Wesleyan University

Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power-Knowledge

Author(s): Larry Shiner
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Oct., 1982), pp. 382-398
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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READING FOUCAULT: ANTI-METHOD AND THE

GENEALOGY OF POWER-KNOWLEDGE

LARRY SHINER

Michel Foucault is both philosopher and historian, yet he is neither. He can

execute the analytic somersaults typical of the structuralist or the sustained
textual analysis of the philological historian only to turn the results against
structuralism and conventional historiography. And, of course, his name has

become synonymous with the trick of taking the liberal intellectuals' favorite

historical assumptions and standing them on their heads. Paris has not been

without its prominent jesters in recent years - Roland Barthes or Jacques

Derrida immediately come to mind. Foucault is unique in the intensity of the
political purpose behind his masquerades.
One must read his genealogies of the prison, sex, or of the human sciences,
therefore, as a political act rather than merely a history of their development
or a philosophy of their foundations. This is not to deny that Foucault

explicitly deals with "origins" or with philosophical assumptions. On the

contrary, he treats both the historical and philosophical questions in the same
breath and he does so in the context of a political critique. Since this tight
interweaving of political, historical, and philosophical has only gradually be-

come apparent, it is understandable that the early expositions of Foucault,

such as the excellent summaries of Hayden White and Ian Hacking, expounded
Foucault's work in chronological fashion as the development of an uncon-

ventional historical method.' Despite the obvious chronological developments

1. See Hayden White's essays on Foucault in his own Tropics of Discourse (Balti-

more, 1978), 230-260 and in Structuralism and Since, ed. Jonathan Sturrock (Oxford,
1979), 80-115. Ian Hacking has treated Foucault in "Michel Foucault's Immature
Science," Nous 13 (March 1979), 39-51, and in "The Archaeology of Foucault," The New
York Review of Books (May 14, 1981). Among recent expositions of Foucault Alan
Sheridan's useful survey Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London, 1980) comes

closest to putting the analysis of power at the center of Foucault's work. Yet Sheridan
emphasizes the cultural iconoclasm of Nietzsche, rather than political critique, as the key

to understanding Foucault, and Sheridan's chronological form of exposition tends to

obscure rather than illuminate the anti-methodological character of Foucault's work by
giving the impression of a methodological breakthrough in the later works. Michael S.
Roth emphasizes the critical aspect of Foucault's work but does not give the analysis of

power and Foucault's political intent sufficient emphasis in "Foucault's 'History of the
Present,' " History and Theory 20 (1981), 32-46.

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READING

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383

in Foucault's work, especially the well-known shift from "archaeology" to

"genealogy," I believe the most cogent interpretation of Foucault will see his
work in terms of its political purpose and, reading it in reverse, delineate the
emergence of an anti-method. I mean anti-method in the sense we have come

to speak of the anti-novel or anti-art. In what follows I want to give some

directions for reading Foucault that will make it more difficult to assimilate
(or dismiss) Foucault as a maverick methodologist and will force us to deal
with the political question he puts to philosophy, history, and the human

sciences. In the first section I shall deal with Foucault's understanding of the
political role of intellectual work; in the second section with Foucault's antimethod, the genealogy of power-knowledge; in the third with his genealogy of

the human sciences as an illustration of his anti-method.

I. THE POLITICS OF TRUTH

The political intention behind Foucault's work is most clearly articulated in

his view of the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. The traditional role is that of the "universal" intellectual, the writer of genius who

speaks as the moral conscience of mankind, protesting injustice and the abuse
of power (for example, Voltaire, Sartre). This role is gradually receding in

favor of the "specific" intellectual who speaks out on regional issues which
'relate to his or her field of knowledge and practice (for example, Oppen-

heimer, Sasz). Unlike the universal intellectual who speaks for everyone,
including the proletarian masses, specific intellectuals articulate the sector of
life with which they are practically involved - hospitals, housing, delinquency,

nuclear power. The specific intellectual is not the "rhapsodist of the eternal,"
says Foucault, "but the strategist of life and death."2
Foucault's idea of the "specific" intellectual would add little to the traditional view if it assumed the intellectual is a famous or highly placed individual

developing a theory which the ordinary citizen may apply. On the contrary,
the intellectuals Foucault has in mind are found in a variety of occupations nurses or engineers, psychiatrists or sociologists, laboratory researchers or

social workers. Moreover, the knowledge and theory they develop are not

something they "apply" to the problems and political conflicts which touch
the areas of their expertise. By virtue of their location and status in society,
their statements and interpretations become interventions. Their discourse is a
form of action; their theory is practice.
But what of the "professional" intellectual, those of us who spend our time

in research, reflection, and writing? There are two tasks the intellectual in the
narrower sense can perform. First of all she or he can develop certain tools
2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977 (New York, 1980), 129.

