After the concept of the statement is understood, the actual identification of individual statements is relatively easy. The difficulty arises from the sheer volume of text and the time required to read and uncover the statements contained within—which are necessarily rare and dispersed. Days of reading can pass without any new statements appearing, and when one does, an interrogation must take place: has this rule been revealed elsewhere in the prose so far? Does this rule change the effect of other rules found so far? Do I need to return to a previous reading to re-evaluate? In this sense, reading is not a linear process.
Each new discovery affects the last. Each statement ripples out through the incomplete archive, casting a new light, revealing a new layer of detail in past readings, opening up a new array of possibilities for future readings.
The purpose of gathering statements is to reconstruct the discursive formation. The discursive formation is a multi-dimensional object; it is a system, a structure made of reciprocal rules, and statements are its building blocks. The way I have come to think of the discursive formation is as a kind of algebra. Each statement is an element in an equation: a + b = c. Just as a and b could be any number, and c is always their sum, the actual statement could be made of different words, but will always perform the same function. In this algebraic metaphor, discourse is made of the variables, the numbers; the discursive formation is the equation that governs them. This manifests in my use of language in the body of the research: where I talk about ‘discourse’, I mean the actual words uttered; when I talk about the ‘discursive formation’, I mean the rules that structure the discourse.
The presence of statements is revealed not only by their explicit mention, but also by the way they affect the rest of the discourse. This is something that cannot be fully understood from the outset, but as more statements are gathered, and their effects become more familiar, it becomes possible to ‘pre-empt’ a statement by inferring the self-imposed limits of the discourse that precedes it. Contrary to Foucault’s assertion, there is definitely an element of hermeneutic involved at this stage. While the statements themselves are not something to be ‘interpreted’, the text that contains them is. I would describe it as a process of becoming ‘attuned’ to the presence of statements. I was not fully attuned to begin with, so I was regularly forced to return to a text at a later date, when I felt sure I would see it anew, or to check possible contradictions and inconsistencies. As I read, and as the totality of the archive gradually came to be at my disposal, the function of the statements, in their regularity and dispersion, became unmistakable. The archive is not a book to be read from cover to cover; it is a landscape to be explored. It requires boundless curiosity, patient attention to detail, and perhaps a slightly obsessive disposition.
Entire shelves can be filled with analyses of Foucault’s archaeology (see Dean, 1994; Deleuze, 1988; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983; Foucault, 1972; Hacking, 1979; Koopman, 2008; Le Cercle d'épistémologie, 2012, for some of the more useful examples), but what I want to achieve here is not a comprehensive overview; this is merely an insight into how I have thought about and used archaeology in the course of this genealogy. Using this method, I collected my data, a snapshot of knowledge; but the real purpose is to reveal
the motion of history, the interplay of practices, and the exercise of power. For this, we must expand into the next method: genealogy.
3.4.5 Genealogy
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species2 and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to
follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.
(Foucault, 1984, p. 81) Genealogy is a riskier venture than archaeology. It requires a bold leap into the darkness of a history concealed behind obfuscation and mythology. Where archaeology is the ‘science’ of the archive—the ‘felicitous positivism’ that deals in visible statements on a tangible page—genealogy is the ‘diagnosis’; it peels back the skin of history to examine the tell-tale signs of its aetiology. Genealogy’s concepts are constructed by theorisation, it draws its inferences by inductive and abductive reasoning. It is never truly able to ‘see’ its objects, only their effects, their traces, their signature. For these reasons, the praxis of genealogical research is completely different from its archaeological partner; genealogy occurs in the application of analytics, it exists for the most part only in thought, it is a philosophical practice.
Foucault never gave his genealogical method the book-length exposition that archaeology received, so we are left to gather morsels from various essays, lectures, and interviews, and to infer a great deal from his published research. Foucault alluded to his
2 This is actually a misunderstanding of evolution on Foucault’s part: it is precisely the ‘accidents, minute deviations,
complete reversals, and errors’, in both organisms and their environments, that drives natural selection and determines the evolution of species. Evolution is not teleological.
genealogical expansion in his response to The epistemology circle (1998), which became the introduction to The archaeology of knowledge (1972), but his first—one might say his only—full analysis and exposition of the method was a 1971 essay titled Nietzsche, genealogy, history (1984). In it, Foucault laid out what he took to be the ‘rules’ of Nietzschean genealogy:
Genealogy demands relentless erudition. To begin, Foucault makes an observation on the work of the genealogist—in line with the aspiration that one must ‘read everything’—which is that the answers do not stand out to be found easily, and will not be found in a few lofty places as the product of ‘large and well-meaning errors’. The answers are scattered across “a field of entangled and confused parchments”, only to be accessed by the “vast accumulation of source material” and “relentless erudition” demanded of the genealogist. (ibid., pp. 76–77).
There are no origins. The ‘origin’ is a central problematic for genealogy, because the search for origins is a search for the absolute beginning, the moment at which something comes into existence without reason or cause in the external world. Genealogy rejects this notion. It seeks to recover “not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion”; genealogy cultivates the “details and accidents that accompany every beginning” and finds its causes in “the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats”. There are no origins, only events and their consequences. (ibid., pp. 77–80).
