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The general thought which ties many of the blog themes together is anti-foundationalism, whether its variants in epistemology, culture or in ethics. In its most general form, the idea is that there is no correspondence relation between a sentence and the ‘intrinsic nature of the world’ which lead us to think that the sentence is 'true'. All there can said to be are conditions of possibility which mediate between the utterance of a sentence and our ascribing to that sentence the predicate ‘is true’.1 The meaningful task is to analyse those conditions that made such ascription possible and, if need be, negotiate our way to changing them.
For instance, analysing the conditions that led us from Aristotlean-talk to Newtonian-talk would be to analyse the changing intellectual zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, the growing preference for mathematical stories as opposed to theological and teleological ones, the belief in human reason to control and predict states of affairs, etc. Similarly, to understand why 'madness' came to be constituted as a mental illness since the end of the eighteenth century and why groups of people came to be talked about in that way would be to analyse the broader societal need to categorise and manage individuals exhibiting behaviors deemed abnormal or disruptive, the productive needs of industrial revolution and the consequent changes in social order and expectations, the professionalisation of medicine and so on.
The idea here is that the sentences in which the words 'gravity' or 'madness' or 'transgender' or 'schizophrenia' etc. figure do not have intrinsic truth value. Rather, they come to accrue a truth value based on various historic conditions that constitute them. The intriguing point is not merely to debate the metaphysical truth of these terms but to critically examine the circumstances that made us talk about them as such, and, if need be, negotiate among ourselves, as language users, whether this part of our linguistic practice should be kept or reformed.
The normative aspect is important because the ascription is not neutral; scientists debate each other about how to use language when they propose new ways to talk about different things which lead us to predict them better and improve our lives. In fields like medicine, law, military and social policy, the language we use to categorise individuals to index them as deviants, combatants, pathologies, people to be revered, worshiped, arrested, medicalised or otherwise, has profound implications on what to do with them. The conditions that lead certain ways of talking to accrue truth values stretch into identities, institutions, and mode of lives.
Thus, the world is not divided into truth-shaped nuggets to which our sentences aim to represent. When, instead of looking at individual sentences or words, we look at [the superset of all sets of sentences that are capable of being uttered in a given time and place], it becomes easier to recognise the communal and contingent nature of truth. In other words, that truth is coextensive with socially justified beliefs, where linguistic communities dictate which sentences count as true sentences just the same as how they dictate what counts as language.
Recognising this latter fact about language where what counts as language (instead of gobbledygook) is coextensive with its usage within a linguistic community, makes it easier to see that the predicate 'is true' is something that can only be applied to statements and not to 'states of affairs' or a 'world out there', and, because statements are elements of human languages, and language is a human construct, 'truth' cannot be said to be detached from human construction. After all, the justification for the truth value of a statement will always recourse to circularity as there is no way to reach out from under our linguistic practices into a God's eye point of view to judge the correspondence of our sentences with, making a sentence—world correspondence relation untenable. Thus justification fo the truth of a statement will always be relativised to the changing standards, needs and goals of an audience. Richard Rorty put this argumentent more succinctly:
When the notion of ‘description of the world’ is moved from the level of criterion-governed sentences within language-games to language-games as wholes, games which we do not choose between by reference to criteria, the idea that the world decides which descriptions are true can no longer be given a clear sense. Attention . . . to the vocabularies in which sentences are formulated, rather than to individual sentences, makes us realise, for example, that the fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings do that.
The last point in Rorty's passage is crucial as Rorty does not deny the existence of an eternal world; there is indeed a world “out there” that causally exists independent of human minds, but ‘truth’ cannot be said to be an element of that world because "the world does not speak"; it is not language-dependent. To say that a statement is true presuppose a language from which to make this evaluation and so truth cannot be independently of out linguistic practices. On the other hand, to say that the truth is correspondent to the world is to require that there are some statements that "speak the language of the world", corresponds to the worlds' own language, so to speak. It requires for there to be a set of 'right' concepts which humans discover; but human languages are historically evolving symbolic systems that evolve to cope with an incredibly complex world.
