Magazine: Philosophy of the Social Sciences, March 1994
FICTIONS OF EMERGENCE FOUCAULT/GENEALOGY/NIETZSCHE
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Michel Foucault's genealogies, due to their reliance on Nietzschean
accounts of the violent origins of human culture, present a problematic
description of the emergence of patterns of resistance and domination.
By creating a parallel fiction of emergence that replaces Nietzschean
originary violence with Richard Dawkins's account of the centrality of
cultural transmission in human survival we can release emergence from
the unitary Foucauldian drama. It is then possible to reconstruct
Foucault's genealogies, anchoring the will to knowledge in an active
agent dedicated to the transgression of sociocultural limits.
The essence of human existence is defined in its origins, and,
conversely, the search for origins assumes the existence and
accessibility of a human nature. Genealogy, on the other hand, eschews
origins, seeking instead "numberless beginnings" that reveal the
dispersions and deviations inherent in descent. As social forces
intertwine, they produce moments of emergence from their confrontation.
Each episode of emergence produces a new dispersion of rules, beliefs,
dominations, and contingent truths.
The genealogies written by Michel Foucault between 1961 and 1984 trace
patterns of domination to their moment(s) of emergence. By detailing the
disciplinary technologies that divide the subject from others and within
itself, Foucault seeks to reveal the struggle inherent in emergence and
to encourage resistance to the exposed forces of domination through the
development of personal autonomy and the stimulation of human
recalcitrance.
Foucault fails, however, to give a satisfactory explanation of why
struggle, division, and passivity are inherent in emergence, which he
calls entstehung based on Nietzsche's vocabulary in On the Genealogy of
Morals. Implicit in Foucault's description of emergence is a reliance on
Nietzsche's account of the violent origins of culture. The purpose of
this essay is to reveal Foucault's dependence on Nietzsche through a
genealogy of its own that notes the interplay of Foucault's themes of
biopower, will to knowledge, and domination and their descent from a
"single drama" of violence; to set aside Nietzsche's account of the
emergence of culture and its imprint on our phylogenic memory, replacing
it with a description of the gradual acquisition of culture; and to
reinvestigate Foucault based on Richard Dawkins's account of entstehung,
critically redescribing emergence, the subject, the will to knowledge,
and the "agonism" of history.
These aims cannot be reached through conventional philosophical
argumentation. As Philp (1985) points out, it is difficult to criticize
Foucault without becoming part of the domination he claims to subvert
(p. 79). Foucault claims immunity from prosecution by programmatic
rational discourse by labeling his histories "fictions." The narrowness
of this inquiry compounds the difficulties raised by Foucault's
avoidance of intellectual culpability. Although I seek to establish
Foucault's connection with Nietzsche, I do not do so to refute
Nietzsche's (1968) vision of emergence--"What have I to do with
refutations!" (preface, 4). Therefore, I will dispute Foucault's account
of emergence by creating an opposing fiction out of Dawkins's account of
the meme--a fiction which displaces Foucault's Nietzschean roots and
retraces descent from a new emergence.(n1)
It may seem odd to connect a new philosophy of emergence to biological
science, but ontological fables cannot be confined within the boundaries
of a "discipline" or we risk missing the connections between diverse
phenomena that lie at the very heart of genealogy. Foucault's studies
have so blurred the lines that distinguish fields of inquiry into the
human condition that forcing them apart is stranger than uniting them.
To allow the foreign vocabularies and histories of unique approaches to
human society to dissuade us of their relevance is contrary to the
"relentless erudition" genealogy demands.
A new fiction must begin by tracing the disparate strands of emergence
through Foucault's work, not chronologically by production but
thematically through the theoretical lines of descent to the primordial
emergence. These strands reveal themselves in Foucault's appropriation
of the work of the Annales historians.
