It can be difficult to place Foucauldian genealogy within a discipline, because Foucault’s work cut across disciplinary boundaries. He was a philosopher, certainly, but his philosophy was at all times historiographical; he was a historian, arguably, but his historiography was at all times philosophical. Foucault’s legacy extends through multiple disciplines, including history, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, to name but a few (see Skinner, 2002; Agamben, 1998; Dean, 1991; During, 1992, respectively), but that is not to say that he ‘belongs’ to any of these disciplines—he was, in a passive sense, ‘cross-disciplinary’, in that his investigations carried him from the philosophical into the historical, sociological, and cultural; but he was also, in an active sense, ‘counter- disciplinary’ in that his enterprise tested the limits of disciplinarity, challenging each to
absorb a little of the other in the pursuit of deeper understanding (Koopman, 2008; Osborne, 2015).
Foucault did not consider himself to be a historian as such, noting late on that his studies were “studies of ‘history’ by reason of the domain they deal with and the references they appeal to; but they are not the work of a ‘historian’”, instead, he clarifies that it was “a philosophical exercise”, the object being “to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (1985, p. 9). The extent to which Foucault could be classed as a historian did, in fact, change throughout his lifetime (Megill, 1987) and, I would argue, has changed considerably more since his death. I shall explore this a little further in the section below on intellectual and environmental history (§ 3.2), but for now it should suffice to say the discipline of history itself—particularly intellectual history—has morphed to accommodate the distinctly philosophical breed of historiography that Foucault and others have cultivated. As Deleuze has it, “Foucault has managed to invent… a properly philosophical form of interrogation which is itself new and which revives History” (1988, p. 49). Thus, despite his protestations, Foucault has posthumously become an accidental historian.
Likewise, Foucault did not consider himself a sociologist—despite his evident resonance with the discipline. When he mentions it in his writings and in interviews, Foucault treats sociology as an object, rather than a mode, of analysis (cf. 1970). In a detailed account of Foucault’s methods, Dean cautions: “It would be inexcusable to remake him a social theorist or to regard him as a sociologist in disguise” (1994, p. 13). Instead, argues Dean, we should regard Foucault as both a ‘philosophical historian’ and a ‘historical philosopher’. To be clear: this is not a reference to ‘the history of philosophy’, as in the study philosophers of the past; nor is it ‘the philosophy of history’, as in meditations upon historiographical practice. Rather, Foucault was a philosopher who used history to practice philosophy, and, in retrospect, a historian who used philosophy to understand history. The implications for the study of the social are significant, but ancillary to his intellectual project.
As for cultural studies, the uses of Foucault are profuse—and somewhat contentious. The desire to unravel contemporary cultural phenomena by recourse to Foucault’s methodological toolkit has spawned a great number of books and articles. But the peculiar history of cultural studies predisposes it to an explicitly normative form of cultural critique (Hall, 1980). Foucault is deployed to expose the historical contingency
of race, gender, and class in order to puncture the illusion of permanence that enables their cultural reproduction. It is this normativity and subsequent instrumentality, however, which attracts contention (see Kendall and Wickham, 1999, p. 118). Foucault did not start with a normative ideal, and then search for ways to give force to his ideals by producing resistive knowledge; rather, he set out to study the construction of knowledge by others and the ways in which knowledge was implicated in the exercise of power. Any grist given to the wheel of hegemonic cultural critique was unintended, and the innovations of cultural scholars along those lines were independent of Foucault’s genealogy.
My intention over the course of this research has been to cut across these disciplines in the same way that Foucault did, but this does not imply a precise replication of any single interpretation of Foucault’s methods. As Dean establishes, Foucault’s own accounts of his own methods are inconsistent, whereby “having offered accounts of method at certain points, he appears to jettison them or take them up in an entirely different fashion” (Dean, 1994, p. 2). Dean attributes this to a process by which Foucault reflects upon his methods in retrospect, offering an account of what he has done, rather than what he will do, or what he had intended from the outset. For Dean, the point is not to “codify” Foucault’s methods, but to “find out how far one can get by reflecting on them in the context of particular problems” (ibid., p. 2). Likewise, Rabinow and Rose identify that it is “not a matter of seeking to define a singular approach or a unique methodology which we can then apply to our current concerns”, noting that Foucault himself would be “wryly sceptical” of any attempt to “discipline his thought and turn it into an orthodoxy” (Rabinow and Rose, 2003, p. vii). The closest we might come to ‘applying Foucault’s methods’ in these respects is to have at our disposal the range of analytic tools that Foucault developed, and apply them to our own objects of analysis in the spirit of which they were intended—adapting, repurposing, and adding new tools to suit.