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for use in common with others involved in the political struggles of a particular
sector. The intellectual's role is not to provide vision and leadership, nor is
it to offer a global social and economic theory. Rather, it is to provide an
analysis of the "specificity of the mechanisms of power."3 Here we can situate
Foucault's own historical works which deal with the areas of psychiatry,

medicine, criminology, and the human sciences - in each case Foucault

examines the intellectual assumptions and power structures which constitute

the nexus within which the contending parties stake their claims.
The second task for the intellectual in the narrower sense is to develop an

analysis and critique of what Foucault calls the "regime of truth." Every
society, Foucault claims, has a kind of political economy of truth which says

what kinds of discourse are true, what the mechanisms and sanctions are for
distinguishing true from false, the techniques for acquiring truth and the status
of those who are empowered to say what is true.4 In Western societies, for
example, "truth" is centered in scientific discourse and institutions; it is
central to economic production and political power; it is widely circulated;

it is produced and disseminated by great economic and political apparatuses

like the university, the media, or the army. In this system of truth there are

many forms of excluded and subjected knowledge. Those who occupy the
lowest status in various institutions or conditions of life - the patient, inmate,

prisoner, welfare mother, laborer, student - all find their knowledge discounted. They are part of a system of power which invalidates their discourse,
occasionally by blatant denial, but continuously by a set of implicit rules
concerning what sorts of concepts and vocabulary are acceptable and what

credentials and status are requisite for one's discourse to count as knowledge.5
"If the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle,"

Foucault remarks, "it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the

power to speak on prison conditions - at present, the exclusive property of

prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups."6 The role of the
intellectual, therefore, is not only to struggle alongside others by developing

tools of analysis concerning the power nexus of a particular region, but also
to question the general "politics of truth" in society.

Thus one can distinguish two levels of analysis in Foucault's writings: the
level of the analysis of regional structures of power-knowledge and the level
of the critique of the regime of truth. Each of Foucault's works deals with
some aspect of the politics of truth at the same time that it analyzes a limited

region of practice. Thus The Order of Things describes the set of intellectual

rules which invisibly govern how objects may be formed as well as indicating
3. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 145.
4. Ibid., 131.

5. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, 1977), 207.
6. Ibid., 214.

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READING

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385

the status of the subject. The Order of Discourse describes not only the way
intellectual rules exclude some kinds of discourse and validate others but also

suggests how this order becomes an institutional exercise of power.8 Finally,

with Discipline and Punish, Foucault shifts his emphasis to the way micro-

political structures both engender and are engendered by various domains of

knowledge, particularly the human sciences.9
By rejecting the role of the universal intellectual as well as the corresponding idea of a global theory, Foucault also displaces the traditional quest
for method and the problem of philosophical foundations. Phenomenology
and structuralism are only two of the more recent philosophical "methods"
which have been celebrated as offering the foundation the human sciences

have sought so long. Because of his thorough rejection of phenomenology,

Foucault has sometimes been interpreted as applying a structuralist method to

the field of intellectual history; or, if his explicit denial that he is a structuralist
is accepted, one interprets Foucault as offering a new method of his own -

the "archaeology of knowledge" or the "genealogy of power." There are

numerous texts in Foucault which can be read this way, and certainly The
Archaeology of Knowledge gives every appearance of being a treatise on

method in intellectual history. Yet if we read this book in the light of

Foucault's avowed political purpose a different interpretation is necessary.
The Archaeology of Knowledge is a strange book. On the one hand it con-

tains a methodological tour de force, at once brilliantly imaginative and

systematic, for the constitution of a new kind of event or level in history. On
the other hand it engages in a trenchant and ironic sparring with an imaginary

critic, a sparring which suggests that all this "bizarre machinery" of concepts,

as Foucault calls it, is not an engine of method in the traditional sense at all.
Challenged by his imaginary interlocutor to say whether his writing is philosophy or history, Foucault replies that it may be neither if by philosophy is

meant a return of the origin or by history the bringing to life of half-effaced

figures.10 Rather his work is without ground; it is "a discourse about discourses," "a diagnosis."' Foucault seems to be saying: "You think I am
applying structuralist method? I'll show you a method." And having shown
us this "method" without a starting point, he promptly goes off and forgets
it. We see practically nothing of this "bizarre machinery" of concepts in
Foucault's subsequent writings. Viewed in the perspective of the political

orientation of his total project, then, The Archaeology of Knowledge becomes

7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1973).

8. Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris, 1971). In English as "The Discourse

on Language" published as the appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York,

1972).

9. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979).
10. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 300.
11. Ibid., 205.

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not merely a critique of the conventional history of ideas and a clever suggestion for its replacement by a diagnostics of discursive practices, but above
all a parody of the search for method.

If one persists in seeing Foucault as a methodologist, the phrase "genealogy

of power" which from 1972 replaces "archaeology of knowledge" will be
even more grossly misinterpreted. Here again one can find texts which might

seem to support such a reading; for example, there is a chapter in the History
of Sexuality, Vol. I entitled "Method."112 But one makes a methodologist -

and thereby a merely unconventionally conventional historian - of Foucault

only at the price of depoliticizing his work. To grasp the deeply political

character of Foucault's scholarship, one must keep in mind that the politics
he means has nothing to do with electoral or even ideological preferences but

with the politics of truth. It is a question of the reciprocity of power and

knowledge. But isn't that a methodological principle: "Wherever there is

knowledge, look for the power(s) it produces and those that produce and

sustain it"? If it is to be a methodological principle in the traditional academic

sense, however, this statement must claim for itself a special kind of univer-

sality. As the foundation of a method of historical research such a principle

cannot itself be merely historical; and if it is proposed as the foundation of a
method of political analysis it cannot itself be a political statement. But this
is just the status Foucault accords his discourse. His analysis is a political
critique of the liberal-humanist separation of power and knowledge and at

the same time it is a critique of the Marxist view of power as economic

exploitation and class domination. In other words, Foucault is not looking
for a "method" which will be superior to other methods in objectivity and
comprehensiveness but is forging tools of analysis which take their starting
point in the political-intellectual conflicts of the present. His method is an

anti-method in the sense that it seeks to free us from the illusion that an
apolitical method is possible.

II. GENEALOGIES OF POWER-KNOWLEDGE

Foucault calls his anti-method "genealogy." Like all Foucault's analytical

tools "genealogy" is chosen as much for its polemical advantage as its

descriptive specificity. It is Nietzsche's term and Foucault uses it in Nietzsche's
ironic, agonistic way. It allows Foucault to distance himself from traditional
humanistic historiography (also Nietzsche's target) as well as from a certain

kind of Marxist totalizing theory. In addition, it incorporates the earlier

concept of "archaeology" while correcting its misleading nuances and its

failure adequately to treat the reality of power.
12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York,
1980), 92-102.

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With respect to traditional humanist historiography - particularly the

history of ideas - Foucault's main target is a complex of notions gathered
around the idea of origins. In the traditional approach it is assumed that one
can trace ideas or institutions back to a sort of founding era or moment when

their essential meaning was first revealed. The historian can then follow the
continuous development - either as progress or "fall" - away from the
original and essential meaning. Closely linked to the notions of origin and
continuity is the idea of "subject" or the "author," the individual as creator
and bearer of history. Finally, traditional historiography has operated with

certain conventional notions of what comprises "events." In the case of the

history of ideas these are the "work," the "theory," the "idea," the "discipline."
Taken together, origin-continuity-subject-event form the matrix of the tradi-

tional history of ideas, for example, the story of "founding saints" whose
originating genius set in motion a development which has led to the sciences
and belief systems as we know them today. "Genealogy" contests the "origincontinuity-subject-event" complex at every point.
Foucault rejects the idea of "origin" as presupposing an essence or truth

which has either unfolded or degenerated. His genealogy, like Nietzsche's,

traces not "origins" (Ursprung) but "descent" (Herkunft); it finds not the
purity and promise of a beginning but a series of instaurations of power.'3
Hence to reject "origin" is also to reject the possibility of continuity. Genealogy is the analysis of how one constellation of power-knowledge relations is

displaced by another; it attends to the breaks that punctuate history. For all
his emphasis on discontinuity, however, Foucault does not regard it as a

principle but as a fact concerning certain regions of experience. Foucault's

question is not "how can we prove everything is discontinuous," but "why
have there in fact been these sudden shifts?"'4
By refusing to trace continuities in history, genealogy is also led to reject
the "subject" as the creator of history and the bearer of its continuity. On the
contrary, genealogy shows how the subject is "created" by power-knowledge
complexes of history. Foucault's polemic is specifically aimed at the phenomenological conception of the subject as the constitutive foundation of

knowledge. In Foucault's view, even the historicized subject of existentialism

remains an ahistorical residue at the heart of history. Genealogy is "a form
of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses,
domains of objects, etc., 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 events."1'5 More specifically, Foucault's

13. A crucial essay for understanding Foucault's work is "Nietzsche, Genealogy and
History," to be found in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 139-164.
14. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 112.
15. Ibid., 117.