In 1947, historians associated with the journal Annales: Economies,
Societies, Civilizations began an extended attack on event-based
political history. By advocating the investigation of broad patterns of
social, cultural, and environmental development, the Annales historians
sought to reveal the contingency of traditional historical narrative and
the durability of the structures that control society:
It was the task of the new history, led so to speak 'by life itself', to
uncover the impersonal forces which in reality fashioned men and their
destinies and to plot the slower rhythms at which social time in fact
moved. (Clark 1985, 180)
Fernand Braudel, editor of Annales from 1957 until 1968 and arguably the
"most important single influence" in the postwar "reorientation of
French historiography," summed up the project of the Annales historians
as the "transcending of the individual and the particular event" (Clark
1985,179). The problems of history, to Braudel, lie in the landscape
itself and arise from the very nature of society.
Braudel divides history into three units. The first is the tune span of
events and is characterized by the individual, the instant, and the
immediate. The second unit Braudel calls the time of conjonctures. Here
the duration of events and change is longer, characterizing
civilizations and economies. Last, there is the unit of longest duration,
the histoire de la longue duree. This unit is the focal point of inquiry
for the Annales historians. Change is almost unrecognizable except from
the perspective of centuries. History of the longue duree is the history
of the slow rhythms of social time: "This is the domain of man's
biological, geo-physical and climatic circumstances, of `man in his
intimate relationship to the earth which bears and feeds him'" (Clark
1585, 183).
These longue duree processes are on the periphery of Foucault's
characterization of emergence. Where Braudel was intent on severing them
from the immediate, Foucault tries to show how aspects of the longue
duree have been subjugated to political/power processes in the more
immediate realm of history:
As the fostering of life and the growth and care of the population
becomes a central concern of the state, articulated in the art of
government, a new regime of power takes hold. (Rabinow, 1984,17)
Foucault (1978) calls this regime "biopower." As described in The
History of Sexuality, Volume 1, biopower is the result of the
entanglement of life with politics:
It was life more than the law that became the issue of political
struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations
concerning rights. The "right" to life, to one's body, to health, to
happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and, beyond all the oppressions
or "alienations," the "right" to rediscover what one is and all that one
can be, this "right" . . . was the political response to all these new
procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional
right of sovereignty. (p. 145)
Biopower designates that which "brought life and its mechanisms into the
realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of the
transformation of human life" (p. 143). Foucault thus acknowledges the
distinction between the immediate political processes and the histoire
de la longue duree but argues that this separation has been annulled by
the increased power of the immediate over life. "Politics," Foucault
writes, places man's "existence as a living being in question" (p. 143).
Biopower has two "axes": the species and the body. As a scientific
category, the species is the site of "sustained political attention and
intervention" (Rabinow 1984,17). The scientization of knowledge, which
Foucault documents in reference to the penal system in Discipline and
Punish, the asylum in Madness and Civilization, and sexuality in The
History of Sexuality,Volume 1, is inextricably tied to an extension of
power. Categorization under the rubric of science breaks the controls on
the will to knowledge that juridical and clerical classification systems
had maintained prior to the modern age.
The role of the will to knowledge under the regime of biopower is
ambiguous but central to Foucault's idea of emergence as it provides the
first link to Nietzsche. In his essay "Nietzsche/Genealogy/ History,"
Foucault (1984a) details the effects of this "rancorous" will. Inherent
in the will to knowledge is the division of the subject against itself,
the unleashing of deep-seated violence, and the sacrifice of the body.
The will to knowledge
creates dangers in every area.... It dissolves the unity of the
subject.... Its development is not tied to the affirmation of a free
subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive
violence. (p. 96)
Foucault's valuation of the will to knowledge is unclear, as he
expresses, quoting Nietzsche, "do we wish humanity to end in fire and
light or to end on the sands?" (Nietzsche quoted in Foucault 1984a, 96).
The romance of self-destruction through knowledge clashes with the
gentle anonymity of an undisrupted life.