And so it becomes evident that our current discursive practices—the collective sets of sentences, vocabularies, and the rules governing their use—are not endowments from an omniscient deity, nor are they the products of discovery via human “reason” or brute “intuitions” which can accurately track the correspondence relation between sentences and the intrinsic nature of the world. Rather, they are a product of a string of historical contingencies that prove/d transiently useful for our linguistic community. What's more, they are not passive reflections of these contingencies but they also set the conditions of possibility for certain sentences to have truth-values rather than being unintelligible marks and mouth noises. When new contingencies arise that the existing discursive practices cannot adequately address or cope with, society moves to modify these practices—or, when the contingencies are too radical, they create entirely new ones. The latter is seen when paradigm shifts occur in various fields, like the sciences, where new theories and concepts emerge that were previously unimaginable within the old framework. And thus talking Newtonian let's us predict future states of affairs better than talking Artistotlean—but there is not ontological development here that can be meaningfully detached from the pragmatic nature of this development. In other words, the world itself does not talk Newtonian.
This view is contrasted with 'representationalism', a subelement of foundationalism, which claims that words act as pointers to an antecedently given reality. As argued, the fundamental issue with this view is rooted in our inherent tendency to define the contexts in which truths emerge. Be it truths of a physical, social, psychological, mathematical, or theological nature, they only materialise as 'truths' within the contexts we have previously established. Intriguingly, we construct these truths and, retrospectively, regard them as if they were intrinsic components of the world.
Representationalists seem to argue that humans do not actively construct these contexts; instead, there is an assumption that humans are passive recipients of universally given factoids, merely to be recognised and later described as part of a truth-seeking enterprise Contrastingly, thinkers like Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault (as will be shown) advocate for acknowledging our active role in the entire truth process: from the creation of contexts and the structuring of knowledge within them, to the formulation of methodologies for validating this knowledge, and finally, to the acceptance of conclusions drawn from this structured knowledge. In other terms, they acknowledge our ability to construct truths from the ground up. This oversight, moreover, impedes the proactive utilisation of the truth-building process that we all share, and thereby disconnects people from their socio-environmental conditions, cultural knowledge base, and potential for equitable interconnections. They urge us to recognise ourselves as active constructors of our shared reality, rather than as subordinates to it. We, as language users, are deeply involved, through linguistic processes, in all aspects of world-modelling and meaning-making. Thus, because meaning is use-conditional, the way the term ‘truth’ operates in or our language will vary, including as a tool of approbation and commendation, or as a compliment paid to beliefs that are well justified, or at any rate some kind of social practice, as opposed to ‘sentences that represent “Reality” accurately’. Embracing this process shifts the objective of inquiry from an attempt to 'represent reality' to a quest for more effective descriptions, distinguishing more useful ones from less useful ones. The focus, then, is not on uncovering an absolute 'Truth' but on seeking justification and intersubjective consensus, and these practices will always be tailored to specific audiences rather than to an abstract, metaphysically substantive entity called 'reality' or 'truth' to which we must defer to as an authority over and above ourselves.
“Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.
“Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. (Foucault 1980, 133)
While Foucault is now a revered cult figure in the Humanities, his work is rarely seen as an explicit attack on representaionalism. But much of what he says seems to be just that.
Richard Rorty offer us a useful context to explain Foucault by relating him to the thinkers he was influenced by. Foucault share's Nietzsche's scepticism on knowledge and draws from his idea about the will to power. Nietzsche proposes that the fundamental driving force in humans is not merely survival or reproduction, but a deep-seated will to exert and extend one's influence and control. Foucault adopts this view and moves beyond the traditional Marxist understanding of power as primarily related to economic and class structures and instead sees power as pervasive throughout all aspects of social life. With Nietzche's perspectivism (that there is no God's-eye-view to judge all knowledge-claims) and his will-to-power as his starting point, Foucault then relates the two in proposing that knowledge and power are mutually constitutive; one is subsumed onto the other.
But Nietzsche focused primarily on critiquing other philosophers and their philosophical claims and did not address broader societal and historical contexts. Marx, on the other hand, usefully shows us how power structures in society influence knowledge and shape human behavior, and his work is characterised by its practical utility in understanding and transforming societal structures, particularly through the lens of class struggle and economic systems. Yet, Marx neglects Nietzsche's insights into power and knowledge. Marx is still beholden to what Nietzsche calls the will-to-truth, an unyielding pursuit of an objective, scientific understanding of society and history, a sort of grand narrative. But this overlooks how power influences the creation and acceptance of what counts as knowledge. Marxists, in their pursuit of a scientific understanding of society, fail to recognise how Marxist discourse is itself influenced by and contribute to existing power structures.
