G

Summary

Genealogy

Originally developed by French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault, the concept of genealogy aims to trace ‘the details and accidents that accompany every beginning’ (Foucault, 1998, p 144). For Foucault (1998), genealogy recognises that every idea and thought system is conditioned by ‘its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats’ (pp 144– 145). Genealogy therefore ‘rejects the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for origins’ (Foucault, 1998, p 140). Inspired by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who through his writing on morality and religion opposed metaphysics and the search for the origins or essences of things (in German ‘Ursprung’), Foucault described ideas and thought systems as the ‘exteriority of accidents’ (Foucault, 1998, p 146), meaning that what comes to stand in for, or represent, truth is only ever the ‘outcome of a process in which there is conflict, confrontation, struggle, resistance’ (Foucault, 2002, p 457).

Genealogy therefore concerns the mode of dissension by which some ideas and thought systems acquire the status of ‘truths’ – universal ideals, value systems or normative assumptions. Here, mode of dissension refers to that dynamic, generative, productive space in which ideas and thought systems are struggled over by cultures and interest groups through invasions, ploys, omissions and silences. In this sense, genealogy differs from traditional historical methods of inquiry where, typically, ideas and thought systems are studied chronologically or sequentially as the culmination and expression of a linear-rational search for truth. On this account, genealogy views ideas and thought systems as the contingent product of struggles over meaning, struggles that tend to be concealed or violently suppressed through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘rationality’ or ‘morality’. Genealogy therefore aims at denaturalising ideas or thought systems taken to be timeless and rooted in a fixed and unchanging reality, ‘making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted’ (Foucault, 2002, p 456).