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Overview
Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253006233 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2013 |
| Series: | American Philosophy |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 359 |
| File size: | 734 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Colin Koopman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and author of Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty.
Read an Excerpt
Genealogy as Critique
Foucault and the Problems of Modernity
By Colin Koopman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Colin KoopmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00623-3
CHAPTER 1
Critical Historiography
Politics, Philosophy & Problematization
The History of the Present as Philosophical and Political
Genealogy articulates, or makes sayable and visible, that is conceptually available, the problematizations of our present. Genealogy thus involves the articulation of that which comprises a singular problematization out of a multiplicity of otherwise disentangled elements. This project in articulation facilitates a better understanding of those conditions of possibility that constrain and enable us today, right now, in our present. Genealogies are, in every prominent instance, addressed to today despite ostensibly being histories about the past. The present, or the difference that today makes with respect to who we are, is a key organizing idea for genealogy in the work of all genealogists. As such, genealogies function as critical histories of the present. Genealogies start with the present in order to trace the conditions of the emergence of the present in which we are present.
The use of history in order to reveal, but also to shake up, the present is made manifest in the work of the Friedrich Nietzsche, the thinker with whom the practice and concept of genealogy became prominent. Nietzsche was trained as a classical philologist and throughout his life consistently focused his work on an analysis of the past and especially of antiquity. So in what sense can Nietzsche's work, since it was work on the past, also be read as work on the present? Nietzsche's own explanation of this was that histories are invaluable for the present insofar as they are untimely within the present. In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche wrote, "I do not know what meaning classical philology would have for our age if not to have an untimely effect within it, that is, to act against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it is to be hoped, of a coming age." This book was published as part of a series of four, the entire collection being titled Untimely Meditations. Indeed all of Nietzsche's genealogies can be seen as untimely in the sense that they work through the past of the present in order to redirect our present into some other possible future of the present. Nietzsche's thought is best seen as using history to intervene into the present.
Almost a century and a quarter after Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, philosopher Bernard Williams published his Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Williams was there explicit about his debts to Nietzsche in crafting the philosophical-historical method he would use to address his central topics. But what are the topics central to Truth and Truthfulness? Not truth as an ahistorical concept, though Williams does discuss that too. But rather the value of our concepts of truth and truthfulness today, insofar as present-day culture finds itself committed to "two currents of ideas" that do not easily fit with one another, namely "the devotion to truthfulness and the suspicion directed to the idea of truth." Williams is clear that his historical genealogy is about the compossibility of these two currents for us today: "My question is: how can we address this situation ... I believe this to be a basic problem for present-day philosophy." Williams's history of truth and truthfulness, then, is meant to illuminate a problem that is central for us today. It is not, by contrast, offered as a history of what certain concepts were taken to be in the past without respect to how those past iterations can be traced forward to today.
A similar view is adopted by another contemporary philosopher whose work combines a background in analytic philosophy and a deployment of historical genealogy. Ian Hacking makes use of genealogy in much of his work, even though he often presents it under other labels, such as "historical ontology." Whatever its label, Hacking's histories are clearly presented as histories of the present: "At its boldest, historical ontology would show how to understand, act out, and resolve present problems, even when in so doing it generated new ones." Of course, historical ontology need not be so bold: "At its more modest it is conceptual analysis, analyzing our concepts.... [B]ecause the concepts have their being in historical sites.... This dedication to analysis makes use of the past, but it is not history." Hacking offers these descriptions in a paragraph that begins as a comment on Foucault. Williams seems to have learned his genealogy mostly from Nietzsche, and Hacking his mostly from Foucault. Both ably appropriate their predecessor's methodology for their own purposes, but there remains in each ample traces of that which preceded them. These remnant traces are worth bearing in mind when, in the next chapter, I typologically discriminate different uses of genealogy. For this chapter, however, my purpose is association and drawing together what is common among these and other thinkers for whom genealogy is a philosophical history of the present.