Descent is the true objective. In place of the search for origins, the genealogist must substitute the analysis of ‘descent’. The analysis of descent is not a search for family resemblances; rather, it seeks out the moments in which difference is produced. It is not an attempt to identify the unbroken continuity of traits or concepts handed down; rather, descent traces “the myriad events through which—thanks to which, against which—they were formed”. Despite the allusion of its name, it is not quite right to think of genealogy as a ‘family tree’; it is more like the ‘life history’ of a phenomenon, from its accidental inception, through its haphazard development, to its unexpected end. Descent is a record of chaos. (ibid., pp. 80–83).
Emergence is the starting point. At the beginning of descent there is ‘emergence’; “the entry of forces… their eruption, the leap from the wings to center stage”. Not simply the first time something appears, but the event in which the new comes into conflict with the old, the space in which they “exchange their threatening gestures
and speeches”. The analysis of emergence is concerned less with what was said, or by whom, and more with the “scene where they are displayed superimposed or face-to-face”. In this sense, the analysis of emergence looks to the conditions of possibility, as well as the conflict that unfolds within. (ibid., pp. 83–86).
There is no telos. The overarching theme that pervades Foucault’s reading of genealogy is the rejection of teleology. The long march of progress is an illusion scratched over historical accounts to obscure the ‘real’ history beneath—the chaotic and haphazard events that hammer out their own path through the void of time. In the teleological view of history, events move from their purest origin, to progress along their preordained path, toward their inevitable telos. Genealogy seeks the diagnosis of the present; not the telos of the future. It traces the discontinuities of descent; not the continuity of progress. It finds genesis in the scrappy conflicts of emergence, not the pure essence of origin. The ‘events’ of history, therefore, are not affirmations of the extant; they are the usurpation of power, the appropriation of discourse, and the sharp change of direction. (ibid., pp. 86–90).
Genealogy is active in history. Foucault goes on to interrogate historiography itself, its obfuscations and contradictions—a genealogy of history—the sting in the tail being that the emergence of genealogy is, itself, proof of historical continency. “If this fully represents the genealogy of history, how could it become, in its own right, a genealogical analysis? Why did it not continue as a form of demagogic or religious knowledge? How could it change roles on the same stage?” The answer being, of course, that it was never eternal. The emergence of genealogy is played out on “a scene where forces are risked in the chance of confrontations, where they emerge triumphant, where they can also be confiscated”. The discontinuities of historiography are evidence in themselves of the discontinuous nature of history. (ibid., pp. 90–93).
Genealogy is critique without anachronism. This, the last of Foucault’s rules, closes on the question of anachronism, and the analytical mode which separates genealogy from other forms of critique. Genealogy does not treat history as an extension of the present, to be judged by the standards of the present. Nor does it cut across epistemic boundaries to hold one form of knowledge up to the standards of another. Genealogy seeks the vicissitudes of an emergence within the field of its own discourse— how it entered at the time, how it was received at the time, how events unfolded at the time. As a form of critique, genealogy operates entirely within the domain of its objects of analysis, without recourse to the values and norms held to be eternal by the righteous.
In these ways, genealogy is radical in both its historicism and its critique. (ibid., pp. 93– 97).
The essay was the beginning of Foucault’s full commitment to genealogy. It represented his own ‘leap from the wings’, on to a course that would result in him becoming the ‘other’ great genealogist alongside Nietzsche. But it was not the end of his thought on the nature, purpose, and practice of genealogy. Foucault would go on to develop his own framework; incorporating the ‘rules’ he garnered from Nietzsche, but recasting them within the triad of knowledge, power, and the subject. Along these three ‘axes’, Foucault would construct his own genealogical method, as the analysis of ‘discursive practices’, ‘technologies of government’, and ‘practices of the self’.
The analysis of discursive practice—made visible by the method of archaeology—reveals the formation of knowledge; not, strictly speaking, to chart the development of knowledge or the sequence of its formation, but to reveal the way in which knowledge is regulated, and thus the way in which truth is understood. The analysis of technologies of government3, reveals the intentionality—the planning, the
procedures—behind the exercise of power; which is to say the attempt to exercise power, since such an analysis only sees the procedures put in place, not their effectiveness. It is not concerned with domination or hegemonic power, but the mundane, technical, and procedural techniques of everyday government, directed toward specific problematisations. The analysis of practices of the self, the final addition to Foucault’s genealogy, reveals the role of the subject—not merely as the recipients of subjectivation, but complicit in their own subjection, participating in discursive practice, cooperating in the technologies of government. Subjects are made by the deployment of knowledge and the exercise of power, to be sure, but they also make themselves—or rather, we make ourselves.
Together, these three axes cross at the centre of Foucault’s genealogy, forming a typology of objects of analysis, and creating a genealogical method distinct from its forebears. Foucault has interpreted Nietzsche’s genealogy, and incorporated it into his own framework. I take this genealogy as the theoretical framework for my own research, wherein it serves as the philosophical basis of my overall approach (see Raffnsøe et al., 2016, pp. 374–380, for a thoughtful exposition of Foucault's own philosophical and
3 Technologies are techniques which have been made portable. For example, techniques of discipline may be
developed in the barracks, but then ported across into other situations where discipline is desired, such as schools or prisons, at which point those techniques become technologies. It is their repurposing, and re-application that designates them as such.
methodological reflection). The actual practical business of Foucauldian genealogy, however, takes place not in the general approach, but in the application of Foucault’s analytics. In the following section I shall outline the specific analytics used, including a description of how they were applied in my research.