Archeology and Genealogy

Although the terms archeology and genealogy have established meanings in other disciplines, in the context of communication theory they are most often associated with methods for researching the past proposed by French theorist Michel Foucault. The goal of both archeological and genealogical approaches to history is to uncover how it is that certain ways of thinking and approaches to knowledge have become “common sense.” Archeologies of history tend to be directed toward uncovering the moments at which various ways of knowing come to be dominant and institutionalized, thus demonstrating how contingent the “taken for granted” has always been. Genealogies of history seek to tie these archeological shifts in knowledge and consciousness to broader historical transformations and the exercise of power behind those transformations. Both archeology and genealogy provide research approaches that question whether the development of communication theory and practice is the result of continual refinement and evolution or the result of historically contingent shifts in power.

Both of these methodologies spring from a fundamental skepticism about the nature of traditional histories. Foucault argues that most historical accounts suffer from a variety of interlinked but functional shortcomings. Stated simply, conventional accounts of the evolution of thought and historic events vastly oversimplify both those events and their causes. While this is an inherent quality of all histories, Foucault believed that the creation of [Page 39]knowledge about the past serves as part of a broader project by which people and institutions determine what range of truths will be widely accepted. Thus, rather than simply reflecting what “really” happened in the past, histories document those ideas, institutions, and political actors who emerged victorious from highly contested struggles over truth, meaning, and power while excluding or marginalizing other ideas, institutions, and people. In the case of histories of knowledge and technology, presenting the past as an orderly unfolding of ever increasingly rational and accurate ideas about science, government, education, and society is not only an oversimplification but a distortion. Rather than simply tracing major refinements in ways of thinking, such histories conceal struggles over truth and meaning whose outcomes were never inherently more superior, accurate, or inevitable than other potential outcomes. Equally important, they silence those individuals, ideas, experiences, and ways of living that did not prevail, erasing their existence from the historical record. Similarly, Foucault argued that political, economic, and social histories similarly serve to legitimate the power and authority of the victors of past power struggles, while overlooking the real power relationships that impact people on a day-to-day basis.

The problem with traditional histories is not simply that they are dishonest or incomplete but that they establish a “commonsense” or “taken for granted” understanding of the past that serves to continue and reinforce the power of the winners of those distant struggles into the present. By defining the range of ideas and outcomes that are conceivable under our commonly held understandings of what truth is; what ideas, institutions, and technologies are legitimate; and what ways of living are healthy and moral, histories shape and foreclose possibilities in the present. Thus, Foucault saw the creation of knowledge—and especially historical knowledge—as inseparable from the exercise of power. And histories constitute a particularly effective and problematic form of “knowledge/power” in that they simultaneously reproduce the exercises of power that underlie our stories about the past, while cloaking those exercises of power by presenting contemporary understandings as largely uncontested and inevitable.

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