The most important contributor to the shared tradition of genealogy is, on my account, Michel Foucault. Foucault too was explicit that his histories were intended as histories of the present: these are histories that afford an intervention into the present leading to a possible redirection toward another future. In one of his earliest formulations of his idea of "the history of the present," given in a 1969 radio interview, Foucault stated, "To diagnose the present is to say what the present is, and how our present is absolutely different from all that is not it, that is to say, from our past. Perhaps this is the task for philosophy now." It was precisely in this sense that he explicitly offered his 1975 book on modern punishment, Discipline and Punish, as an intervention into the present: "I would like to write the history of this prison ... Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present." A few years later Foucault further clarified the intent of that book: "What I wanted to write was a history book that would make the present situation comprehensible and, possibly, lead to action. If you like, I tried to write a 'treatise of intelligibility' about the penitentiary situation, I wanted to make it intelligible and, therefore, criticizable." In speaking directly to the present in this way, Foucault's genealogy locates itself at the intersection of reflection and intervention, or of what can safely be referred to as philosophy and politics. This specific relation was crucial for Foucault throughout his career, and increasingly so in his late work, for instance in his 1983 Collège de France course lectures, where we find him eagerly exploring "the necessary, indispensable, resistant, and stubborn relation of philosophical discourse or the philosophical life to political practice."
Locating genealogy at the intersection of philosophy and politics enables us to see this tradition as making a contribution in the form of a political philosophy, a public philosophy, or what I elsewhere call a "cultural critical philosophy." Characteristic of this form of philosophical practice is a reflection on conditions of possibility of contemporary cultural, social, political, and ethical problems. Cultural critique for the genealogist does not, or at least need not, take the form of taking a position or assuming a side in present debates. Rather it takes the form, at least primarily, of articulating the conditions of possibility of the fraught debates in which we find ourselves enmeshed. Cultural critical philosophy in genealogy takes the form of the articulation and intensification of the problematizations central to our fragile cultural formations. It will be a primary task of this chapter, as well as those that follow, to describe in detail this practice of cultural critical philosophy as made manifest in the genealogical tradition. I should, however, note at the outset that I shall not be here engaging in that practice of cultural critique, except by way of commentary on Foucault and others. This is not because I find the practice secondary in relation to clarifying the methodological issues I here take as primary. Rather it is because my hope is that methodological clarification can in some way assist practices of cultural critical philosophy already under way and already on exhibit. I do not, of course, hereby excuse myself from the practice of cultural critical philosophy. I only make plain to the reader that you will not find that practice herein, at least not in any sustained form that might count as an exhibit, an example, or an expression of philosophy as cultural critique.
Though all genealogists offer histories of the present, it was Foucault who fashioned that term, and it is also in his work that we find the most prominent statements among genealogists of such histories as forming at a hinge between philosophy and politics. One such locale, particularly convenient for the connections it draws among political-philosophical reflection and the historical present that is the object of that reflection, is Foucault's 1983 Collège de France course lectures, titled The Government of Self and Others, quoted just above. The lecture series opens on January 5 with methodological considerations in which Foucault tells his audience that he proposes to practice "a critical thought which takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of present reality." As the lectures proceed, Foucault is increasingly clear that thought can reflexively direct itself at its own present by way of assuming a fragile position between philosophy and politics. The decisive moment in the lectures occurs on February 23 when Foucault asks: "The question I would like to pose ... is this: must philosophy's need to confront politics, must philosophy's need to seek its reality in the confrontation with politics consist in formulating a philosophical discourse which is at the same time a discourse that prescribes political action, or is something else involved?" The work of thought, Foucault continues, has too often assumed that philosophical reflection must stake out positions on the field of political reflection and that politics must seek its justifications in philosophy. Political philosophy, it is often assumed, must take the form of a systematic theorization of political concepts in such a way as to yield determinate answers to pressing political crises. Philosophy in this way can be applied to political debates on the ground just as partisans to those debates can repair to philosophy for a justification of the one correct position. This sort of metaphilosophical orientation is, I would argue, characteristic of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century political and moral philosophy. For Foucault, the critical task involved in a history of the present is something quite different. There is, for him, something else involved in a practice of philosophy as cultural, political, and moral critique. Foucault's view is that "Philosophy and politics must exist in a relation, in a correlation; they must never coincide." Philosophy should not tell politics what to do, nor should politics look to philosophy for its justification. Rather, philosophy must confront politics and find its reality for itself in that confrontation. Philosophy "does not tell the truth of political action.... it tells the truth in relation to political action." Philosophy does not tell us which political conditions are the just or true ones, but rather it tells the truth about the very conditions of possibility of present political problems in the first place. Philosophy, in other words, challenges, confronts, or problematizes political life. Thus Foucault concludes in his final lecture, of March 9, that philosophy ought to assume for itself "a sort of restive and insistent exteriority towards politics." Philosophy must remain exterior to politics so that it may, from a position that is very near, confront politics with the truth of itself.
