Genealogical History

Michel Foucault in his essay entitled, “7 January 1976” introduces the concept of the “genealogy” and how it relates to historical knowledge and literary criticism. He says that genealogies are:

Naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges…a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it—that is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work (Newton 130-131).[1]

In using word knowledges instead of knowledge, Foucault is introducing a more nuanced view of history than previously acknowledged and that he explicates when he says, “…history is the complex interrelationship of a variety of discourses, the various ways—artistic, social, political, and so on—that people think and talk about their world” (Bressler 220).[2]

The importance of multiplicity, layers of discourse, of the idea that history is neither linear (no definite beginning, middle, end) nor teleological (purposefully moving forward to a culminating point, or known end) typifies both the theories of Foucault but also connects him to the theories of Cultural Poetics or New Historicism (Bressler 218-219). This view of history also connects these theorists to the work of Derek Walcott. Walcott said in a 1983 interview with Leif Sjoberg that, “I do not believe in heroes. I do not believe in human progress, that is, that man gets better. How can one, after Auschwitz, My Lai, Beirut…” (Baer 80)[3]

Do you believe in human progress (or the teleological view of History)?

Should history be written by Historians or Foucault-inspired genealogists, both?

Is the task of the historian an objective or subjective one?

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[1] Newton, K.M., ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. 2^nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

[2] Bressler, Charles E., ed. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4^th Edition. NewJersey: Pearson Education, 2007.

[3] Baer, William, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Literary Conversations Ser. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. This is from an interview included in this book entitled “An interview with Derek Walcott” by Leif Sjoberg in 1983.