In contrast, Foucualt held that systems of knowledge (or discourses) both create and are created by power relations, leading to the conclusion that what a society accepts as 'truth' is deeply influenced by the power dynamics within that society. This approach debunks contemporary liberal institutions while avoiding the assumption that power is inherently repressive, a key departure from traditional Marxist thought. Instead, it is also productive; it creates realities, shapes identities, produces discourses, and forms knowledge. In this way, Foucault can be seen to have bridged a Marxist—Nietzchean gap.
The knowledge-power thesis is a powerful critique of representationalism, and Foucault mounts it with immense use of historical examples and facts instead of theoretical stipulations.
This point may be illustrated by drawing on Foucault’s central thesis in his The Order of Things. In it, he tracks the three general areas of human enquiry from within three epochs, the Renaissance—Classical or Romantic—Modern, within which natural history has slowly become the stuff of the biological; value and exchange has diffused into economics; and general grammar has been repurposed in linguistics. It is the shifting epistemic assumptions within these three subjects across each historical epoch that determined which sentences are possible of having truth-value.
For example, Foucault traces how certain sets of questions about general grammar arise in the Renaissance with disparate answers being given, but those questions and answers would have been utterly unthinkable during 18th century Classical period philology. Specifically, Renaissance general grammar asked abstract questions underpinned by Cartesian representationalist presumptions such as ‘how do symbols represent the world?’. But after the Colonial discovery of ancient texts during the Classical period, the questions shifted into a preoccupation with the variability of syntax within linguistic families. Language had turned from a representational object into an historical one where practitioners compared and contrasted past and present languages.
The upshot is that the set of all sentences that can be uttered by a speaker in any of these epochs is not under the conscious control of the speaker, not simply read of the intrinsic nature of world. What counts as evidence, truth, reason, argument, proof, sane, rational, etc. is governed by ‘the rules of formation’ of the discourse, or what can be thought of in Wittgensteinien terms as being confined to a general language game. The competing, seemingly disparate answers proffered to the risen questions within the enquiry domains are underpinned by the same implicit discourse that prescribe and presuppose every epochs’ rules for formation. This rule-organised discourse produces a corpus of “unconscious” utterances which people make everyday, and which can be uncovered not by identifying grand ideologies (as Marxist analysts do) but by examining the anonymous systems of thought within each epoch; e.g., in artistic artifices, paintings, novels, flysheets, laws, media pages, institutional rules, bureaucratic procedures, proceedings of juridical disputes, academic papers, the spatial planning of prisons etc..
This is why Foucault preferred the analysis of discourse as constituting the ‘conditions of possibility’ of whether p sentence is true rather another one, over the then established methods of doing history; the Longue durée and the examination of big ideas, events and figures which moreover assume that current developments can be traced back to one determinate historical foundation. Foucault rejected this. For him, studying discourse (and history generally) is not by identifying who said what, but by identifying the specific conditions under which a set of sentences has a determinate truth-value (i.e., as being considered self-evidently true), and therefore is even capable of being uttered. This form of analysis which Foucault called ‘genealogy’ (another influence from Nietzsche) is, according to him, also emancipatory in that it opens up new possibilities of imagining alternative ways of ‘knowing’ an issue by demonstrating that the current ways of knowing it is not self-evident but historically constituted.
By treating all knowledge as historical events, Foucault says:
it means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke historical constants, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that’; that it wasn’t a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t self-evident that the only things to be done to a criminal were to lock him up, it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were to be sought through the individual examination of bodies; and so on (1987: 4).
Contemporary knowledge is historically transient, but we often forget this fact. And so epistemic constraints become so intimately imbricated within the fabrics of every day life that people no longer experience them as constraints, but as ‘how the world is’ or ‘reality’ or ‘the natural order of things’. Foucault’s methodology of ‘permanent criticism’ is, in a broader sense, a methodology that deconstructs those constraints and gives us the freedom to think differently about old problems. It not a syllogism but a liberating tool, with the aim not to refute ideas but to unmask them and show their extra-theoretical function, with the hope to undermine their authority which otherwise presume some kind of necessity and inevitability.