The ambiguity of the will to knowledge lies in its ability to extend and
destabilize the regime of biopower. Foucault acknowledges that the will
to knowledge is a driving force behind the regime of biopower and the
political co-opting of longue duree processes, but it is also the means
by which the interplay of forces is exposed: "the `will to knowledge' in
our culture is simultaneously part of the danger and a tool to combat
that danger" (Rabinow 1984, 7). The will to knowledge when employed in
the genealogical method "involves a painstaking rediscovery of struggles,
an attack on the tyranny of . . . `totalizing discourses' and a
rediscovery of fragmented, subjugated, local and specific knowledge"
(Philp 1985, 76). By unveiling the moment of emergence, struggle is
revealed; by revealing struggle, technologies that are used to objectify
the subject are demystified. In the operation of these technologies upon
the subject lies the second axis of biopower.
The second axis is constituted by the body. As "an object to be
manipulated and controlled," the body is the site of employment of
technologies formed by the union of knowledge and power:
The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take
charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms.
(Foucault 1978, 144)
These technologies discipline the body; they place control of existence
outside the object. Foucault's genealogies trace the descent of these
technologies to a moment of emergence. There are three technologies that
transform human beings into subjects: dividing practices, scientific
classification, and subjectification. The technologies of "dividing
practices" are prior to all others and inherent in emergence.
Foucault defines dividing practices as the means by which "the subject
is objectified by a process of division either within himself or from
others" (Rabinow 1984, 8). In both Discipline and Punish and Madness and
Civilization, Foucault demonstrates that the first step in the extension
and intrusion of power over subjects is division. For example, one of
Foucault's identifiable points of emergence for a new penality occurred
during an execution in Paris in 1775. Due to extreme tension between
government authorities and the people, which was caused by the corn
riots, two ranks of soldiers were placed between the public and the
scaffold: "Contact was broken: it was a public execution, but one in
which the element of spectacle was neutralized" (Foucault 1979, 65).
Division of the public from the scaffold extended the objectification of
the prisoner as it ended the drama of punishment--"the spectacle of the
scaffold"--that had created a theatrical relationship between authority
(the sovereign), the prisoner, and the general public. By separating the
scaffold and the public, the French authorities assumed all roles in the
spectacle. This event was a moment of emergence because it inaugurated
the slow process of distancing the public from punishment that has been
the focus of penal reform ever since.
Foucault's best example of a dividing process comes from his work
Madness and Civilization. In 1656, the Hopital General was created in
Paris for the confinement of the poor, the insane, and others who were
defined as "nonhuman" due to their idleness or lack of reason (Foucault
1965). This division, which involved the internment of one percent of
Paris's population, marks the beginning of Foucault's "classical age."
But the differentiation and confinement of individuals from a mass is
only the most visible dividing practice. It is the internal division of
the subject tied to the will to knowledge that reveals Foucault's links
to Nietzschean descriptions of emergence.
The will to knowledge, by releasing "those elements of itself that are
devoted to [the subject's] subversion and destruction," disentangles
will, instinct, and culture from the body, dissolving the "unity of the
subject" (Foucault 1984a, 163). The body, neutral and detached, is
willingly called to sacrifice on the altar of knowledge, having become a
slave to its new master--instinct--through the will to knowledge.
Culture and instinct, once held in check by a neutral historical
consciousness committed to the "dissipation" of identity and the
inhibition of creativity, are freed through the will to knowledge to
accomplish the dissolution of the subject. To Foucault (1984a), the will
to knowledge "deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and
nature.... This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it
is made for cutting" (Foucault 1984a, 154). Thus the subject becomes a
corporeal stage where instinct and culture perform a theatrical duel of
claims upon the body. The will to knowledge, loosed through genealogy by
a complete unmasking of the self, violently undermines the unity of the
tripartite of culture, instinct, and body and calls this destroyed unity,
through its own imperative, to the voluntary immolation of the self.
Entstehung, or emergence, is the alignment of culture, instinct, and
body into a concerted struggle:
Emergence is thus the entry of forces.... What Nietzsche calls the
Entstehungsherd of the concept of goodness is not specifically the
energy of the strong or the reaction of the weak, but precisely this
scene where they are displayed superimposed or face-to-face....