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genealogy dispenses with the idea of the "author." In his essay "What is an
Author?" Foucault examines the ambiguous role the "author-function" plays
in our culture, showing how an "author" and his or her "works" are extremely

problematic concepts. Once we recognize their culturally specific and conventional character, the privilege given to the "author" and the "work" as
units of historical study cannot be justified.'6

Genealogy not only rejects the subject as the originating force or point of
continuity in history, it also undercuts the conventional "objects" or "events"
studied by the history of ideas - the idea, the theory, the constituted
discipline or science. These events or units are regarded by Foucault as just
as problematic as the "author" or the "work." In The Order of Things, for
example, Foucault argues that the organizing principles which inform the

natural history of the eighteenth century give it more in common with the
analysis of wealth or the general grammar of that time than with the biology
of the nineteenth century, which is governed by a set of principles it shares
with the political economy and philosophy of its day. Accordingly, the

historian could more justifiably take these organizing principles as the "event"
to be studied than anachronistically making the sciences as currently conceived
a model for the event.

Thus a genealogy will not take its events as they are conventionally given

to it, but will constitute its own events. Specifically, genealogy will look for
the anonymous rules governing discursive practices along with the network
of power relations of which these rules are a part. For example, in The Order
of Things, the particular set of human sciences which Foucault studies are not

described in terms of their founders or the internal evolution of concepts and

theories but in terms of the implicit rules which governed them - rules for

the formation of objects and concepts, for the selection of theoretical strategies, for positioning the subject. Because Foucault rejects the conventional
"events" of intellectual history to focus on a set of anonymous rules which
formed their preconceptual conditions, he has been misunderstood as rejecting
events as such in order to study structures. But Foucault sees no such

dichotomy between structure and event. In common with the Annales ap-

proach, he is simply studying events of a different scope and temporal breadth.

The main purpose of the term "archaeology" in Foucault's early works was
to call attention to this different level or stratum of events - "discursive
formations" - which lay between the general rules of linguistic structure on

the one hand and the particular epistemological formulations of science and
philosophy on the other.

The term "archaeology," however, was unfortunate from several points of

view. It carried the implication that it might be a new systematic "method,"

something Foucault himself occasionally seemed to entertain. Second, its
16. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 113-138.

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connotations easily lent the suggestion of uncovering some deeply buried

original meaning, a project completely foreign to Foucault's intention (although his oracular pronouncements on the imminent disappearance of "man"

did not help). Finally, of itself, the term "archaeology" gives no hint of the
importance of relations of power. "Genealogy," because of its Nietzschean
resonances, avoids any suggestions of systematic method or the uncovering

of original Truth and more easily calls to mind the conflicts of power.
Whereas one could justifiably interpret Foucault's "archaeology of knowledge"
as a description of discursive rules which are purely intellectual, "genealogy"
is a reminder that we must always consider the ways these rules are integrated
with a nexus of power. Although Foucault now sees that the reciprocal

workings of power-knowledge was the "event" he was studying already in

Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, he grants he hardly
used the word and never had power in mind as a specific field of analysis.17
Foucault believes the reason he did not explicitly treat power as a central

problem at that time was owing to the inadequacy of the two analyses of
power then available: the Right's view of power in terms of constitution or
sovereignty and the Left's in terms of domination and class conflict. It was

the revolt of 1968 and its aftermath, "the daily struggles at grass roots level,
among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power,"
that led Foucault to formulate an alternative view. That view of power is the
heart of his "genealogy."'18
Thus if one side of Foucault's genealogy can be read as a critique of the
idealizing and transcendentalist tendencies of the traditional history of ideas,

the other side can be read as a critique of the tendency of traditional political
theory to conceive of power as a commodity possessed by some who exercise
it at the expense of others - even if it is with their consent. The liberal or

juridical view of power treats it as a right one possesses and can therefore
give up to the sovereign state in a contractual exchange. Marxists, on the

other hand, by focusing on production and class conflict see power as located
in a political-economic apparatus of oppression. A third theory of power,

stemming from Hegel and Freud, sees it as repression of the individual,

nature, or instinct for the sake of some higher reality. All three views,

Foucault points out, regard power as limitation, prohibition, repression. The

liberal and Marxist views also agree with each other in viewing power as

concentrated in major political and economic institutions from which it

extends its sway downward to the group and the individual. Foucault's

experience of practical struggles "in the fine meshes of the web of power"
along with his historical studies have led him to an opposite view of power.
He sees power not merely as prohibitive but as productive; not primarily
17. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 115.
18. Ibid., 116.