This is not to be confused with what is called 'global scepticism'. Scepticism implicitly presupposes representationalism; it insists on a naive belief in the 'out-there'-ness of our current discursive practices, only to develop a spectrum for scepticism. This scepticism inherently undercuts the value of the self-constructed contexts which Foucault wishes to illuminate and thus, in turn, it negates or obscures the potent process of belief investment. This is precisely what Foucault is rebuffing. Foucault says that his standpoint is not epistemic scepticism but instead an "attitude that consists, first in thinking that no power goes without saying, that no power whatever kind, is obvious or inevitable, and that consequently no power warrants being taken for granted. Power has no intrinsic legitimacy.” (p. 77) There is a deep subjectivising power, a history, that conditions our subjectivity, the way talk and understand about ourselves, the decisions we make, how we categorise things and produce knowledge, and Foucault would like to understand this power instead of pretending that we are free flowing ahistoric subjects.
An obvious way to show how this works is to provide a historical example within a distant epoch which most people would recognise as being systematically ‘discursively constrained’. An extreme example which Foucault did not explicitly discuss is Christendom.
In his study of the mentalité of the 16th century occupants of France and the spiritual currents of the age, the historian Lucien Febvre notes that it was virtually impossible for anyone at that time to have been an atheist because the requisite mental equipment to be able to navigate alternatives in a world utterly imbued in Christianity and its accompanied tools of thought—philosophical language, scientific procedures, and even sceptical and explorative attitudes—did not come to pass, and so all thought was always filtered through an a priori theistic framework. Febvre asks:
Was it so easy for a man, as nonconformist as he could conceivably be in other respects, to break with the habits, the customs, even the laws of the social groups of which he was a part, at a time when those habits, customs, and laws were still in full force; when, on the other hand, the number of freethinkers who were trying to shake off the yoke was infinitesimal; when there was no material in his knowledge and the knowledge of the men of his time either for forming valid doubts or for supporting those doubts with proofs that, on the basis of experimentation, could have the force of real, veritable conviction? (p, 445)
And his answer is a resolute ‘No’:
Christianity was the very air one breathed in what we call Europe and what was then Christendom. It was the atmosphere in which a man lived out his en tire life—not just his intellectual life, but his private life in a multitude of activities, his public life in a variety of occupations, and his professional life no matter what his field. It all happened somehow automatically, inevitably, independently of any express wish to be a believer, to be a Catholic, to accept one’s religion or to practice it. Today we make a choice to be a Christian or not. There was no choice in the sixteenth century. One was a Christian in fact. One’s thoughts could wander far from Christ, but these were plays of fancy, without the living support of reality. One could not even abstain from observance. Whether one wanted to or not, whether one clearly understood or not, one found oneself immersed from birth in a bath of Christianity from which one did not emerge even at death. Death was of necessity Christian, Christian in a social sense, because of rituals that no one could escape, even if one rebelled before death, even if one mocked and scoffed in one’s last moments. From birth to death stretched a long chain of ceremonies, traditions, customs, and observances, all of them Christian or Christianized, and they bound a man in spite of himself, held him captive even if he claimed to be free. And first and foremost they pressed in on his private life. (p.336)
In a Christendom reality, the overtone window of discourse on any topic will remain ensconced within the parameters of the theological framework (cosmological, moral, metaphysical, aesthetic, emotional, political, social etc.) and any conversation takes places within theistic currents. When every part of one’s life is pervaded by one framework—hearing the bells of prayer multiple times a day, congregating at church, looking at the calendar, embarking on an education, joining a guild—this precludes any cognitive process of even beginning to challenge the givenness of the prevailing (God-World) framework. Language is instrumental to thought, and people simply did not have the language for atheism (concepts such as relative, causality, abstract, concrete, virtual, criterion, condition, induction, deduction, synthesis, etc. Febvre says were not part of the French language). To be sure, people were renounced as ‘atheists’ but that concept did not have the same connotations as it currently does and people did not self-describe themselves as such. Historian Marc Bloch comes to a similar conclusion in his study of Feudal societies when he wrote:
‘Ages of faith’ we say glibly, to describe the religious attitude of feudal Europe. If by that phrase we mean that any conception of the world from which the supernatural was excluded was profoundly alien to the minds of that age, that in fact the picture which they formed of the destinies of man and the universe was in almost every case a projection of the pattern traced by a Westernized Christian theology and eschatology, nothing could be more true. That here and there doubts might be expressed with regard to the ‘fables’ of Scripture is of small significance; lacking any rational basis, this crude scepticism, which was not a normal characteristic of educated people, melted in the face of danger like snow in the sun. It is even permissible to say that never was faith more completely worthy of its name. (p. 81-82)
The same thesis is again argued by Karen Armstrong who wrote that
Yet in fact a full-blown atheism in the sense that we use the word today was impossible… From birth and baptism to death and burial in the churchyard, religion dominated the life of every single man and woman. Every activity of the day, which was punctuated by church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life—even the guilds and the universities were religious organizations. ... Even if an exceptional man could have achieved the objectivity necessary to question the nature of religion and the existence of God, he would have found no support in either the philosophy or the science of his time.
