization
is a convenient exaggeration: one of Foucault's (and Nietzsche's) stock
rhetorical strategies to cast aspersions on competing "perspectives." If
one attends to concrete examples of genealogical thinking, this facile
division cannot be sustained.
In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, for example, the poet relates the story of
Agamemnon's homecoming, how the king, having razed the city of Troy in
retribution for Paris's abduction of Helen, is warmly received by a net
of ropes and robes, slaughtered by the "architect of vengeance" dwelling
in his palace—his wife Clytaemnestra (and her accomplice, his cousin Aegisthus).
What precipitated this act of revenge was Agamemnon's decision to sacrifice
his daughter, Iphigeneia, to appease the goddess Artemis. Artemis, grieved
by the almost certain doom of the children of Troy, demands blood as "the
price" for the Greeks' anticipated devastation.
For my purposes, what is relevant is the context Aeschylus provides
for the audience, the genealogical backdrop against which Aeschylus implies
we should comprehend Agamemnon's behavior. As Iphigeneia is hoisted over
the altar, Agamemnon instructs his henchmen to "slip a strap in her gentle
curving lips" lest her wailing "curse the house" (lines 235-236).24
Agamemnon's trepidation is deeply ironic, for the "House of Atreus," one
of the most infamous in Greek mythology, is already cursed: a lineage that
produces figures who tragically reenact the impiety of their forebears.
The genealogy starts with Tantalus who, in an egregious act of hubris,
chops up his son Pelops and serves his dismembered body to the gods. For
this hideous crime, Tantalus is bound in tartarus; Pelops, after a divine
"reassembling," wins the hand of Hippodamia (by engineering the death of
her father) and sires several children, including Thyestes and Atreus.
Incensed when he discovers his wife's infidelity—a tryst with his own brother—Atreus
invites Thyestes to a banquet at which the flesh of his three young sons
is the main entree. In the next generation, as noted above, Agamemnon (son
of Atreus) murders his own daughter, a gruesome emulation of earlier progeny
mutilations. Aegisthus (son of Thyestes) then avenges his father by aiding
Clytaemnestra in the assassination of his brother's son. The dead perpetually
rise up to slay the living; the terror, as Aeschylus describes it, "raging
back and back in the future."
Near the end of the play, the "seer" Cassandra (one of the few Trojan
survivors and daughter of King Priam) displays her extrasensory powers
by detailing the transgressions of the House of Atreus: "No . . . the house
that hates god, an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen torturing kinsmen, severed
heads, slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood" (lines 1088-1091).
A fundamental question raised by the play is whether Necessity thoroughly
determines the actions of the characters or whether the "echoing womb of
guilt" can be eluded. Aeschylus's own answer is shot through with ambiguity;
each life, he seems to suggest, is composed of varying amounts of both
ingredients—freedom and necessity. As Aeschylus recounts the immolation,
Agamemnon "slipped his neck in the strap of Fate . . ." (line 218). Commenting
on this passage, Peter Euben argues that while Agamemnon is "predisposed"
to evil because of hereditary pollution, he is not "predestined": "The
choice may be harder for him than for others; in some sense it may even
be an impossible one. Yet he does the deed and cannot escape responsibility
for it or for how he lives with its aftermath." 25
To remove Aeschylus's genealogical context in favor of Foucauldian-memory-dissolution
would no doubt impoverish the story and the identity of one of its main
protagonists, Agamemnon. Like Agamemnon we are all ensconced in histories,
laden with peculiar inheritances.26
Our character is formed in a process of coming to terms with a richly textured
past; even if we reject large elements of that past, we are—as the Greek
tragedians consistently remind us—no less indelibly marked by it. In its
one-sided aim to "counter" memory, to break with the past, Foucault's genealogical
identity is reductionist.