The idea and practice of the history of the present should be located here, within the relation between a philosophy and a politics that are not reduced to identity. But this raises as many questions as it answers. Why did Foucault specify his work in terms of the historical present? Why should an inquiry that is avowedly historical in orientation have any important bearing on what he took the present to be? Why was the present so important for Foucault? One seemingly obvious answer to this final question would be to say that the present is where we always find ourselves. The present is important because it is only by being attentive to where we are that we can do anything to improve our situation. There is surely some truth in this answer, but it is too superficial to be of much use. Allow me to plumb a little deeper.
There are important philosophical issues relevant to these matters that can help us understand why Foucault's histories of the present would be motivated simultaneously by philosophical and political considerations. A more helpful answer to the question concerning the importance of the present can be developed by focusing on the way in which the question itself is posed. The question is not "Why did Foucault want to study the situations in which he found himself?" but rather "Why did Foucault want to study the present in which he found himself?" The question, in other words, should be posed as a question that is situated within a turn toward historicity and temporality as central to understanding who, where, and what we are. This suggests a more plausible answer to our question to the effect that Foucault was so concerned about the present precisely because he understood the present to be the site of the temporal and historical processes through and in which we constitute ourselves as subjects. To study the present situations in which we find ourselves requires that we study these situations as historically and temporally located amidst ongoing processes of change. The present is constituted by its historicity and temporality. A history of the present is requisite precisely because the present gains its coherence from the history out of which it has developed and on the basis of which it will flow into the future. As Foucault put it: "If history possesses a privilege, it would be, rather, insofar as it plays the role of an internal ethnology of our culture and our rationality."
Thus, Foucault's understanding of the historicity and temporality of the constitution of knowledge, power, and ethics explains his patient focus on "the present" rather than on some other shadowy stand-in for "where one finds oneself," as exampled by more prominent, and often much darker, concepts for our condition, such as "the West," or "late Capitalism." An inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of the present enables us to understand who we are, where we have come from, and where we may go. The present is where we find ourselves as historically and temporally invested such that the present in which we are present is always conditioned by its own inertia. This inertia constitutes the crucial difference between being headed in one direction and being headed in the other, a difference that ahistorical inquiries cannot often discern. This difference, in its simultaneous political and philosophical perspectives, constitutes the precise object of focus in Foucaultian genealogy.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Genealogy Does
1. Critical Historiography: Politics, Philosophy&Problematization
2. Three Uses of Genealogy: Subversion, Vindication&Problematization
3. What Problematization Is: Contingency, Complexity&Critique
4. What Problematization Does: Aims, Sources&Implications
5. Foucault's Problematization of Modernity: The Reciprocal Incompatibility of Discipline and Liberation
6. Foucault's Reconstruction of Modern Moralities: An Ethics of Self-Transformation
7. Problematization plus Reconstruction: Genealogy, Pragmatism&Critical Theory
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
Colin Koopman rethinks Foucault's work from the ground up, re-reading his relationships to Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Habermas. In so doing, he opens up fruitful new avenues for connecting Foucaultian genealogical critique to pragmatism and Habermasian critical theory. It is a must read for anyone interested in the relationship between Foucault and critical theory.