This analysis taken on the limits of what can be said during Christendom is not an analysis of the impositions on free-speech (though that did happen regularly), but an analysis of the historical conditions which set the parameters of discourse and determine the truth-value of a sentence. People could not bring themselves to utter sentences that are incongruent with Christian currents because there’s a long threaded string of institutionally stabilised rules of discourse that precludes doing so, and even if one or two single speakers come close to it, those sentences will not register as ‘true’.
Hidden behind all these discourses and practices—from the ecclesiastical laws, to the identity of the ecclesiastical court and the ‘sinning’ parties within it, to the sanctions it imposes (hellfire, salvation, punishment, death etc.), and the disciplinary activities of institutions (family, monastery, covenant, church, school etc.) and bodily regulations (fasting, praying, confessing, absolution, penance etc.), right to the mundane routine of looking at the calendar—is a presupposition that there is something coherent and intelligible called ‘Christianity’ to which people can talk about and act towards.
Genealogy—the historical evolution of discourses and practices—as methodology, works to call into question this presupposition through historically analysing the process by which ‘Christianity’ came into force through contingent relations of power. People did not randomly think ‘Christianity is true!’ or privately investigate the soundness of the proposition, but rather, as Talal Asad’s (1993) genealogical treatment shows, it was the above mentioned relations of power that created the conditions necessary to experience the proposition ‘Christianity is true’ as true (a contemporary analogue is the givenness of the nation ‘in a world of nations’ and Michael Billig’s (1995) analysis on ‘banal nationalism’). Thus genealogy is not concerned with the truth/falsity of Christianity but with how concepts such as ‘sinning’, ‘baptism’ ‘priest’, ‘contrition’, ‘confession’, ‘heresy’, ‘absolution’, ‘penance’ etc. became ubiquitous, self-evident and accrue the meanings they do.
Building on the last section, we saw that meaningful utterances are not spoken on a whim but are rather made possible through a vast, largely implicit, network of (not intrinsically oppressive) power relations which allow those words to be registered and stamped as ‘knowledge’; hence Foucault’s ‘Knowledge/Power’ dialectic. Foucault envisions the field of knowledge in his three subsequent books as being:
(1) a diverse body of concepts, theories and disciplines (Madness and Civilization).
(2) a normative set of rules (Discipline and Punish).
(3) and a mode of relation to oneself (The History of Sexuality).
It is helpful if I provide some more concrete examples on how power operates and determines this field, especially in terms of classifying and categorising people.
Consider how the categories into which a group of experts slot a person who killed another person, as a deviant or as mentally ill or as being under the influence of magic—all possibilities of thinking about X person in Y way—determines the fate of what be done with that person. Foucault admirably demonstrated this in his analysis of the Pierre Rivière caseand the conflicting discourses produced by the epistemic authorities; the police, the judges, the different schools of psychiatrists, all of which competed over the ‘truth’ of Rivière’s mental sate when performing the parricide.
Another example typically given are mental illnesses themselves: knowledge about what kinds of people exist. People did not simply wake up one day and saw various mental illnesses all around them and gave those behaviours different labels. Rather it was preceded by historically constituted practices and discourses (for e.g., the individualisation of therapy or the spread of a ‘semantic contagion’, see: Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul, 1995 on MPD) that classified certain behaviours as pathological deviances in need of intervention.