It is also crucial to observe that Aeschylus incorporates Foucauldian
concerns into his trilogy. While poignantly acknowledging the interconnectedness
of the characters—the miasma, responsibility, suffering they share—genealogical
Fate and Necessity are contested. In the very framework of traditional
genealogy, "Foucauldian questions" about the possibility of interrupting
cycles (systems) of human violence, about "being and doing something other
than one is," are confronted.
Another familiar example of ancient genealogy is found in the New Testament.
The author of the gospel of Matthew, for instance, provides a genealogy
of Jesus. Doubtless, this family history is designed to perform the function
Foucault spurns—shoring-up, solidifying Jesus's messianic identity via
genealogical grounding. But without needing to take a "Nietzschean hammer"
to the text, a reader is struck by certain curious entries in the ancestral
list. All the women—Tamar, Ruth, "the wife of Uriah" (Bathsheba), and Mary—are
linked to (or had been accused of) sexual aberrance: rape (Tamar), seduction
(Ruth), adultery (Bathsheba), and fornication/infidelity (Mary).27
The presence of these figures, as would have been clear to any first-century
Jew, has serious implications for Jesus's identity.
In Luke's gospel, the writer relays a conversation between Jesus and
some disciples of John the Baptist. Responding to the queries of John's
followers—"Are you the expected One, or do we look for someone else?"—Jesus
retorts: "Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind
receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear,
the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them" (Luke
7:22). Jesus's response, in brief, is 'test my words and actions against
our prophets.' Indeed one expectation (e.g., see Isaiah 61:1) was that
the messiah would be a "liberator," would save his people from all sorts
of physical, emotional, and spiritual oppression. And this portrait is
definitely in evidence in the gospel of Matthew.
But the Matthewan genealogy also, with its entourage of "questionable"
women, foreshadows another Jesus (also represented in the other three gospels)—the
one who not only lends a helping hand to the sick but who is "a friend
of publicans and sinners." This Jesus disconcerts and disturbs the religious
establishment. What this and the previous example demonstrate is that traditional
genealogies (and presumably other historical narratives) are not, even
in their own "self-understandings," monolithic and transparent determinants
of identity. They subvert and contest as much as they locate.28
But they do locate. Genealogical inquiry, with its sometimes painful probing,
does not detract from but enriches identity, affirms that we really are
historical (as opposed to fictional) beings. In these antique genealogies,
the horizon of human entwinement does not retreat, but surrounds and helps
to "center" identities of grand complexity.
Conclusion
Finally, I want to outline two other rebuttals to Foucault's genealogical
identity. First, it betrays oppressed persons and groups who are striving,
as Foucault would urge them, to mount "resistance." Even a cursory glance
at the African-American experience bears this out. In Faces at the Bottom
of the Well, Derrick Bell, former Harvard Law professor, soberly culls
inspiration and a resolve for meaningfulness from his shackled ancestors:
I am reminded that our forebears—though betrayed into bondage—survived
the slavery in which they were reduced to things, property, entitled neither
to rights nor to respect as human beings. Somehow, as the legacy of our
spirituals makes clear, our enslaved ancestors managed to retain their
humanity as well as their faith that evil and suffering were not the extent
of their destiny—or of the destiny of those who would follow them. Indeed,
we owe our existence to their perseverance, their faith. In these perilous
times, we must do no less than they did: fashion a philosophy that both
matches the unique dangers we face, and enables us to recognize in those
dangers opportunities for committed living and humane service.29
Like their captive progenitors, Bell argues, African-Americans today
confront an inveterately racist society. He believes accepting this fact
will enable people of color to cast off the "stifling rigidity of relying
unthinkingly on the slogan 'we shall overcome,' " to critically evaluate
traditional civil rights remedies, and to search for more viable strategies
to ease the burdens of racism.30
Now I believe it would be a mistake to join Nietzsche and Foucault in
jeering at this "traditional" use of genealogy for bolstering identity
(NGH, 80-81). No one would deny that racial and ethnic genealogy have been
used for the basest and most nefarious of political purposes. This "abuse"
of history, however, should not be allowed to obscure the emancipatory
content of traditional genealogical reflection—its strategic role in combating
the "forgetfulness" enjoined by oppressors.
