Genealogy (Foucault)

Sebuah metode pemikiran, atau lebih tepatnya level of analysis yang dicetuskan oleh Michel Foucault.

Archaeology of Thoughts

Arkeologi Foucault sebagai Archeology of Thoughts - bukan mencari tahu apa ataupun bagaimana pemikiran tertentu bisa terbentuk dari sisi individu (konsekuensinya bisa kepada mencari tahu secara deskriptif ataupun kepada pemikiran dari tokoh yang membentuk atau mencetuskan pemikiran tersebut), tetapi kepada apa saja yang membentuk kondisi yang kemudian menghasilkan pemikiran tersebut. Serupa dengan arkeologi yang lebih berfokus kepada konteks dari temuan sejarah dalam ekskavasi geologis.

Foucault: A Very Short Introduction - Archaeology

We will not be so much interested in, say, Hume or Darwin as in what made Hume or Darwin possible. This is the root of Foucault’s famous ‘marginalization of the subject’. It is not that he denies the reality or even the supreme ethical importance of the individual consciousness. But he thinks that individuals operate in a conceptual environment that determines and limits them in ways of which they cannot be aware.

Genealogy

Genealogi Foucault mengambil satu langkah maju dari pendekatan yang dilakukan oleh arkeologi di dalam menelaah sesuatu - ia mengambil posisi yang serupa dengan Genealogi yang dicetuskan lebih dahulu oleh Nietzsche, bahwa kuasa/power selalu memiliki hubungan dengan pengetahuan.

Foucault: A Very Short Introduction - Genealogy

(Talking about Archaeology of Knowledge’s four main categories of archaeological analysis) …However, the four key archaeological categories are here applied not just to language but to practices that go beyond mere linguistic expression to produce physical changes in their objects. Discipline and Punish is concerned, therefore, not just with the language (analysed by archaeology) through which we know the world, but with the power that changes the world.

Foucault: A Very Short Introduction - Genealogy

Foucault was sceptical of grand teleological narratives focused on such goals and proposed instead accounts based on many specific ‘little’ causes, operating independently of one another, with no overall outcome in view. On such an approach we might, for example, discuss not the ‘invention of printing’ but an entire complex of developments in the production and distribution of newspapers and magazines (new sorts of presses, styles of reporting, methods of making paper, subscription schemes, and so on) that would in turn have a wide and disparate range of social, economic, and political effects. Or, to cite an example from Foucault himself, in Discipline and Punish he shows how, among many other things, the invention of a new kind of rifle, more efficient ways of organizing the space of hospitals, and changes in the methods of teaching children penmanship all unwittingly contributed to the formation of a radically new system of social control.

A final discovery: that the objects of these diverse and specific causes are human bodies. The forces that drive our history do not so much operate on our thoughts, our social institutions, or even our environment as on our individual bodies. So, for example, punishment in the 18th century is a matter of violent assaults on the body: branding, dismemberment, execution, whereas in the 19th century it takes the apparently gentler but equally physical form of incarceration, ordered assemblies, and forced labour. Prisoners are subjected to a highly structured regimen designed to produce ‘docile bodies’. A Foucaultian genealogy, then, is a historical causal explanation that is material, multiple, and corporeal.

Ini yang menjadi dasar dari tesis Foucault seputar relasi kuasa/pengetahuan - kekuasaan mempengaruhi bagaimana sebuah pemikiran terbentuk atau berubah, meskipun relasinya tidak serta merta secara absolut.

Foucault - A Very Short Introduction - Genealogy

Foucault is here staking out a position between the extremes of reducing knowledge to power (that is, the identification of ‘A knows that p’ with ‘social forces compel A to accept p’) and asserting the essential independence of knowledge and power (that is, the Utopian claim that ‘A knows that p’ implies ‘A’s acceptance of p is causally independent of all social forces’). To know is not simply to be affected by power; as Foucault once said of power and knowledge, ‘The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them’. On the other hand, knowing does not involve a total escape from power relations.

See also: belajar bahasa asing, sebagai contoh analisis pribadi yang sedikit banyak didasarkan kepada konsep genealogi.