Foucault’s ‘philosophy of the event’: genealogical method and the deployment of the abnormal (original) (raw)

And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (Foucault, 1980b, p. 117) This chapter can be read in at least two ways. It is first and foremost a close-text exposition of Foucault's approach to genealogy, undertaken so as to avoid the shortcomings of many standard forms of discourse analysis as practiced within psychology. 1 It is also, more generally, a commentary on the strategic value of 'effective history' as it might inform qualitative research as a mode of critique. Foucault offers us less than a structured 'methodology' of genealogy; his late genealogical works create a methodological rhythm of their own, as Tamboukou (1999) puts it, ensuring no certain procedures of analysis. What Foucault does offer is a set of profound philosophical and methodological suspicions towards the objects of knowledge that we confront, a set of suspicions that stretch to our relationships to such objects, and to the uses to which such related knowledges are put. Foucault's genealogical method, in short, is a methodology of suspicion and critique, an array of defamiliarizing procedures and re-conceptualizations that pertain not just to any object of human science knowledge, but to any procedure (or position) of human science knowledge-production. Following the style of the previous chapter, my discussion here will take the form of a reading of Foucault's most pertinent single document regards the question at hand, in this case Foucault's (1977b) 138