Undoubtedly there is a multiplicity of ways in which African-Americans
have appropriated their history. Bell is just one example; many stand to
his political left and right. In a sense, Bell provides what Foucault could
extol as "countermemory"—a "subjugated knowledge" that emerges to compete
with interpretations of American society that minimize the presence of
racism. But the fact that a plethora of narratives and interpretations
can be spun from the materials of history does not imply that history has
no substance, that all attempts at plumbing the depths of our past to better
understand our present yield nothing more than "fictions." This plays into
the hands of those who claim the ovens at Auschwitz were built to bake
bread.
A final question: Is personal development along Foucault's genealogical
lines truly sustainable? Asked differently, is genealogical self-effacement
not a form of self-deception? Foucault recessed his monumental book The
Order of Things with the prediction that "man" would imminently disappear,
"like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." But can this be said
of the prophet himself? Was Foucault swallowed up in a Dionysian revelry
of multiple selves? A few observations suggest otherwise.
Discussing his philosophical oeuvre with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus,
Foucault argues that there are three general domains of genealogy: a historical
ontology of humans in their relations to truth (how they are constituted
as subjects of knowledge), to power (how they create themselves by acting
on each other in various fields of power), and to ethics (how they are
constituted as moral agents).31 Although
all three axes intersect, each, Foucault says, is highlighted in different
works—the truth axis in Birth of the Clinic and The Order of
Things; the power axis in Discipline and Punish; and the ethical
axis in The History of Sexuality.32
Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think I detect an "author" within this
corpus.33 That is, there appears to
be a systematic unity to Foucault's investigations; an incisive, designing
mind skulks behind and radiates through these historical studies. And,
ultimately, this author even posits a telos—an "aesthetics of existence."34
Foucault believes that various moral codes, which once successfully subjugated
(and by extension, "subjectified") individuals, have been so thoroughly
discredited as to be in decline. What must fill the void, he argues, is
a return to the normative approach of the ancient Hellenes who sought a
personal ethics, who sought to make of themselves a work of art.35
Foucault's late "subjective turn" is well documented. One is compelled
to ask, however, what happened to genealogical identity. In Foucault's
own case, the absence of a "carnival of masks" speaks volumes. At the end
of his life, in his own quest to shape himself into a thing of beauty,
he accepted the (suffocating) title "philosopher."36
In other words, he created a self—in rather conventional genealogical fashion—from
the materials of the past, by harvesting the riches of Cynic and Stoic
philosophical traditions, by tying his own identity to forerunners such
as Socrates, Diogenes of Sinope, and of course Nietzsche. James Miller
observes that, "when the philosopher confided on his deathbed in Herv‚
Guibert . . . just as when he delivered his last lectures at the Collège
de France, Foucault, in effect, was conceding his own inability, when all
was said and done, to escape from the duty to tell the truth—above all,
the truth about who he was, and what he had become." 37
Foucault's own story does not, I readily admit, represent an absolute
refutation of genealogical identity. Others may indeed succeed where Foucault
"failed." But therein resides a problem—how to recount a "success." Could
one give narrative form—at least something more than a chronological list
of experiments—to the life of a "genuine" genealogist? Maybe one of Foucault's
most important legacies is this lingering tension, the alterity between
genealogical identity and "the need to tell the truth."
Notes
*Scott Roulier is Assistant Professor of
Political Science at Dowling College. Portions of this article were presented
at the Conference for the International Study of European Ideas in Utrecht,
The Netherlands, in August 1996. [Back]
1 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,"
in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books,
1984), 96 and 81. Hereafter cited as "NGH." [Back]
2 For cogent accounts of Foucault's genealogical method
see Arnold I. Davidson, "Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics," in
Foucault:
A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986), 221-234; Jürgen Habermas, The Discourse of Modernity,
trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987), 248-254.