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exercised from above but as widely distributed; not as exclusively political or

economic but as dispersed in a multitude of forms from the most finely tuned

disciplines for bodily movements to the broadest rules for the formation of
true statements. Above all, Foucault rejects the liberal tradition's separation

of power and knowledge and the Marxist distinction between science and
ideology on the grounds that both imply there can ultimately be a knowledge
untainted by relations of power.

The positive understanding of power which animates Foucault's genealogy

is not a unitary concept he came upon in a sudden flash. He has been

elaborating and revising it in connection with his empirical studies for almost

a decade now. For convenience, his current position may be described in

terms of the answer to three questions:
1) Who has power?
2) How is it exercised?
3) What are its effects?

1) Who has power? Power is diffuse; it is exercised by everyone; it forms a

complex mosaic in which each local piece plays its relatively autonomous
role. Even those whom we ordinarily think of as "powerless" have in-

numerable means of deflection, partial submission, resistance, and localized

action. But these resistances are in no way external to power, a mere reaction
or revolt. Power relations are not a series of binary conflicts, but a mobile
network of struggle. Hence power relations are less a matter of domination
than of circulation.19

But what of the power of the state and the ruling economic classes?

Foucault does not deny the extraordinary forces at their command, but points
out how state and corporate power are built upon and operate through the
relatively autonomous powers at the micro level.20 What Foucault rejects is
the deductive or homologous theory which sees power at the local level as
a mere imposition or reflection of what is above. Instead he seeks "an

ascending analysis of power, starting from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which

each have their own history."'21 Such an analysis may then consider the way
these local mechanisms of power are "invested and annexed by the more
global phenomena."22

2) How is power exercised? As one might expect, Foucault does not think of
power as a mysterious entity but as something which exists only in its
exercise, in "acts," so that properly speaking the focus of analysis is not on

19. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26-27; History of Sexuality, 92-93.

20. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 122.
21. Ibid., 99.
22. Idem.

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"power" but on "relations of power." In his most recent writings Foucault

specifies relations of power as "conducts" (conduites) in the double meaning

of behavior and the shaping of behavior. Power relations are thus a matter
of "governance": a way of attempting to give structure to the terrain of
action of others.23 It follows that power necessarily involves freedom, that

is, a field of possible behavior and reactions. Correspondingly, physical

violence or physical bondage are not relations of power but direct actions on

the bodies of others. Genuine relations of power occur in a field of struggle

where various parties attempt to give structure to the action of others and

the others in turn may comply, resist and/or themselves attempt to give
structure to the same terrain of action. Power relations form a kind of "game"

or "war" in which each participant and group of participants develops strategies to gain an advantage.24
In his books on the prison and sexuality, Foucault shows how the strategies

developed in this "war" are built up from various micro-techniques of power

aimed at the control of the body. This "capillary" form of power relations
"reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts

itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses and learning processes

and everyday lives."25 Often these tactics or micro-technologies of power

begin to reinforce each other and end up forming a strategy without anyone
planning it that way.26 For example, Foucault argues that the moralizing of

the working class in nineteenth-century France may have been adopted as a

strategy of the bourgeoisie, but they did not invent it and impose it on
workers. Instead innumerable individuals and groups responding to "the need

to master a vagabond, floating labor force" contributed to the moralizing

of the working class by setting up schools, by publishing tracts, by creating
company towns, and so forth.27 Hence various tactics, each operating in its
own domain with its own aims, nevertheless end up converging in a "strategy"

which a dominant group may then more or less explicitly make its own.
3) What are the effects of power? Clearly, the effects of power are not

simply negative and restrictive but above all productive. As we have just
seen, the incessant struggle to give structure to the field of action of others

constantly produces tactics which merge into global strategies. Here again,
23. This notion of power relations as a matter of giving structure to the field of action
comes from a recent essay of Foucault's entitled "Le pouvoir comment s'exerce-t-il?" I
am grateful to Hubert Dreyfus for sharing this essay, which will appear as an appendix
to his forthcoming book on Foucault.