Emergence designates a place of confrontation. (p. 84)
Foucault is somewhat elliptical about the nature of this confrontation--
or "drama" as he calls it--that characterizes emergence. He describes it
simply as "the domination of certain men over others," but he does not
explain why there is "only a single drama ever staged in this `non-
place'" of emergence (p. 85). In fact, by positing a singularity to
emergence, Foucault seems to define a human essence based in domination
and submission. This single drama is replayed in every episode of
entstehung due to a memory of emergence: entstehung "establishes marks
of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies" (p.
85). This phylogenic memory, as postulated by both Freud (Civilization
and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion) and Nietzsche (On the
Genealogy of Morals), must necessarily be rooted in the drama of the
Fall--an event of profound and lingering psychological impact that
continues to limit and direct the single drama of emergence.
Nietzsche (1968) describes in On The Genealogy of Morals the drama of
entstehung. On a primordial landscape, Nietzsche writes, instinct
reigned supreme in the human psyche: "In the days when mankind was not
yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful" (II:7).
This pre-lapsarian Eden of cruelty ends with its own original sin--with
awareness of its cruelty, humanity slowly develops the bad conscience:
I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to
contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever
experienced--that change which occurred when he found himself finally
enclosed within the walls of society and peace. (II: 16)
The creation of society was not gradual or voluntary. Suddenly, we were
forced to relinquish our animal past. Nietzsche's vision involves a
conquering race of "blond beasts of prey" violently fashioning the
oldest state from a hitherto shapeless and nomadic population--an
original tyranny using violent oppression to subdue the instincts of the
people to enable communal life:
Among the presuppositions of this hypothesis concerning the origin of
the bad conscience is, first, that the change referred to was not a
gradual or voluntary one . . . but a break, a leap, a compulsion, an
ineluctable disaster which precluded all struggle.... Secondly, however,
that the welding of a hitherto unchecked and shapeless populace into a
firm form was not only instituted by an act of violence but also carried
to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence. (II:17)
Specifically, Nietzsche describes the incarceration of the "instinct for
freedom" as the origin of the bad conscience:
this instinct for freedom forcibly made latent . . . pushed back and
repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent
itself only on itself that, and that alone, is what the bad conscience
is in its beginnings. (II:17)
Thus it is when we become cultural animals on our way "to becoming an
'angel'" that man "finally learns to be ashamed of all his instincts"
(II:7).(n2) In this new world--a world of prohibition--the instincts
that had served them so well were useless: "all their instincts were
disvalued and suspended" (II:16). Cast out of Eden, these creatures,
robbed of "their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and
infallible drives," were forced to rely on their consciousness, "their
weakest and most fallible organ" (II:16).
The "blond beasts of prey" used knowledge of dividing practices to cut
the mass of people off from nature and instinct. Thus they fashioned a
subject divided into three parts: culture, resting on the surface of a
neutral body, represses the instinctual urges that emanate from deep
inside the subject. Foucault's entstehung is a recapitulation of the
Fall from the Eden of cruelty. Domination of others by division lies
etched in the collective phylogenic memory and is destined to be
repeated as the only drama that can occur in this "nonspace" defined by
the violent advent of culture: "humanity installs each of its violences
in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination"
(Foucault 1984a, 85).
Nietzsche provides an "effective" history, which describes the links
between emergence and dividing practices. While I find Metzsche's
account problematic in the extreme, it is not the purpose of this essay
to dispute points of paleoanthropology. Instead, I shall simply set it
aside and propose a different account of emergence. It is ironic that
Foucault's entstehung should rely on a singular drama. The rejection of
Nietzsche's account of emergence in favor of Richard Dawkins's creates
the opportunity to reestablish the multiplicity in emergence that
Foucault sought.
If culture is not a sudden process but a slow deliberative acquisition
transmitted inter- and intragenerationally, with the acuity of hindsight
we may conjecture that natural selection favored those early humans who
were gaining proficiency at extrasomatic transmission of information. In
competition, instinct proved to be insufficient to guarantee survival.