On the differences between Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogy see Michael
Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). [Back]
3 As Foucault uses the term, "genealogy" is a type of
historical inquiry. Genealogists are, in Foucault's mind, historians who
have not been hoodwinked by metaphysics. What I refer to as "traditional"
genealogy is a kind of historical inquiry that still presupposes that some
sense (and thus some use) may be made of origins or teleologies. [Back]
4 Charles Taylor believes this view of history is as
simplistic as the view it disavows: "The problem is that Foucault tidies
it up too much, makes it into a series of hermetically sealed, monolithic
truth-regimes, a picture which is as far from reality as the blandest Whig
perspective of smoothly broadening freedom." Charles Taylor, "Foucault
on Freedom and Truth," in Hoy, 98. [Back]
5 Madness and sexuality comprise the other main studies.
In Madness and Civilization (1965), Foucault provides the larger
social and historical context out of which the asylum and its unique set
of practices and relations emerged. According to Foucault, a European-wide
project of "confinement"—evidenced by the founding of the great hospitals
and houses of confinement, by the massive coordination of public institutions
of social order and welfare—was launched in the seventeenth century (43).
Intriguingly, it was not just the insane but the poor and unemployed who
were targeted and herded into "hospitals" and other public institutions.
Besides being a preventative measure, reabsorbing a mass of economically
dislocated and disgruntled people, the strategy of internment had a "curative"
dimension as well: "It was no longer merely a question of confining those
out of work, but of giving work to those who had been confined and thus
making them contribute to the prosperity of all" (51).
Foucault claims that recognizing the ethical status assigned to these
facilities is crucial, for it is here in the "space invented by a society
which had derived an ethical transcendence from the law of work, that madness
would appear and soon expand until [in the nineteenth century] it had annexed
them" (57). The asylums of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Foucault argues, were designed to address precisely this moral dereliction.
Stated more provocatively, beneath the mythic images of liberation—the
legends about how the "philanthropists" Tuke and Pinel courageously unshackled
maniacs and raging psychopaths—Foucault's genealogical investigations turn
up insidious forms of oppression. Typically, what interests Foucault is
a shift in the economy of guilt. In the asylum the lunatic is no longer
guilty of being mad (this was the "obscured" form of guilt implicit in
the program of confinement); rather, the madman was made to feel morally
responsible for disrupting social conventions (246). In other words, the
"free terror of madness" was supplanted by a "stifling anguish of responsibility"
(247). Madness and Civilization: History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).
In Volume I of his History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault calls
the "repressive hypothesis" into question. It is commonly assumed that
while lurid speech and actions were openly tolerated in the sixteenth century,
as the seventeenth, eighteenth, and (especially the Victorian) nineteenth
centuries unfurled, sex was driven into the bedroom/closet. Foucault contends,
however, that far from undergoing a process of restriction, "sex talk"
has been "subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement" (12). What
he finds most intriguing is that discourses on sex did not "multiply apart
from or against power, but in the very space and as the means of its exercise"
(32). The economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice—each absorbed sexuality
and organized it for its own purposes. Michel Foucault, The History
of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Hereafter cited as "HOS." [Back]
6 Michel Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview,"
in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed.
Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: UMass Press,
1988), 14. [Back]
7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979),
16. Hereafter cited as "DP." [Back]
8 Bentham's Panopticon, envisioned as a correctional
facility, was an ingenious architectural scheme. Designed in the shape
of a pentagon, the prisoners' cells, each theatrically "backlit" by a high
window, faced an open space dominated by an observation tower. The tower
windows had shades which could be drawn in such a way that the detainees
did not know whether they were being watched at a particular time or not.
