Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity

4. What Problematization Does: Aims, Sources & Implications

4 What Problematization does Aims, Sources & Implications The Point of Genealogy What should a genealogy aim to accomplish? there is a standard answer to this question that circulates almost silently throughout contemporary theory: genealogy denaturalizes, destabilizes, and renders (historically) contingent that which was assumed to be (metaphysically) necessary. this is the standard coin of the theory realm—it is backed up by more than just the frequency with which it is credited, for behind it is the truth that this is exactly what Foucault, nietzsche, Williams, and just about every other genealogist told us to take from their work. the problem with this coin is not that it is counterfeit, but rather that it is not worth nearly as much as is commonly supposed. For, i shall argue in this chapter , there is a deeper lesson we ought to learn from genealogy. Whereas i offered a methodological specification of genealogical problematization in the previous chapter, in this chapter i turn to a consideration of the point of this methodology as specified. According to the argument i shall be making, the point of a genealogy is not just to denaturalize—though certainly it is that, too. the more important point of a genealogy is to show how that which is so easily taken as natural was composed into the natural-seeming thing that it is. it is so natural for us to take our sexuality as biological destiny. Foucault’s point is not just that sexuality is more than biology , more than nature, and so not as necessary as it had once seemed. Foucault’s 130 Genealogy as Critique point is in part that, to be sure, but it is also to help us see how sexuality came to be composed as the seeming destiny that we take it to be. Consider two questions. is our sexuality a necessary fact about who we are, or a contingent construction? A genealogy helps answer this first question, but so too does much else. now shift to the second question. how was our sexuality contingently constructed? to answer this second question, we need something quite like genealogy, namely something involving an empirical inquiry into the history of sexuality. Getting clear on the distinction between the fact that our practices are contingent and the history of how these same practices were contingently composed goes a long way toward recognizing the broader import of genealogy. For if genealogy helps us see how our present was made, it also thereby equips us with some of the tools we would need for beginning the labor of remaking our future differently . merely knowing that some construction contingently came into being does not equip us with much if our goal is to remake that construction. it provides us, perhaps, with a little confidence, or at least a solace that the work we want to do is possible—that we will not be bumping our heads against cognitive, biological, or metaphysical necessity. But the comforts of possibility are not quite the tools of actuality. to make those constructions different, to make ourselves otherwise, we need to know, amongst other things, how it was that we made ourselves into who we are. to put this point in another idiom that i shall be eager to develop in this and later chapters: pragmatic reconstruction requires a genealogical problematization that would equip the work of reconstruction with a sense of how the problematization that is being reworked was itself constructed. to make my way toward this point, i begin this chapter by tracing some of the intellectual antecedents of Foucault’s conception of genealogy in the context of his French philosophical milieu. this will provide, especially by way of Foucault ’s intellectual interactions with his erstwhile interlocutor and friend Gilles deleuze, a useful lens for seeing the details of how problematization links up with reconstruction. Sources of Foucaultian Historiography in considering the intellectual historical filiations informing all of the central elements composing Foucault’s conception of genealogical critique as i have explicated them (practical multiplicity at the intersection of power and knowledge, temporal multiplicity in the combination of continuity and discontinuity, and above all problematization), one approach would involve granting analytic priority to Foucault’s intellectual milieu. Concerning each of these elements of power/ What Problematization Does 131 knowledge, emergence, and problematization, it must be emphasized that Foucault of course did not simply assemble his intellectual toolkit by taking these concepts , techniques...