{"id":1670,"date":"2021-01-01T15:01:37","date_gmt":"2021-01-01T20:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/?p=1670"},"modified":"2021-04-27T15:46:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T19:46:27","slug":"stuart-elden-from-dynastics-to-genealogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/abolition1313\/stuart-elden-from-dynastics-to-genealogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuart Elden | From Dynastics to Genealogy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Stuart Elden<\/a><\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve written about The Punitive Society<\/em> course by Foucault before, particularly in a review essay which appeared in Historical Materialism<\/em><\/a>, and then in my book Foucault: The Birth of Power<\/em><\/a> which appeared with Polity in 2017. That was a book based on both textual and archival research, an attempt to trace how Foucault moved from The Archaeology of Knowledge<\/em> in 1969 to Surveiller et punir<\/em>, Discipline and Punish<\/em> in 1975. I did this by privileging two main sources of information \u2013 his early courses at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, and his political activism.<\/p>\n

With the courses, I was particularly interested in how each of the first three courses took a particular schema of power-knowledge as its principal focus: measure, inquiry, examination; in Lectures on the Will to Know<\/em>, Penal Theories and Institutions<\/em>, The Punitive Society<\/em>. And then how they were explored through a range of historical topics, even as the contemporary moment was not very far away. The opening of the second course, Penal Theories and Institutions<\/em>, begins with the suggestion that those looking for the \u201creason for these lectures\u201d need \u201conly to open one\u2019s eyes\u201d (PTI 3\/1). In a Latin Quarter still scarred by the 1968 events, and remaining heavily policed, Foucault\u2019s audience would have surely known what he meant. Bernard Harcourt and his colleagues\u2019 editorial work on this volume and The Punitive Society<\/em> is invaluable in situating these lectures back in that and other contexts.<\/p>\n

With Foucault\u2019s activism, in the book I do discuss the work of the GIP, the Prisons Information Group, of course. This is on the basis of the group\u2019s publications; the valuable archival and documentary work of Philippe Arti\u00e8res and his colleagues, of which a good sample will be at long last in English translation in 2021<\/a>; and on my own archival work at IMEC which houses the GIP papers. But I also tried to tie Foucault\u2019s work on medicine and mental illness in this period to his activism, particularly in a discussion of his lesser-known work with the Groupe Information Sant\u00e9. Their work on questions concerning abortion rights, industrial accidents and immigrant health is, I think, an important part of the story, the contexts for these lectures and other academic work.<\/p>\n

In returning to The Punitive Society<\/em> for this session I was struck by one word. The word I want to focus on briefly is the notion of \u2018dynastics\u2019.<\/p>\n

When people think of Foucault\u2019s shift to a different or complementary approach to archaeology in the 1970s, we usually talk of genealogy. This, in name at least, is indebted to Nietzsche. \u00a0Foucault does of course use that term \u2018genealogy\u2019 very frequently to describe what he is doing. There are a lot of complexities about that term, but I think we can give a few indications.<\/p>\n

Genealogy is mentioned in \u2018The Order of Discourse\u2019 in December 1970, where critical analyses and genealogical ones are contrasted. Foucault had lectured on Nietzsche and genealogy before this, but had not used it to describe his own work, except for a 1967 suggestion that \u201cmy archaeology owes more to Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly so called\u201d (DE I, 599).<\/p>\n

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, genealogy is generally an object of study, rather than an approach to it. In Lectures on the Will to Know<\/em>, for example, Foucault talks quite a bit about genealogy, but this is in terms of the lineage of kings, ancestors and heroes. He also writes the \u2018Nietzsche, Genealogy, History\u2019 essay around this time, drawing on earlier teaching. But in this it is very much a description of what Nietzsche is doing. Foucault is not claiming this is his approach, at least not yet.<\/p>\n

It is only really in 1974, with the Psychiatric Power<\/em> course, that he says that his work provides a sketch of the \u2018genealogy of knowledge [connaissance<\/em>]\u2019, which he sees as \u201cthe indispensable historical other side [envers<\/em>] to the archaeology of knowledge [savoir<\/em>]\u201d (PP 239\/239). He describes his approach in Discipline and Punish<\/em> in 1975 as a genealogy, and in a 1975 interview says that \u201cif I wanted to be being pretentious, I would use the \u2018the genealogy of morals\u2019 as the general title of what I am doing\u201d (DE II, 753). From this point on, 1975, Foucault uses the term \u2018genealogy\u2019 fairly generally to describe what he is doing.<\/p>\n

But between 1970 and these examples from the mid 1970s, Foucault does not use \u2018genealogy\u2019 to describe an approach. It was either a notion seen as explicitly Nietzschean, or a general descriptor of a contrast to a critical approach, or an object of study itself. Instead, in the early 1970s, Foucault uses another term, which for a while at least seems to be the more likely complementary approach to archaeology. This term is dynasty, a dynastic or a dynastics.<\/p>\n

Foucault uses the term dynastic in both his second and third lecture courses at the Coll\u00e8ge de France. To my knowledge the first use of the term is on 15 December 1971 in the third lecture of Penal Theories and Institutions<\/em>. Foucault is exploring the revolt of the Nu-pieds<\/em>, and suggests we must analyse this not through \u201ca semiotics of the elements, but in a dynastic of forces\u201d (PTI 47\/45). He repeats this formulation later in the course (PTI 199\/199), and then in the closing lecture, when he contrasts the history of sciences with the archaeology of knowledge and the dynastic of knowledge.<\/p>\n

On 8 March 1972 he suggests we have three levels:<\/p>\n