Since the prisoners were constantly subjected to this field of total visibility,
they would internalize the prison guard (DP, 200-203). [Back]
9 I am of course aware that my choice of terms—genealogical
identity—is ironic, even oxymoronic, for the intention of the genealogist
is to call into question the possibility of an integrated self. [Back]
10 Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Rabinow,
44. Hereafter cited as "WIE." [Back]
11 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiv. [Back]
12 Michael Walzer, while agreeing with Foucault that
we live in a "more disciplined society," protests that Foucault depreciates
the ways in which liberal society "maintains the limits of its constituent
disciplines and disciplinary institutions. . . ." By contrast, he argues,
authoritarian and totalitarian states override limits, "turning education
into indoctrination, punishment into repression, asylums into prisons,
and prisons into concentration camps." See Michael Walzer, "The Politics
of Michel Foucault," in Hoy, 66. [Back]
13 Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Rabinow,
63. [Back]
14 Ibid. [Back]
15 Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 83. Quoted in James
Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993), 17. [Back]
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 201-202. [Back]
17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), 15. [Back]
18 William Connolly provides a much more sympathetic
interpretation of Foucault's politics and ethics. In so far as Foucault's
genealogical critiques subject conventional morality to "a strip search,"
Connolly says, they are "cruel"—destabilizing and upsetting to people who
are attached to the outmoded codes. "But they also take a precarious step
toward a social ethic of generosity in relations among alternative, problematic,
and (often) rival identities" (366). According to Connolly, one of the
main components of Foucault's "ethical sensibility" is what he calls "agonistic
respect": ". . . a social relation of respect for the opponent against
whom you define yourself even while you resist its imperatives and strive
to delimit its spaces of hegemony" (381).
As Connolly concedes, however, his version may be more his gloss on
Foucault—a "Fou-connism"—than a reliable account of Foucault's own sentiments
(368). "Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault,"
Political
Theory 21 (August 1993). [Back]
19 Foucault came to reject revolutionary praxis and
was highly suspicious of any intellectual who assumed the role of ideology
"demystifier" or who deigned to speak on behalf of the oppressed masses.
But that does not logically rule out other signs of solidarity.
Certainly Foucault believed he developed useful tools of analysis ("strategic
knowledge") for those who were waging small-scale struggles against specific
mechanisms of power. He was an advocate of prison reform and was identified
with several socio-political causes which sought to improve the situation
of marginalized groups (i.e., mental patients, homosexuals, immigrants,
conscripted soldiers). Regarding this activism Lawrence Kritzman cautions
that "the goal of his [Foucault's] quest was not based on an abstract moral
imperative; it was less a question of speaking on behalf of the downtrodden
than of carrying out documentary investigation." Still, Kritzman sees this
critical analysis of specific sectors of society as an important form of
political activism and engagement. See Lawrence Kritzman's introductory
essay, "Foucault and the Politics of Experience," in Foucault: Politics,
Philosophy, and Culture, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge,
1988), xviii.
The interpretation of Foucault I am offering would lead us to emphasize
the "documentary investigation" dimension of his political activism, that
is, documentary investigation primarily focused on complex networks of
power dispersed throughout society and employed more as a critique than
a gesture of solidarity—prying open a tiny space for self-creation.
One of Foucault's biographers, James Miller, does speculate about a
kind of "bathhouse solidarity" in which Foucault may have participated.
Miller for one dismisses rumors that Foucault, who died of AIDS, deliberately
tried in the fall of 1983 to infect innocent people with the virus: "Given
the circumstances in San Francisco in the fall of 1983, as best I could
reconstruct them, to have taken AIDS as a 'limit-experience,' it seemed
to me, would have involved engaging in potentially suicidal acts of passion
with consenting partners, most of them likely to be infected already; deliberately
throwing caution to the wind, Foucault and these men were wagering their
lives together; that, at least, is how I came to understand what may have
happened" (Miller, 381). [Back]
20 Zarathustra, 61. [Back]
21 Miller, 351. [Back]
22 The Greek word genos refers to race and kin. It
can also denote "birth"—the bursting forth, not the extinguishing of life.