24. Foucault is fond of reversing Clausewitz's famous saying that war is politics continued by other means. See Power/Knowledge, 90-92, where he considers the limitations
of this view.
25. Ibid., 39.
26. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95.

27. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 204.

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if we are to understand Foucault, we must not think of this productivity as

limited to an apparatus of political and economic domination but see it as

creating a fine web of power relations which reaches into the most intimate

physical and cerebral areas of life. For Foucault, power simply "produces

reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth."28 Even what we

call the "individual" and the knowledge we have of the individual is the
product of relations of power. Foucault is saying that we will only understand

the real effects of power when we stop looking at power as an external

limitation on an abstract freedom or an already existing "subject" and instead
look for the myriad ways relations of power create the idea of the subject,

the rules of truth, and our modes of behavior. For example, Foucault shows
in his book on sexuality how the supposedly "repressive" power relations in-

volved in authoritative discourse on children's sexuality in the nineteenth

century actually had the effect of sexualizing the infantile body as well as the
relation of parent and child and the whole familial domain.29 "Sexuality is far

more of a positive product of power than power was ever repression of

sexuality. "30

Among the "products" or effects of power, according to Foucault, none

is more important than knowledge. Yet the relationship of power and knowledge is neither unidirectional nor exterior. Foucault believes they stand in an
interior and reciprocal productivity, as indicated by his occasional practice

of joining the two terms as power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir). For Foucault

there is "no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field
of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute
at the same time power relations."31
The cutting edge of Foucault's anti-method, therefore, is the analysis of

the mutual productivity of power and knowledge, genealogies of powerknowledge. Foucault has developed portions of several genealogies: madness,
medicine, punishment, sexuality. He has also developed both an "archaeology"
and a "genealogy" of the human sciences. I want to sketch the outline of his
genealogy of the human sciences since I believe it can best illustrate and
confirm the political reading of Foucault which I am proposing.

III. TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES

From what I have described of Foucault's understanding of power-knowledge

one would expect a genealogy of the human sciences to examine the intimate

connection of the knowledge they represent with the relations of power

28. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194.

29. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 27-30, 41-42.
30. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 30.

31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27.

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which "produced" them. More specifically, such a genealogy should show

how the human sciences emerge from tactics or micro-technologies of power

by which various groups and individuals attempt to give structure to the field
of behavior of others. Conversely, a genealogy of the human sciences should
also be attentive to the way the human sciences at the moment of their birth
reinforce and enlarge the very tactics which are engendering them to produce
technologies of more formalized power-knowledge which converge to form
strategies of domination. The specific thesis of Discipline and Punish links
the emergence of the human sciences to a shift in strategies of power which
occurs at the end of the eighteenth century, a shift most dramatically manifested in a change in the economy of punishment.
Prior to the time of the Revolution, one punished by publicly torturing or
killing a body which had opposed its power to the sovereign power of the
King. In the period after the Revolution, one imprisoned a body (which has

offended the social contract) within a space where it will be disciplined until
it is rendered obedient. The crucial element here, in Foucault's view, is the
shift from concern with punishing the crime to punishing and reforming the

criminal. Although we have become used to the idea that prison "makes"
delinquents in the sense of producing "repeaters," Foucault points out that

the prison system has "made" delinquents from the beginning in the literal
sense of taking as its object of punishment not the offense, but the person

and past of the offender. This new approach not only leads to the creation
of a host of personnel concerned with the biography and character of the
prisoner but also results in a modulation of the length and type of penalty
in keeping with the findings and recommendations of these auxiliary "judges,"

for example, the modern-day psychiatrist, social worker, parole board.32

What particularly interests Foucault in the new approach to punishment,
however, is the way it served as a model for the development of a "disciplinary

society." By "disciplines" Foucault means the micro-techniques of teaching

the body efficient and correct behavior through carefully supervised training
and carefully designed surroundings. The aim of the "disciplines" is a combination of usefulness and obedience; they seek to increase the economic utility
of the body while decreasing its political danger. Foucault describes this new
"micro-physics" of power through an analysis of details from military drill

regulation, pedagogical manuals, school and hospital architecture, and factory

organization, all of which reveal how the strict ordering of space and time in

the prison was paralleled everywhere in society. Along with these microtechniques of power which range from teaching the right number of discrete

movements to perform in presenting arms to those involved in correct

penmanship or in operating a factory machine, goes a precise knowledge
of individuals through a careful keeping of performance records in school,
32. Ibid., 16-23.

