Genealogical Approach

Nietzsche and Foucault on Genealogical Critique

The genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault assume (and simultaneously attempt to establish) that society is composed of mutually contesting forces. Nietzsche refers to the interplay among these value-creating forces as a will to power. Some of these forces are active; that is, spontaneous affirmations of the contest among the forces that make up society. Others are reactive; that is, exist as denials or negations of the contestatory but also creative nature of society. When [Page 370]active forces dominate the social body (or the individual), Nietzsche refers to the latter as an affirmative will-to-power; when reactive forces are in the ascendancy, a nihilistic will to power. Similarly, Foucault refers to the forces of the social body as power. This power is not primarily the coercive sort or laws that say “thou shall not …”; rather, it refers to the practices that construct objects, subjects, and criteria of truth. For example, the modern form of power, bio-power, consists in the disciplines that organize and regulate bodies in the social arena—workplaces, schools, armies—and the policies that control the health, size, and other parameters concerning the utility of the population. Bio-power also requires forces that resist it. They permit it to continue exercising and increasing the practices that make up its anonymous disciplinary activity. In turn, the resisting forces require bio-power in order to be what they are. The social body is therefore ultimately both of these types of forces, power and resistance.

The Critical Dimension of Genealogy

Given this brief sketch of society as the interplay among value-creating forces, we can now elaborate on the specific characteristics of genealogy. Genealogy has a critical dimension and an affirmative dimension. Its critical dimension involves three tasks. The first two tasks are to reveal the social forces that cultural codes and social institutions serve, and often conceal, and to evaluate these codes and institutions on the basis of that revelation. The third task is to show how one and the same word, practice, or institution often serves successive and distinct, even opposed, forms of life and thereby takes on a new significance at every turn. In other words, the third task is to show that society is fundamentally grounded in contestation among the value-creating forces that genealogy takes to be its domain of operation. Genealogy, like every other discourse, is itself a value-creating force; thus, it is subject to the same sort of analysis it provides for other discourses.

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