Martin Kusch

Genealogical Research Strategies

Proceeding from the question of what power is or how it works to the question of how it is to be (or can be) investigated, it is clear that the latter issue cannot but be closely related to the former. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in dealing with the Foucauldian theory of power we already encountered a whole number of proposals on how power might be studied. For instance, we saw Foucault attending to power mechanisms and exercises; employing models of war and physics; giving heed to mechanisms of ecological control by architectural measures; focussing on the training or disciplining of bodies; studying the ways power relations and mechanisms shape the personal identity of the coercer and the coerced; investigating power as a network of power relations; examining the interconnections between microlevel and macro-level power relations; analyzing coercive institutions as social laboratories for the development of power mechanisms; taking one’s starting point from individuals and groups rather than classes (“ascending analysis”); relying on invisible hand or counterfinality explanations; making use of concepts like “tactics” and “strategies”; considering the interrelations between social power and scientific knowledge; taking into account the involvement of interests; (re-)conceptualizing science as a social process of exclusion and regimentation (“orders of discourse”); and rehabilitating excluded, “subjugated” knowledge.

Genealogical Criticism of Power and Rationalities

Perhaps the most striking difference between Foucauldian genealogy and research programs in the sociology of science is that genealogy does not confine itself to descriptions and explanations of power and interest structures in science. Rather, genealogy takes up a critical posture towards the power of science in modern society. To analyse this posture in a separate chapter seems imperative for two reasons. On the one hand, it allows us to see genealogical methodology at work, and illustrates the critical accumen of genealogical relativism. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of critics of genealogy have concentrated their attention on the critical posture of genealogy. To answer their criticism will, I hope, turn the focus of debate over genealogy away from this topic, and towards the issues dealt with in previous chapters.

The Archaeological Model II: Beyond Continuity and Discontinuity

Needless to say, the touchstone of respectability for any conceptualization of the history of science is its ability to capture phenomena of change. That is to say, the relative success of any proposal for how to write the history of science cannot but be measured in terms of its skill in distinguishing between phases of rapid and slow change, its ingenuity in dealing with continuity and discontinuity, and its ability to separate apparent or superficial changes and tendencies from deep-going and far-reaching ones. Therefore, only by reconstructing and discussing Foucault’s suggestions with respect to these topics can we put ourselves in a position where we can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the whole archaeological edifice.

The Concept of Power

My treatment of what I propose to call Foucault’s theory of power is structured around a distinction first advanced with respect to justice (Rawls 1972: 5-6) and later applied to power (Lukes 1974: 26-27). This is the distinction betweenthe conceptandconceptionsof power, wherethe conceptof power refers to the basic core or primitive notion of power lying behind all (or most) talk of power in the social sciences and philosophy, a basic core that is developed or fleshed out by different authors into distinct theoretical conceptions.

The Genealogical Conception of Power II: Social Power and Scientific Knowledge

Little has been said so far about the two topics that figure most centrally in Foucault’s genealogy, to wit, the productivity of power, and the relation between power and knowledge.

Archaeology, the New Histories, and the History of Ideas

It is one of the peculiar facts of twentieth century French intellectual history that the two new strands in historical scholarship, the Annales School and the epistemologists, have by and large ignored each other’s work. Lucien Febvre’s 1939 review of Bachelard’s Psychanalyse du feu (Bachelard 1964) remained the only review of Bachelard’s many books in the Annales, and none of Koyre’s or Canguilhem’s books was ever reviewed in this journal (Chartier 1982: 31). Furthermore, in a programmatic article on how the history of science should be written, “Sur Einstein et sur l’histoire” (Febvre 1955), published in the Annales, Febvre makes no mention of Koyre’s, Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s work. Febvre suggests that the study of the history of science be integrated into general history (ibid., 306). Likewise, references to the works of the Annales historians are missing from the texts of the epistemologists.

The Genealogical Conception of Power I: Fields and Networks

In the last chapter I attended to parallels between Foucault and the received analysis of power only insofar as the basic skeleton or core assumptions were concerned. Further parallels can be drawn and will be taken up below at least at those points where such allusions can serve to illuminate or strengthen the Foucauldian position. In any case, even the parallels referred to up to this point suffice to show that Stephen Lukes’s assessment of Foucault’s theory of power as radically different from Lukes’s own tradition, more precisely, as “diffuse” and as unable to allow for any links between the attribution of power and the attribution of “causal or moral… responsibility”, is exaggerated at best (Lukes 1986a: 15).6

On the Very Notion of ‘Archaeology’

In choosing the term ‘archaeology’ as a label for his approach to the history of science, Foucault took advantage of the fact that this term had already gained currency in France. Since the fifties, the concept of ‘archaeology’ (as well as the concept of ‘geology’) had been used to characterize the various fashionable intellectual movements of the day, movements like phenomenology, structuralist anthropology, psychoanalysis, Bachelardian epistemology, and Annalist history.

The Archaeological Model I: Identifying Discursive Formations

Having reviewed where The Archaeology of Knowledge identifies friends and foes, we can turn to Foucault’s own proposals on how the history of science might be written. Foucault’s own, archaeological, model is most naturally reconstructed in two steps. I shall begin by introducing the main conceptual tools that Foucault employs for analyzing what he terms “discursive formations” and “statements”. These notions will be related to the methodology of serial history, and sharpened by drawing on some basic notions from analytical philosophy. It is only subsequently that we can take up the Gretchenfrage for any philosophy or history of science, to wit, the question how continuities and discontinuities are conceptualized and accounted for. I hope to show that the archaeological model contains suggestions for describing change in science that are still of systematic interest today.

The New Histories in France

Few commentators have failed to notice the fact that Annales historiography and the historical epistemology of Bachelard and Canguilhem figure centrally in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Indeed, this fact is somewhat hard to overlook since the book mentions both schools repeatedly. What I regard as the main shortcoming of existing commentaries is rather that they focus on one of the two schools at the expense of the other, and that they do not pay sufficient attention to parallels in the concerns, theories and problems of the two. To set the record straight seems to be of some interest, not only as far as Foucault is concerned. Now that historians and philosophers of science have begun to study science from a more anthropological-cultural perspective, the work of Annales historians and of the epistemological school has to loom large; after all, in these fields of scholarship these allegedly new topics have been among the central preoccupations for the last fifty years.