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hospital, prison, workplace. Foucault found an ideal image of the indirect

and invisible working of these micro-tactics of discipline in Jeremy Bentham's
"Panopticon," the design for a prison in which the cells are distributed in
a circle around a central observation tower. The idea here is that by providing

the sense of constant scrutiny, the structure itself would modify behavior.33
Although the panopticon is an excellent visual image of the power strategy

of the "disciplines," Foucault locates the supreme instrument and symbol

of the disciplines in the "examination"- whether it occurs in the classroom, the hospital, the parade ground, or the factory floor. The examination
is both a ritual of power and an acquisition of knowledge; it permits both
surveillance and a normative judgment. At one and the same time the
examination distinguishes individuals by virtue of their performance and

generates a set of comparative data for the study of populations. Foucault

sees these last two effects of the examining power as crucial to the establishment of the human sciences.34
First of all, the examination is a key instrument in the process by which
the disciplines "make" individuals. In the older regime of sovereignty,

Foucault remarks, the higher a person's status and power the more he or she
is marked as an individual. In a disciplinary regime, where power functions
more anonymously, those lower down are most individualized -the patient

more than the healthy, the madman or delinquent more than the normal. The
examination generates a mass of documents that capture and fix the individual in terms of conducts, performances, symptoms, and so forth. Thus the
examination makes of each person a "case," not in the older sense of
circumstances defining an act which can modify a rule, but in the direct sense
of an individual as he or she may be described and judged. The examination

does not provide "a monument for future memory, but a document for
possible use."35 In this reversal of the process of individualization, Foucault
sees the origin of "all the sciences, analyses or practices employing the root
'psycho.' "36 The human sciences become possible, Foucault suggests, from
the time when "the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement
from status, thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man
that of the calculable man."37

Examination had a second effect which was equally instrumental in the

rise of the human sciences: it generated written records which made the

measurement of overall characteristics possible. Foucault believes these "small

techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting files, of arranging facts

in columns and tables" were decisive in the "epistemological 'thaw' of the
33. Ibid., 135-228.
34. Ibid., 184-189.
35. Ibid., 191.

36. Ibid., 193.

37. Idem.

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sciences of the individual."38 The origin of the sciences of man should not be
sought so much in some isolated genius using his compass to measure
sensations, Foucault concludes, as in the mechanisms of discipline and their
registration, in "these 'ignoble' archives where the modern play of coercion
over bodies, gestures and behaviors has its beginnings."39
By linking the emergence of the human sciences to disciplinary tactics,
Foucault does not intend a simple causal relationship. The process is subtler
and more circular, in keeping with the way these tactics themselves are at
once relations of power and modes of knowledge. Foucault's view seems

to be something like this. The innumerable small tactics of discipline, each

inaugurated in its own place and time for quite varied reasons, began
to reinforce and borrow from each other, gradually forming an overall
anonymous "strategy" of discipline. As they are combined and generalized,
they achieve higher levels of power and knowledge until they cross what
Foucault calls "the technological threshold"; that is, the disciplines are able
to transform the hospital, then the school, then the factory, into apparatuses
of mutually reinforcing power-knowledge. Thus it is not a matter of relations

of power on the side of disciplinary tactics giving rise to relations of knowl-

edge on the side of the human sciences. Since the disciplines are themselves
already a mode of knowledge, there is no break but a continuous movement
which finally crosses what Foucault calls the threshold of epistemologization.

"It is a double process then," Foucault writes, "an epistemological 'thaw'

through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of the effects of

power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge."40
Once the most rudimentary beginnings of what we could identify as human

sciences appear, they are already functioning as an intrinsic element in the

power of the disciplines to shape behavior. Foucault believes this role in the
strategy of the disciplines is one the human sciences have never been able to

escape. Even the attempts of psychology and sociology to "scientifically

purify" the examination have simply become the basis of a pedagogy, psychotherapy, or social work which seeks to alleviate the effects of the disciplines
while "adjusting" people to school and work. In Foucault's own words,
"these techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to
another, and they reproduce in a concentrated . . . form, the schema of
power-knowledge proper to each discipline."'41
It would be instructive to reread the "archaeology of the human sciences"
which Foucault developed in The Order of Things in the light of these sug-

gestions for a "genealogy" of the human sciences. Such a reading would

38. Ibid., 191.

39. Idem.
40. Ibid., 224.
41. Ibid., 226-227.

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no doubt trace an intersection between the "making" of the individual

