T1-lec 4 oct 2
Foucault’s archaeology:
The ‘history of ideas’ means the conscious thought of the various thinkers in
different periods.
For Foucault, the context of their thought is more important as it provides the
structural clues to why they thought that way and with what implications.
What did Darwin (1809-1882) say is not as important as what made Darwin’s
thought possible, why he thought that way and the implications of his thought
(Gutting, 2005). http://anthro.palomar.edu/evolve/evolve_2.htm
Foucauldian genealogy is a historical causal explanation that is material, multiple,
and corporeal
The objects of these diverse and specific causes are human bodies.
The forces that drive our history do not so much operate on our thoughts, our social
institutions, or even our environment as on our individual bodies
Prisons, clinics and schools have structured regimen designed to produce ‘docile
bodies’
http://vimeo.com/11514365 Genealogy and Archeology
19 Min run 9
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; trans. 1971):
F’s archaeology of Knowledge: tracking knowledge production by studying
why/how institutions are formed.
The discourses that emerge discipline a way of thinking, and the way we engage and
relate to people.
Design of the institutional apparatuses is to ‘normalise’ subjectivities
By exploring the rules of discourse production, historically institutions are
examined: e.g., how people who are regarded as deviant are monitored and how to
normalize them.
• Modern capitalist system is political economic structure
• Examine micropolitics for the design of how power operates
The genealogy of power/ knowledge reveals the way the body is regulated through
power that explicitly disciplines bodies
• Governmentality
• Biopower
F’s Governmentality :
• The way governments produce the citizen who must obey/follow
governments' policies
• The organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through
which subjects are governed
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The techniques and strategies of regulation the society behave and act to
make it governable.
Disciplined bodies, e.g., in prisons, the military, the corporate world and in schools.
Modern Times (Chaplin US 1936), …Gattaca (Niccol US 1997),
• Spatial division of individuals
• Control of their activities,
• Organization of individuals into groups
• Coordination of these different groups
Biopower: The operations of power that secure and defend the nation-state as it
circulates within civil society
• F’s biopower refers to the techniques of “subjugation of bodies and the
control of populations.”
• 18th C: Power was intertwined into the development of capitalism as the
bodies of workers were inserted into the production machinery and
population was applied to economic processes.
• Segregation and social hierarchization ensured “relations of domination and
effects of hegemony”
• War of attrition or racial conflicts defend the Society, i.e., the nation-state.
• ‘if I want to live, you must die’ into a biological formulation: ‘death of the bad
race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal)
F’s Biopower: the political logic used to manage and control populations through
speculations about the future based on probabilities and statistics.
• Security system form the main apparatus of biopower, informs the policies
and practices.
• These policies and their implementation should result in the economic
maximization of resources while maintaining scarcity and acceptable levels of
poverty.
Truth is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation
to these institutions
• The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures
control the production and transmission of the truth
• We assume it is truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in
the long baking process of history’
F’s Genealogy’s role:
• to connect different events according to ‘the emergence of different
interpretations’
• to explain these different interpretations as a ‘perspective’ rather than a
universal or transcendental truth.
Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body
and the dominating powers that produce such practices.
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