Genealogy
from 1887 Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality; revived by Foucault from 1971
Trace a value or an institution back to the low, contingent, often disreputable circumstances that produced it, and watch its air of necessity evaporate.
- Active
- from 1887
- Where
- Sils-Maria, later Paris
- Also
- Genealogie
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Genealogy writes the history of something that presents itself as having no history. Values, categories and institutions that feel natural and timeless are shown to have emerged at a particular moment, out of particular struggles, for reasons that had nothing to do with the justification now offered for them.
The target is the sense of inevitability. Nothing is refuted; what is removed is the impression that things could not have been otherwise.
How it works
Take something presented as natural, universal or simply obvious. Find the moment it emerged. Reconstruct the conditions and the interests at work then. Show the discontinuity between those origins and the present justification. Leave the reader holding a contingent thing where a necessary one had been.
Nietzsche's insistence is that the history be low rather than noble — that you look for the pettiness, the accident and the interest, because a dignified origin story is usually the thing being covered for.
The moves, in order
- Take what is presented as natural or timeless
- Locate the moment of its emergence
- Reconstruct the conditions and interests that produced it
- Show the gap between those and the present justification
- The thing now appears contingent rather than necessary
The procedure
Proposition The key sign-out rule is not a safety rule.
- The depot rule requires every vehicle key to be signed out and back through the office, and is defended as a safety measure ensuring only inducted drivers take vehicles.
- The rule was introduced in March 1998. The minutes from that month record no safety discussion.
- What they record is the disappearance of a utility over a long weekend and an insurance claim that was initially refused for want of evidence about who had the vehicle.
- The induction requirement was added to the rule in 2011, thirteen years later, in a different document, and the sign-out was already universal by then.
- So the practice originates in an insurance dispute about custody, not in any concern about who is competent to drive, and the safety justification was attached to an existing rule long afterwards.
Therefore The rule is an evidence-of-custody rule wearing a safety justification, which matters because the proposed electronic key cabinet is being rejected on safety grounds it was never designed to serve.
Nothing here shows the rule is bad. It shows the reason given for keeping it is not the reason it exists, which changes what evidence is relevant to the decision.
What it is good for
Institutional rules, professional norms and moral categories that have hardened into common sense. It is the sharpest instrument available against the phrase we have always done it this way.
Where it fails
It walks along the edge of the genetic fallacy for its whole length. Where something came from is not what it is worth, and a rule with a squalid origin can be an excellent rule. Nietzsche and Foucault both knew this and neither gave a clean account of why their arguments were not simply that fallacy — the honest answer is that genealogy undermines a justification rather than a practice, and readers routinely take it to have done more.
It is also self-undermining, and more sharply than debunking arguments generally are. Genealogy is itself an institution with an origin in particular nineteenth-century conditions, and its own critical authority is exactly the kind of thing it exists to dissolve.
And the archive is chosen. A genealogy is a story assembled from selected sources, and there is no procedure for showing that a different selection would not tell a different story.
Common misconceptions
That it is ordinary history. Foucault called it a history of the present: the question is not what happened but why the present looks inevitable, and the past is examined only for what dissolves that appearance.
Where it came from
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality of 1887, which traces guilt to debt and moral goodness to the resentment of the weak. Foucault revives it in the 1970s for punishment, madness and sexuality.
What became of it
Now a standard mode across the humanities and increasingly in analytic philosophy, where genealogical debunking arguments are taken seriously.
Lasting influence
Discipline and Punish is the most influential work of history written by a philosopher, and the genealogical move is now routine in critical scholarship of every kind.
Why it still matters
Very high, and the most portable continental method — it works on a depot rule as well as on a moral category.
Put another way
Lifting a paving stone that has been there so long everyone assumed the ground grew that way.
Texts
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
The first essay is the model. Read it for the method rather than for its historical claims, several of which are unsupported.
Where to start
Read the first essay, then read Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, which explains what he took from it.
The surprising bit
The method exists to dissolve the authority of things with respectable pedigrees, and its own authority now rests almost entirely on a respectable pedigree.
In their own words
All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only that which has no history is definable
Who held it
Bernard Williams
Connections
- Relies on
- Debunking explanation
- Set against
- Endoxa
- Influenced
- Archaeology, Ideology critique
- Parallel to
- Debunking explanation
The verdict
The most powerful solvent on this list, and the one whose users are least clear about what it has actually established.