Genos is derived from the verb gignomal, which means "to be or to become";
again, the emphasis is on existence. Finally, for the Greeks genos has
its roots in theogony—the birth of the gods—the immortals. See A Greek-English
Lexicon, compiled by Liddel, Scott, and Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1968). [Back]
23 "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work
in Progress," interview with Michel Foucault, in Rabinow, 351.
[Back]
24 Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles
(New York: Penguin, 1977), lines 235-236. [Back]
25 J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory:
The Road Not Taken (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990),
70. [Back]
26 Foucault does not dispute this: we are always caught
up in some discourse and our projects of disengagement are always partial
(WIE, 47). What Foucault disavows is that identity shaping should be primarily
a task of "discovery." All attempts at historical self-grounding are illusory—based
on fugitive beginnings and contingent discourses and social practices.
In place of a fixed, unitary identity, Foucault's genealogy celebrates
and explores the plurality of conflicting voices that dwell in the psyche,
constantly combining, re-combining, and altering those voices in a fluid
self-composition. [Back]
27 I want to thank David Barrett-Johnson for bringing
these issues to my attention. Johnson speculates that there was a Jewish
polemic against the circumstances of Jesus's birth. In the Talmud, for
example, Jesus is often referred to as "Ben Panthera [son of Panthera],
suggesting his illegitimacy. See Howard Clark Kee, Jesus in History:
An Approach to the Study of the Gospels (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1977), 48-54.
Matthew, then, could be suggesting that women who stand outside the
sexual mores of the tradition are, despite the aura of impropriety, redemptively
used in God's sovereign plan for his people. The fact that Matthew lumps
Mary together with other "promiscuous" women, however, does not mean that
the author had doubts about the virgin birth. Whatever he is doing, Johnson
believes, it is something more interesting than merely saying "No, you
are not telling the truth" to the accusers of Jesus/Mary.
[Back]
28 Communities of memory, institutions, and individuals—as
Alasdair MacIntyre points out—discuss, debate, and contest the ends they
pursue. "[B]earer[s] of tradition . . . in a centrally important way, [are]
constituted by a continuous argument as to what . . . [they] ought to be.
. . . Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict." See Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222. [Back]
29 Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well
(New York: Basic Books, 1992), 195. [Back]
30 Ibid., 199. [Back]
31 "Genealogy of Ethics," 351. [Back]
32 Ibid., 352. [Back]
33 For an account of the death or disappearance of
the author see Foucault's essay "What is an Author?" in the Rabinow reader.
MacIntyre, in his most recent book, deftly "uncovers" the author: "Yet
now the question arises as to whether what even Foucault's partial implementation
of that program may not have revealed is that the successive strategies
of the genealogist may not inescapably after all involve him or her in
commitments to standards at odds with the central theses of the genealogical
stance. For in making his or her sequence of strategies of masking and
unmasking intelligible to him or herself, the genealogist has to ascribe
to a self not to be dissolved into masks and moments, a self which cannot
but be conceived as more and other than its disguises and concealments
and negotiations, a self which just insofar as it can adopt alternative
perspectives is itself not perspectival, but persistent and substantial."
Three
Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition
(Notre Dame, Ind: Notre Dame Press, 1990), 54. [Back]
34 Michel Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence," in
Politics,
Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. with
an introduction by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988). [Back]
35 Ibid., 49. Charles Taylor complains that Foucault's
use of critique to open up this new path betrays his desire to "distance"
himself from "truth and freedom," the key terms for a view he rejects—the
notion that there is a "deep self" to be brought to light: "Indeed, in
offering us a new way of re-appropriating our history, and in rescuing
us from the supposed illusion that the issues of the deep self are somehow
inescapable, what is Foucault laying open for us, if not a truth which
frees us for self-making?" (Taylor, 99).
[Back]
36 Miller, 358. Also see Thomas Flynn, "Foucault as
Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France," in The
Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge,
Mass: 1988), 102-118. [Back]
37 Miller, 358. [Back]
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