through the disciplines and the sudden emergence of "man," the empiricotranscendental doublet in the space left vacant by the classical order of
representation. Such a reading would also have to specify the relation between
the politics of truth as exemplified in the rules of discursive formation common to a certain group of the human sciences and the strategies of domination

built up from the tactics of the "disciplines." It would be equally instructive

to follow the modifications of Foucault's genealogy of the human sciences in
The History of Sexuality. There one could trace how Foucault's study of

sexuality as a crucial point of intersection between power and knowledge

leads him to discover two new elements which reinforce and modify the work
of examination: pleasure and confession.42 But such investigations would
carry us beyond the scope of this essay, which has the more modest aim
of arguing for a particular reading of Foucault's genealogy.
I began by suggesting that Foucault's genealogy is an anti-method. I think
we are now in a better position to see why that is the case. In his genealogy

of the human sciences Foucault has clearly liquidated whatever tendencies his

"archaeology of the human sciences" betrayed of a methodology of the

structuralist sort. Nor has Foucault attempted to turn genealogy itself into a

method which would compete with others in a claim to scientific status. If he

has been critical of aspects of the traditional history of ideas, his genealogy

of power-knowledge is an even more emphatic rejection of the totalizing

discourse of Marxism or psychoanalysis. What bothers Foucault about the

aspiration of Marxism and psychoanalysis to scientific status and the privileges

of a "theoretical avant-garde" is the implicit grasp for a certain kind of power.
Foucault grants that both Marxism and psychoanalysis can provide useful
tools for local research, but he believes that whenever such research has been

fruitful it has put global theories in abeyance. But Foucault is hardly more
respectful of the established sciences and academic disciplines, which he sees
as caught up in a traditional power-knowledge network - one which, among
other things, rejects the "subjugated" regional knowledge of the patient, the

prisoner, the worker. From one point of view, then, genealogy can be seen as
a union of erudite analysis with these local memories. Genealogy, says
Foucault, entertains "the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, dis-

qualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of

theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some

true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes science and its
objects."43 Insofar as they champion these subjected knowledges, genealogies

are, in Foucault's words, "anti-sciences."44 But they are not anti-sciences

42. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 45, 58ff.
43. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 83.
44. Idem.

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because they reject the contents, methods, or concepts of constituted sciences;

rather they reject "the effects of the centralising powers which are linked to
the institution and functioning of an organized scientific discourse within a
society such as ours."45 Genealogy is in part a struggle against the coercive
effects of hierarchized formal scientific discourse. So encompassing are these

institutions of knowledge that "genealogists" must constantly be shifting their

ground and their concepts in order to avoid capture by the intellectual estab-

lishments. It is Foucault's apprehension of this absorptive power of the

institutions and traditions of knowledge which has led to his multiplication of
methods and concepts often followed by their carefree abandonment.
In response to a group of geographers who chided Foucault for failing to

provide geography a "place" in his archaeology of the human sciences,

Foucault gave his clearest statement so far of his anti-methodological and

specifically political intentions. Reminding his interviewers that The Order
of Things was only a regional study which deliberately left out a number of
sciences and domains, he contrasts a "correct, clean, conceptually aseptic"

kind of history which selects its objects for their exemplary value with a
kind of history that is intended to have a political use. If one is interested in

the political meaning of historical work, Foucault says, then the subject
matter will be selected because
one has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in

question. I tried first to do a genealogy of psychiatry because I had had a certain

amount of practical experience in psychiatric hospitals and was aware of the com-

bats, the lines of force, tensions, and points of collision which existed there. My
historical work was undertaken only as a function of those conflicts. The problem
and the stake there was the possibility of a discourse which would be both true

and strategically effective, the possibility of a historical truth which could have a

political effect.46
To treat Foucault as a methodologist - whether it is in order to quarrel with
his techniques and sources or to embrace his salutary innovations - is to
miss the point of his work. If Foucault is understood he will not be seen as

offering scholarship one more methodological option, but as seeking to elicit

an awareness of the politics of truth and the continual forging of instruments
for political struggle.
Sangamon State University

Corrigendum:

In "Causes, Conditions, and Causal Importance" by Raymond Martin (History and

45. Ibid., 84.

46. Ibid., 64.

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Theory XXI [1982], 53-74), the sentence which begins on the bottom of p. 59 and
ends on p. 60 should have read as follows:

The best way to solve the underlying problem is to provide an analysis, or

contextual definition, of the causal-weighting aspect of the historian's assessment
of relative causal importance. The historian's evidence for his assessment should
be better evidence for it on the analysis provided than it is on any competing
analysis.

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