The gene--the one mode of information transfer since the beginning of
life--was slowly being eclipsed in human development. But what was
replacing it? What was the actual language of the etchings that history
inscribed on our bodies? The word "culture" is so monolithic and
imposing that to ascribe it to early humans is to do violence to our
emergence. Without an appropriate word to describe the new replicator--a
cultural replicator--Homo is at one moment instinctual and then, once a
basic task is taught to another, cultural.
Dawkins (1989), an English geneticist, has coined the word "meme"
(rhymes with gene) to describe a single unit of cultural transmission.
He discards the gene as the sole basis of evolutionary analysis of human
culture, creating in its stead a new replicator:
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very
planet . . . It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about
in its primordial soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change
at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind. (p. 206)
The meme is defined as a single unit of cultural transmission of
sufficient magnitude or intensity to replicate itself under proper
conditions:
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool so memes propagate
themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process
which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. (p. 206)
N. K. Humphrey, also a geneticist, envisions memes as "living structures,
not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme
in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle
for the meme's propagation" (quoted in Dawkins 1989, 207).
The meme is a powerful analytic tool for dismantling the account of
emergence created by Nietzsche and built upon by Foucault. But we cannot
create a truly new fiction of emergence by simply replacing Nietzsche's
failed metaphysical Darwinism with a reconstructed sociobiology. The
usefulness of the meme within a new fiction of emergence lies in its
power to undermine the monolith of culture. The individual meme, within
a framework of transmission and communication, removes the suddenness of
emergence. One meme shared intragenerationally as the entstehung of
human genealogy heals the violence inscribed on emergence by Nietzsche.
The meme's growth is not in opposition to the gene but complementary to
it. By ensuring greater security in the competition for finite resources
adjudicated by natural selection, the meme guarantees not only its own
survival but the survival of its associated genes.
The removal of a phylogenic memory of violence from the emergence of
culture opens the drama of entstehung to a variety of possibilities and
causes difficulties for Foucault's descriptions of dividing practices,
the subject, and the struggle of history. The first consequence of a new
fiction of emergence based on the meme is the removal of inherent links
between emergence and dividing practices. This does not mean, however,
that Foucault's modes of objectification of the subject must be
abandoned. Of the other modes Foucault describes, subjectification is
the one best linked with Dawkins's account of emergence.
Scientific classification is unsatisfactory because it implies the same
type of passivity on the part of agents as dividing practices. Memetic
emergence depends on an active agent in two ways. First, the
extrasomatic information must be obtained, and, second, it must be
transferred, which includes active teaching and active learning.
Scientific classification, however, involves the extension of power over
a passive subject. For example, Foucault demonstrates how scientific
reification of "madness" has given the discipline of psychoanalysis
considerable power over the disposition of subjects, either to free:
them from juridical prosecution (i.e., "not guilty by reason of
insanity") or to effect their incarceration (i.e., in an asylum). As
subjects hold only a passive role in their objectification in this model,
it cannot be linked to the dramas of emergence.
Subjectification, on the other hand, is active. According to this mode
of objectification of the subject, agents are self-creative. This self-
formation, which Foucault addresses in his later work (see History of
Sexuality), occurs through a multiplicity of "operations on [people's]
own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own
conduct" (Foucault quoted in Rabinow 1984,11). For example, Freud
represents to Foucault the epitome of a late Victorian obsession with
sex as a key to self-understanding and definition. To speak of sex under
the conditions of repression, which characterized Victorian times, was
to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise
bliss to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold
pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of
knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the
garden of earthly delights. (Foucault 1978, 7)
Although using a psychoanalytic model to illustrate subjectification
places a mediator between the subject and knowledge, this mediation is
not necessary. Foucault (1984b) writes in his critique of Baudelaire
that "modernity compels [man] to face the task of producing himself" (p.
42).