This does not mean that ‘schizophrenia’ is not ‘real’, that the responsible neurones or biochemicals or genes do not exist, or that those so classified do not behave in a certain way, but it means that the idea of schizophrenia, as well as the institutions and practices that deal with it, is made and moulded through discourse. What the power/knowledge dialectic gets at is the behaviour of people and the emergence of the ways in which we conceptualise those behaviours at a given moment as well as our practices towards them. It gets at how classifications interact with those classified and those doing the classification. The baptising power of naming a human kind in turn forms new people who conform to that kind. Ian Hackings’ sketches this diagnosis-illness-public response interaction out:
Just before World War Two, Kurt Schneider produced a list of 12 ‘First Rank Symptoms’, with auditory hallucinations top of the list. When First Rank Symptoms ruled the diagnostic roost, a lot more people became schizophrenic than would ever have been so classified in the wards of the Burghölzli hospital during Bleuler’s reign . . . For Bleuler, auditory hallucinations were not important; there were other aspects of the patient’s life to be taken into account and many of those he did not diagnose as schizophrenic also had hallucinations. Hallucinations having thus become unproblematic, schizophrenics took them more casually. Schneider, finding them to be universal, made them almost a sine qua non of the diagnosis. As psychiatrists became more cautious about using the diagnosis of schizophrenia, ‘flat affect’ came back, and in the most recent diagnostic manuals, hallucinations are no longer key. In some jurisdictions, there are fewer than half as many diagnosed schizophrenics today as there were twenty years ago.
The emergence of concepts such as ‘schizophrenia’, ‘trauma’ or ‘autism’ therefore stretched into institutions, identities and permissible ways of living and constructed new ways of being a person. The medical professionals—the bearers of knowledge on the human condition—dub behaviours as mental illness, as they once did with homosexuality, and this determines the reaction taken by institutions, the rest of society and the subjects themselves. For example, the way we think of and respond to a person and their associated “antisocial behaviour”, which we may otherwise view with contempt and annoyance or indifference, will radically change once we come to learn that the person has been diagnosed as ‘autistic’ or ‘ADHD’ etc. by a medical professional; we start to relate with them in new ways (the notorious case of Chris Chan comes to mind). The persons so classified (e.g. as ‘fat’ or ‘anorexic’), in being aware of their classification, will likewise experience themselves as being new sorts of people and may even start altering their behaviours.
To see how knowledge stretches into practices and identities specifically, consider G. E. M. Anscombe’s theory that all intentional actions are actions done under a description, and descriptions vary cross-culturally and across historical periods. The possibility of being ‘a child with ADHD’ allows a child living within a period and place where this possibility is present to produce intentional acts that she may explain under the description of ‘ADHD’, such that when she pushes another child in the playground and is asked why, she may retort ‘because I have ADHD’—a description unavailable to, say, a Victorian child. The causes attributed to an action shifts as the possible available descriptions also shift along with the practices and discourses of society. This generalises to the invention of the classification for people such as race, gender, ‘juvenile delinquency’, and even ‘drunk drivers’, and the descriptions under those classifications which precondition intentional acts.
Or consider the different ways of ‘knowing’ the haecceity (‘whatness’) of transgender persons which determines what mode of life such persons are permitted to have. Various claims rendering legible the ‘truth’ about the haecceity of their gender compete(d) in a long historical negotiation over which particular knowledge-claim should inform present day policy, from criminality and pathologisation to reverence or indifference. This claim to knowledge not only determines the way people get to live but also how they experience themselves—for example as born sinners, sick or ‘normal’.
Or closer to my own field, take social contract theory which makes the following proposition: anarchy is a situation where human beings have negative mental states. This Hobbesian schema about the ‘state of nature’ underpins most political theorising despite our best anthropological evidence that pre-agricultural foraging tribes did not experience organised violence, sexual oppression, private property, symbolic cultures and work as a strenuous activity separated from private life. The claim to knowledge about the state of nature as ‘red and tooth and claw’ is not meant to simply ‘represent reality’, but to extend to justifications of state power and the constitution of certain human beings as subjects of that power.
Semiotic practices such as these descriptions, classifications and other claims on what ‘counts’ as knowledge are thus (sense-making) tools and not neutral representations of how the world is, and from the point of view of power, this difference is important; the way in which theories, classifications, taxonomies etc. define what counts as knowledge stretches into identities, institutions, routines, actions, and permissible modes of life.
It should also be clear from these examples that the ‘power’ in the knowledge/power dialectic need not be personal power, as in Hitler’s wish for domination, but also impersonal, as when technocrats accumulate large data of statistical knowledge on individuals for bureaucratic needs, or when surveillance technologies are implemented in prisons to ‘make things easier’.