In addition to the adaptive and reactive nature of Foucault’s methods, there is another, overarching consideration to bear in mind: the danger of methodological anachronism. As I write this sentence it is the year 2019, a full 35 years after Foucault’s untimely death; 44 years after the publication of his first genealogical work (1975); 65 years since his first publication (1954). Foucault was writing before the Internet, before the mass digitisation of documents, before automatic translation, before ‘big data’, algorithmic processing, and artificial intelligence. As the saying goes, ‘history is not what it used to be’—and nor is the analysis of text, in any other domain, for any other purpose (Butler, 2015). Foucault’s romantic evocation of “dusty tomes, texts that are never read,
books that are no sooner printed than they are consigned to the shelves” (1980, p. 79), is now complemented by the smudged screens, squint scans, and pixelated text that typify the great book-scanning projects of the 21st century. One notable effect of this is on the
speed with which one can work with documents. At once, the mundane tasks of data collection, storage, and retrieval are sped up by the tools of digitisation; but at the same time, analysis is slowed to a crawl by the sheer and unrelenting avalanche of texts that populate the archive.
Foucault started his intellectual project at a time when, as he himself remarked, “you had to be as a philosopher a Marxist, or a phenomenologist or a structuralist”, but that he “adhered to none of these dogmas” (Foucault and Riggins, 1997, p. 125). As such, it is important to read Foucault in his own intellectual context: much of his argumentation was pitched in response to—or pre-emption of—Marxist, phenomenological, and structuralist critique. His work was situated within, across, and against those prevailing systems of thought. Today, Marxism and phenomenology are by no means the main pillars of philosophy, and structuralism is more readily found on the ‘history of philosophy’ shelf than in philosophical practice. Read in context, the relevance of Foucault’s writings to contemporary political and philosophical concerns is not immediately obvious. The philosophical movement of which Foucault was part—what we might call the ‘practice turn’ in philosophy (Schatzki, 2001)—was not a fait accompli, but a process in which he was instrumental; in reality, each methodological innovation was met with scrutiny, and every overturned belief met with scorn (Davidson, 1997; Foucault, 1991; 1998). Foucault’s writings have stood strong, but the intellectual context they now inhabit is new, which inevitably changes their meaning—and their effect.
Likewise, the political formations and transformations that Foucault studied, and those that he lived through, were not the ones we are experiencing today. Even his ground- breaking analysis of neo-liberalism, conducted in the 1970s (Foucault, 2008), was the study of a barely nascent political movement that had not yet found expression in the usual suspects of Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). Foucault once remarked that “Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else” (1970, p. 285); thus, it is important to ensure that Foucault is not simply a fish from the water of the 20th century, floundering on the
banks of the 21st. The risks of anachronism must be confronted and resolved.
On the basis of these observations, I have undertaken this genealogy with a critical approach to the method itself. I have read Foucault’s writings in their own historical,
political, and intellectual context, and extracted his analytics with great care, taking note of the local and historical specificity of their original use, and the limits of their re- application. In the process, I have developed a strict distinction between three elements of Foucault’s work: methods, analytics, and concepts, which will serve as my methodological framework. This enables me to develop a research practice that is both classically Foucauldian in its epistemology, and appropriately novel in its expression. In the next sections, I lay out the epistemological implications of this ‘taxonomy’ of Foucauldian research, followed by a description of each of the methods, analytics, and concepts, and how they are used in this research. But first, a note on the relationship between genealogy and other forms of historiography, which the current work will undoubtedly be situated within and alongside—namely intellectual history, and environmental history.