Foucault recognizes that an agent active in emergence anchors the will
to knowledge--a will to both establish truths and uncover their falsity--
in autonomy. In his critique of the Enlightenment, Foucault (1984b)
concludes that
the critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly,
as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that
is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos. (p 50)
This ethos he defines as "a historico-practical test of the limits that
we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon
ourselves as free beings" (p. 47). By defining and surpassing limits,
the subject seizes Kant's (1970) imperative sapere aude--dare to know--
and mobilizes it according to the conception of aufklarung as ausgang--
enlightenment as exit (p. 54). Thus the first links between self-
knowledge (or as Foucault would say "the critical ontology of the self")
and the active agent, derive from an ethos that defines enlightenment
and the drive for autonomy of will as an ausgang--a defining and
superseding of boundaries. This drive for autonomy of will is the will
to knowledge. But a will to knowledge tied to a Kantian ideal of exit is
not the dangerous subversive Foucault describes in his more Nietzschean
writings. The will to knowledge and the active objectification of the
self affirm the freedom of the subject if it is dedicated to the active
transgression of limits and our "impatience for liberty" (Foucault 1984b,
50).
A liberating will to knowledge and a graceful emergence highlights an
aspect of Foucault's writings that seems anomalous among his other work.
Although Foucault's theory is malleable enough to react to the
dissociation of dividing practices from emergence, there are two other
problems introduced by a fiction of emergence based on the meme that
cannot be resolved without serious damage to his framework. The first
problem is the unification of the subject. Without the violence of
emergence, culture does not repress instinct but embays it, flooding the
areas where it can no longer guarantee survival. In addition, the body
is no longer scarred by an internal battle between culture and instinct.
Certainly, history still acts on the body, cutting and healing it, but
the body is not divided against itself. The sacrifice of humanity in a
consuming fire for knowledge, while dramatic, depends on an internal
tension where discovery destabilizes and disrupts and revelation details
the grotesque carnage underlying the masks of history. This tension does
not exist in a subject that actively defines the process of its own
objectification and that defines boundaries so as to overstep them and
revel in its autonomy. Where passivity constitutes emergence,
domineering power structures cause alienation and internal division;
where activity constitutes emergence, the ability of agents to surpass
limits through cultural knowledge and the will to knowledge opens
entstehung to a continuous flow of possibility for change.
The second problem and third consequence of a memetic fiction of
emergence is the removal of conflict inherent in entstehung, which could
justify Foucault's characterization of history as a struggle. Struggle,
Foucault argues, is a condition of the contingent and patternless
processes that root history knowledge and the subject "in contingency,
discontinuity and iniquitous origins" (quoted in Philp 1985, 78). Mark
Philp (1985) points out, however, that Foucault fails to explain "why
people struggle and what they should struggle for" (p. 79).
Without struggle and without agonism, what defines history? How can
agonism and the will to knowledge be redescribed within a memetic theory
of emergence? Have we liberated human origins from orgiastic violence
only to cast modern humans into processual descriptions of powerlessness
and determinism? On the contrary, human activity is affirmed but
redefined. Genealogies must focus on the activities of cultural
transmission that constitute entstehung--teaching and learning. In this
dynamic lies the dispersion of possibility and idea. Genealogies are not
so much texts as they are incantations, transmitted and practiced
orally. It is the shock of domination--the interruption of the
transmission that is our catechism and confirmation- that engenders
agonism. In the ever ambiguous will to knowledge lies the revelation of
a body scarred and disfigured by domination but one fully engaged to the
constant reenactment of transmission. In other words, the will to
knowledge discovers hope in emergence rather than despair.
Foucault's genealogies are incomplete in light of an emergence based on
cultural transmission. They show domination but not restoration and
hence we can discern no political program in Foucault's writings. To
transcend the impotent "decentered" self as well as the self-created
"man of the Enlightenment," we must employ the new fiction of emergence
toward various courses of resistance that promise to reestablish
cultural transmission. The self is affirmed in the context of each
transmission as both an agent and a receptor. In every entstehung we
must look for the point of transmission to discover praxis; in every
disruption through domination we must seek to reestablish cultural
communication.
