What Foucault Meant When He Said “Genealogy”
When Michel Foucault was up for a coveted job at the Collège de France in 1969, he proposed to teach a course on the history of the science of heritability, “starting from breeding techniques, on through attempts to improve species, experiments with intensive cultivation, efforts to combat animal and plant epidemics, and culminating in the establishment of a genetics whose birth date can be placed at the beginning of the twentieth century.” He did get the job, and although the course never came about, research for it made its way into the first volume of The History of Sexuality.
There Foucault observes the contrast between two models of heredity in the nineteenth century: aristocratic genealogy that tracked bloodlines and bourgeois genealogy that attended to the health and vitality of the body.
[T]he aristocracy had . . . asserted the special character of its body . . . in the form of blood, that is, in the form of the antiquity of its ancestry and of the value of its alliances; the bourgeoisie on the contrary looked to its progeny and the health of its organism when it laid claim to a specific body. The bourgeoisie’s “blood” was its sex.
To put the contrast crudely, the bourgeoisie sought hereditary distinction in producing strapping lads and lovely lasses whose vital bodies would improve the stock, much as breeders of horses sought to produce racing champions. Aristocrats, on the other hand, risked bleeding out from hemophilia for the sake of reproducing a pure (and politically advantageous) bloodline. Never mind the health of the organism when the power of the family line was at stake.
The bourgeois model of heredity was Darwinian in its understanding of species-level change through variation over time. As Foucault remarked in his “Candidacy Presentation,” it was no accident that Darwin relied on the research of agricultural breeding to come to some of his most important insights. When applied to human heritability, the bourgeois model inclined to optimism about improvement of the “race” through careful breeding—as well as to anxiety about “degenerescence” through incest or miscegenation. Not to be confused with the political breeding of the aristocrats, bourgeois breeding extended to “body hygiene, the art of longevity, ways of having healthy children . . . and methods for improving the human lineage.” The bourgeois model of heredity thus lent itself to “a dynamic racism, a racism of expansion,” in which humanity takes control of its own evolution to better the race.
Purity of bloodline was only a secondary concern for the aristocracy. According to Foucault, purity derived its importance from political concerns. Aristocratic genealogies interpreted heredity according to political opportunity. Genealogy in this sense is always hermeneutical and always inventive. Nobility is expressed primarily in the politically opportune marriage. An aristocratic stemma, or family tree, exists to reveal and validate these opportunities.
This background allows us to make two observations about Foucault’s terminology. First, when Foucault says “genealogy,” he does not mean the natural sciences’ method of studying heritability. And he is more interested in the aristocratic, rather than the bourgeois approach, to heredity. This first observation affords a second: Foucault contrasts the science of genetics to aristocratic genealogy. And he adopts the aristocratic version of genealogy—concerned with sanguinity for political purposes—as the model for his analogical use of the term to name his own historical method. When Foucault says “genealogy,” he is thinking of aristocratic genealogy.
These observations enable us to parse this mature statement of Foucault’s genealogical method:
This kind of method entails going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power. In the same way, this analysis allows us to replace a genetic analysis through filiation with a genealogical analysis—genealogy should not be confused with genesis and filiation—which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communications, and points of support.
In this 1978 lecture he gave at the Collège de France, Foucault speaks of “genetics” to indicate the natural sciences’ method of studying heritability. He contrasts his genealogical method to any evolutionary model of history. His genealogy is not interested in heredity except insofar as a hermeneutics of heredity expresses political opportunity. Like aristocratic families, disciplines, institutions, and practices are constituted by and transmit themselves through alliances and networks of other disciplines, institutions, and practices.
The question Foucauldian genealogy asks is not how one cultural or social formation descended from others but how and to what extent it is related to and co-constitutive of others. (For the sake of clarity, I am oversimplifying Foucault’s understanding of institutions and practices.) Foucault is particularly interested in limit cases when an institution’s latent contingency comes to expression and opportunities for new alliances, networks, and formations emerge. The sinister example he discusses in The History of Sexuality is the emergence of eugenics as an exercise of biopower using the new tools of genetics.
These limit cases are “problems,” and their recognition and articulation constitutes “problematization.” (Here I follow Colin Koopman’s cogent explication of Foucauldian problematization.) Genealogy is the kind of analysis appropriate to a problem that has been problematized. Like a king seeking an advantageous marriage for his daughter, the genealogist consults the family trees in order to recognize opportunities for new formations. He analyzes not only lineages but also their proximity to and distance from each other. Too close and you run into the extreme of consanguinity, incest. Too far and you reach the region of enmity.
Genealogical tree of the Richard and Abigail Lippincott family in America, constructed and published by Charles Lippincott, 1880.
Considered in these terms, Foucault’s genealogy has a great deal in common with medieval analysis of genealogy using trees of consanguinity. Heredity is taken for granted (but it is not the point). Unlike a family tree, there is no single origin (because origins are not the point). Rather, the tree of consanguinity measures relative proximity and distance between individuals, lineages, and generations. Proximity and distance determine possibility. The tree of consanguinity visualizes the limit cases, the fringe of possibility where relation passes from taboo to opportunity, the degree of separation where “marriage is restored.”
In stressing possibility, I am emphasizing an underdeveloped dimension of Foucault’s analysis of pouvoir, or power, as it usually appears in English translations of his work. As Philipp Rosemann reminded me, pouvoir has more semantic overlap with the Latin virtus than it does with the English power. Less a force against an object, or force made structure, as Derrida once defined it, Foucault’s pouvoir is capacity or capability to do something; pouvoir is capability made possible by contingency.
It is common to describe Foucault’s genealogy as a campaign dedicated to unmasking the will to power by revealing institutions’ bad-faith assertions of noble origins. My charitable reading suggests another aspect of genealogy, a hermeneutic of historical contingency oriented to limit cases when new capabilities can emerge through different relations within and among institutions, communities, and individuals. This Foucault is not only critical but also constructive, creative.
This Foucault poses a powerful challenge to one current understanding of the task of the humanities scholar, which is to problematize. Given the training of humanities scholars in the last couple decades, problematization is the easy part of Foucault’s program (even if it requires hard work). But problematization is just the beginning. Genealogy is what we do after we problematize. Genealogy can be more constructive than critical.
In order to fully appreciate the constructive possibilities of genealogy, it is not enough to reframe Foucault, as this essay has begun to do. The more powerful movement of ressourcement must involve sustained engagement with the practices of genealogy from which humanities scholars derive the analogy of genealogical method. One example of such a practice is the medieval tree of consanguinity, which measures degrees of separation among blood relations. Here distance and difference are positive features of relation that make marriage possible.
Adapting this method to historical inquiry, we can, for example, supplement Alasdair MacIntyre’s and Philipp Rosemann’s accounts of tradition, which emphasize conflict as the engine of change-within-continuity. Genealogy of consanguinity enables us to think about continuity and disjunction otherwise than through conflict. This is because the fundamental mechanism of change in genealogy is not the antagonism of rival parties but the union of different parties through marriage. If we can begin to see nuptial reconciliation in history, we are better able to understand past, present, and future with a comic imagination. Comedies that end with weddings (think of Jane Austen’s novels or A Midsummer Night’s Dream) also imply new beginnings, new storylines. There is nothing deterministic about the comic imagination, even if you already know the ending. A comic historical imagination is less about happy endings than about this ability to recognize or envision new and different relations in history.
Ryan McDermott is the Director of the Genealogies of Modernity Project, associate professor of medieval literature and culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and founder and faculty director of Beatrice Institute.