4/09/2007

From Genealogy to Problematization

An important question provoked by Foucault's later works on ethics and subjectivity concerns the issue of why Foucault felt he had to expand his genealogical work to take problematization into account. What does problematization add to genealogy? What, if anything, does it subtract from it? Is problematization crucially associated with Foucault's third axis (in addition to knowledge and power) of ethics or subjectivity? Could problematization also be associated with some other domain or axis of analysis? A few thoughts on these questions follows.

The much-debated question of why Foucault shifted from archaeology to genealogy can be answered in this way: whereas archaeology offers a static analysis of practices synchronically pulled from the past, genealogy offers a dynamic analysis whereby these practices can be viewed diachronically as historical processes themselves. Genealogy enabled Foucault to explain historical change and continuity. In this way, genealogy was an expansion of archaeology rather than a refutation of it—of course genealogy refutes a few assumptions made by archaeology, but on the whole it refutes these assumptions by reinterpreting the key elements of the earlier approach. Perhaps, then, problematization expands genealogy in a similar way. Few would, I think, want to urge that Foucault’s ‘problematization’ refutes or abandons his ‘genealogy’. An approach to an answer might be: problematization expands the analysis of historical change by describing it in terms of the purposive action of agents. No longer can change merely be an effect of something basic to history (e.g., Marxist materialism or Foucaultian power dynamics)—change can now be seen as effected by purposive agents who are internal to the practices under analysis.

This perhaps helps illuminate ways in which Foucault’s work successively expanded domains of analysis according to these successive expansions of methodology. One could write an archaeology of knowledge (Foucault did this), or power, or subjectivity. There have been numerous archaeologies of power, Foucault would readily admit. But in order to connect any two of these axes together, to explore their interlocking tensions, one needs to adopt the diachronic perspective of the genealogists. This is why Foucault’s work on genealogy was provoked by the urge to internalize power into his analysis of knowledge—but to do this Foucault realized that he could not remain at the level of archaeology. Could one also have written the genealogy of knowledge/subjectivity? Perhaps, but what Foucault seems to have suggested with his own work was that in order to inflect a genealogical analysis with purposive agency, we need to expand our methodology so as to embrace all three axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity.

3 comments:

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