Vincent Descombes divides interpretations of Foucault's work into two
categories--American and French. The American interpretation of Foucault
focuses on personal autonomy and the rejection of universals within the
framework of liberal democracy. The French interpretation of Foucault
studies the same themes but in an anarchistic frame. As Descombes writes,
the French Foucault's quest for personal autonomy requires us to think
"unhuman thoughts" (quoted in Rorty 1990, 1). In other words, the
American interpreters of Foucault accept his project but reject the
Nietzschean underpinnings that the French interpreters find appealing.
This distinction, which centers on the role of Nietzsche in Foucault's
writings, describes the tension that this small investigation has
uncovered by juxtaposing two fictions of emergence. Foucault's
description of emergence is perfectly acceptable but inevitably
dependent on Nietzschean violence. If this account of the drama of the
emergence of culture and its imprint on our phylogenic memory is not
convincing, then Foucault's descriptions of the priority of dividing
practices in the objectification of the subject, the will to knowledge
and the tripartite division of the subject, and history's constant
nondialectic struggle are insufficient.
An emergence based on Dawkins enables us to prescribe political
possibilities and to assert the priority of transmission over domination
and interruption. Entstehung is a moment of agency and receptivity; the
agonism of history lies in the interruption of emergence rather than in
emergence itself.
Perhaps it is best not to force Foucault to confess the descent of his
own theory and instead to extend to him the privileges of a poet (Rorty
1990, 8). However, the account of emergence described in these pages may
not be a fiction after all. It is not directed to the indulgent audience
of the poet but to the dominated and oppressed who need not only the
possibility that Foucault extended but also a program for resistance. To
shield philosophy from inquiry is to cast the philosopher as Lear's fool-
-often speaking wisely but always narrowly avoiding the lash of
accountability and merely assisting the descent into madness. Converting
entstehung into action demands faith, not fiction; to resist domination
and reassert transmission requires a manifesto, not a fable. Poetry can
only exhort. Philosophy can guide.
NOTES
(n1.) By opposing fiction with fiction I am not deconstructing. I am
attempting to show not how Foucault's theory works against itself but
how it might rely on roots too rotten to support it. I am also not
employing hermeneutics against Foucault. I am more interested in
possibility and experimentation than in interpretation.
(n2.) To Nietzsche, neither culture nor instinct is inherently bad, as
both are elements of the will to power. In fact, in a rather confusing
passage, Nietzsche asserts that the consciousness, which he denigrated
in The Genealogy of Morals, is itself instinctual: "by far the greater
part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive
activities" (Nietzsche 1989, 3).
REFERENCES
Clark, S. 1985. The Annales historians. In The return of grand theory in
the human sciences, edited by Quentin Skinner, 177-98. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Dawkins, R. 1989. The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foucault, M. 1965. Madness and civilization. New York: Pantheon.
------. 1978. The history of sexuality, vol. 1. London: Penguin.
------. 1979. Discipline and punish. New York Vintage.
------. 1984a. Nietzsche/genealogy/history. In The Foucault reader,
edited by Paul Rabinow, 76-100. London: Penguin.
------. 1984b. What is enlightenment? In The Foucault reader, edited by
Paul Rabinow, 32-50. London: Penguin.
Kant, I. 1970. What is enlightenment? In Kant on history, edited by
Lewis White Beck, 3-10. New York: Macmillan.
Nietzsche, F. 1968. On the genealogy of morals. New York: Vintage.
------. 1989. Beyond good and evil. New York: Vintage
Philp, M.1985. Michel Foucault. In The return of grand theory in the
human sciences, edited by Quentin Skinner, 65-82. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rabinow, P. 1984. Introduction. In The Foucault reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow, 3-29. London: Penguin.
Rorty, R. 1990. Foucault/Dewey/Nietzsche. Raritan 9 (4): 1-8.
Received 17 July 1991
~~~~~~~~
By ADAM T. SMITH, University of Arizona
Adam T. Smith is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of
Arizona. He is currently engaged in archaeological excavations in
Armenia as part of his research into religious institutions, the state,
and surveillance in the Early Iron Age.
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Source: Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Dec94, Vol. 24 Issue 1, p41,
14p.
Item Number: 9704045973
