4.1 What is genealogy?
Foucault borrowed the concept of genealogy from Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morality), with which he achieved a new methodological step forward, and he marked genealogy as a history of locality, which can be simplified in relation to archeology:
”In two words: perhaps it could be said that archeology would be a method inherent in the analysis of local discursive practices, and genealogy a tactic that, based on the local discursive practices described in this way, introduces the liberated knowledge that results from them.” And in order to establish the project as a whole. ” Foucault (2012: 90)
Therefore, for him, the goal of genealogy is to understand the ”history of the present” independently of the known historical narratives and political ideologies that represented the past. It is a kind of counterbalance to the Hegelian interpretation of world history (Hegel, 2006), which strives to totalize the historicist consciousness as a world-historical process. The importance of geography in this process is best seen through the chapter Geographical basis of world history , in which Hegel points out the importance of the intertwining of the natural basis with cultural content:
”These natural differences must, above all, be considered special possibilities from which the spirit arises; in this way they represent the geographical basis. We do not care to get acquainted with the soil as an external place, but we care about getting acquainted with the natural type of locality, with the type that is closely connected with the type and character of the people who originated on such soil. That character is, precisely the way in which nations appear in world history and which occupy a position and a place in it. - Nature should neither be overestimated nor underestimated; the gentle Ionic sky certainly contributed much to the grace of Homer’s poems, but it alone cannot produce Homer, nor does it always produce them; poets did not appear under Turkish rule” (Hegel, 2006: 96).
In an essay entitled Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1995), Foucault clearly demonstrates the power of what he sees as Nietzsche’s genealogical method, a ”multidisciplinary technique for discovering contingent historical trends that support contemporary discourse and power practices.” That is why he states that, unlike the Hegelian sun of world history, “genealogy is gray; it is petty and patiently documentary. ” Huxley (2009: 255) sees genealogy as “a method for discovering power exercises, which are involved in setting up certain regimes of truth and valorization of subordinate knowledge”, and Woodward et al. (2009: 396) see genealogy in two ways, as a post-structuralist approach to historical analysis, but also as a historian ”who replaces origin, linearity and truth with multitude, dispersion and power / knowledge”. Gregory (2011: 315) connects genealogy with ”spatial history” which should shed light on historical geography and which examines ”today’s context of war-torn geographies”, which are detected within the present space which has a colonial past and on which ”various spatial practices have been applied”. “.
This Foucault’s methodological turn from archeology to genealogy is expressed in the book Supervise and Punish (1975), which became one of his most famous books, and in which he defines modernity as a disciplinary society, shaped by new forms of power. His interest in the genealogical history of the present inspired Foucault to the next series, a trilogy of the history of sexuality, which, despite its differences, ”consistently uses Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the origins of the Western soul and submissive regimes of truth, ethics and identity.” Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983: 119) emphasize that the genealogy of knowledge consists of two different corpora: first, from different opinions and theories that have not been established or widely recognized, and, second, from local beliefs and understandings. It seeks to discover these two kinds of knowledge and their struggle to pass them on to others, while not claiming to be truer than institutionalized knowledge. It represents only the missing part of the puzzle, and it works by isolating the main parts of some current political mechanisms, and then following them to their historical roots. These historical roots are available to us only thanks to these described corpora of knowledge. That is why Foucault (1984b: 76) defines genealogy as ”the unity of erudite knowledge and local memory that enables us to establish historical knowledge about the existing struggle and to use that knowledge tactically today.”
Unlike the method of archeology, which is neither formalizing nor interpretive, genealogy is an interpretive analytical method which, according to Peet (1998), is ”opposed to traditional historical research methods.” It does not seek to recognize a fixed essence or internal laws, but seeks ”discontinuities, avoiding in-depth searches and recording the past in order to undermine the notion of a modern march of progress.” As in the previous case, in order to better understand it, it is necessary to start from the clarification of essential concepts that arise from discursive practices (power, knowledge and body) and which essentially determine genealogy as a method. That is why the genealogist / geographer finds hidden meanings, sublime truth and depth of consciousness, which are equally false: instead, the genealogical truth is that things have no essence. In archeology, Foucault sought a space in which we encounter objects and talk about them based on the rules regulated by the system. In genealogy, this field is considered to be the space in which social practices take place, when subjects engage in a repetitive game of domination. History is not the progress of a universal achievement, but humanity is moving from one domination to another. Exploring the order of knowledge, as the order of the new discursive practice of the time, Foucault distances his genealogical approach to knowledge from the history of science:
”What distinguishes what we might call the history of science from the genealogy of knowledge is that the history of science is essentially placed on one axis which is, in general, the axis of knowledge-truth, or, in any case, the axis that goes from the structure of knowledge to demands the truth. In contrast to the history of science, the genealogy of knowledge is placed on another axis, the axis of discourse - power or, if I may say so, the axis of discursive practice - confrontation with power “(Foucault, 1998: 217-218).
Peet (1998: 204) emphasizes that two of Foucault’s (2012: 83-112) lectures from 1976 have aspects of genealogy that may be interesting for geography, in which he favors an autonomous, decentralized theoretical production whose correctness does not depend on the approval of established regimes. Hence, local critics continue on the path of ”return to knowledge” or rebellion of subjugated knowledge, by which he means blocks of historical knowledge disguised as functionalist and systematization theory, which usually disqualifies knowledge as inadequate, naive, below the required level of science. By reviving the history of struggle, and through that subdued knowledge, Foucault thinks that critical discourse can reveal a new essential power. In this sense, genealogy deals with painstaking, rediscovering struggles, reconstructions that would not be possible unless the tyranny of globalizing discourse is eliminated. It is a methodological discourse that Foucault believes in, and which genealogy of power he should follow.