One last example that is closer to our subject matter are religious confessions—a very specific, socio-historically conditioned, way of talking about how one did something. Confessions were made mandatory for all Christians in the 13th century (p.748). But it more than simply served a psychological, cathartical need in expressing what one has done; it is at the same time a theatrical performance where the speech-act of confessing ‘I confess …’ is instituted as a disciplinary mechanism that simultaneously sustains a power relation between the priest—who is not simply a latent interlocutor but an ordained authority figure that imparts absolution—and the confessing subject, who is presumed guilty of doing something wrong. It is a disciplinary technology insofar as it regulates individual actions and discourse in line with Christian codes of conduct by authorising discourse between “the sacred” and therefore True, and “the profane” and therefore False. In being a space of exceptionality where a presupposed “sinful” confessor is permitted to utter the taboo, the secret, the unsayable, to an authority figure who oversees these utterances—which would otherwise disrupt the accepted natural order of things outside of this space—discourse is institutionally delimited through the workings of a power/knowledge dialectic by producing a ‘truth’ about what individuals can say and do.
A historiography of Christendom will take for granted the social identity ‘sinner’ or ‘penitent’, as these terms are now sui generis. It will not ask, ‘how did humans come to construct and perform this social identity?’, because the answer does not lie in the chronological forces which, somehow, imposed a bunch of humans to construct that identity, but rather in the humans themselves. Historiography therefore often paints a story in which human beings react to causal events like plants reacting to stimuli or thermostats to temperature.2
To understand how the identity of a ‘Christian penitent’ is constituted therefore requires, as genealogy prescribes, paying detailed attention to the minutiae of the historical language-in-use and people’s everyday, unreflective lives. The confessing subject might think that the priest may not truly accept his confession, but she will never doubt her social identity as a ‘confessing sinner’—an identity which is constructed and can only make sense within a larger ‘Christian’ discourse. The act of confessing itself is straightforwardly understood; a repenting attitude coupled with an admittance of wrongdoing. But it is also imbued with a (Christian) reality that cannot be simply conveyed by synonymous concepts or by beliefs and attitudes.
Foucault favours discontinuity and avoids "totalising" stories that span millennia. He questions the "logic of continuity," which assumes that concepts and ideas either remain constant throughout history or have been pre-formed and extend as far back as records allow and instead favours the idea of ‘ruptures’ taking place in between different epochs, or what he termed ‘epistemes’. Perhaps the only recurring motif is that each historical epoch views matters in its own, necessarily parochial, lights, its own jargon and logics, and that there is no ‘neutral’ logic to view the world from. The implication is that, in order to understand a historical period, we must first identify the questions it is answering, even if those questions were not overtly stated at the time.
I have used Christendom as an obvious example that would hopefully illustrate the case to the reader. However, Foucault’s genealogy may be applied to presumably any historical epoch. The Order of Things, for instance, was first and foremost a historicisation of the present; a demonstration of how what seems now to be just the natural order of things was in fact produced by unforeseen historical contingencies. His other works examined contemporary disciplinary mechanisms from prisons, mental asylums, clinics to the “biopolitics” of population control, and how these practices regulate the limits of discourse and generate new descriptions and categories, which in part, generates new kinds of people.
This project is shared by Thomas Kuhn with respect to science in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is also shared by Bruno Latour who argued in We Have Never Been Modern that modern societies do not escape from the narrow parameters of their own discourse which comes with its own apparently self-evident axioms to make sense of their world and themselves. It is scarcely possible, for instance, for a person living in America today to elude the adoption of such notions as that progress is linear and modernity moves towards progress, that reason is advancing and the Church retreating, that science is the basis of rational enquiry, that nature is distinct from culture (politics, aesthetic, ethics and social affairs), that there is a large rupture with the past and that we now live in a peculiarly distinct age. This excludes the things that are left unsaid within our current discursive formations, sentences which are simply impossible for me to even begin to consider, as to do so would mean for me to transcend my own discursive practices. This is not to imply that there is a continuity with the past (although there might be interconnected, ongoing conversations) but that the present is also not presupposition-less.
David Couzens Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, 1986.
Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, 2002.
Karen Armstrong, A History of God, 1994.
Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, 1942.
Michael, Foucault, The Order of Things, 1966.
Marc Block, Feudal Society, 1961.
Rayomnd Guess, Genealogy as Critique, 2014.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 1993.
This is not to “deny truth”, but to deny Truth construed as a substantive metaphysical entity, as opposed to intersubjective agreement.
For example, it was not simply the testimonial report of the empty tomb by the disciples that caused Europe to believe that Jesus was resurrected and that God was Jesus incarnate, but this report must be put into context with, for example, the rhetorical genius of St. Paul, the embodiment of his rhetoric in institutions, and the predisposition of a Greek community to take that rhetoric seriously.