Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, Second Edition

Fournuit: ChaEEe~zge and Mi~,slter~tr~ti~f~~ 11conception. of knowledge as possession. of truth, and to conception of theself as the unitary condition of cognition. We cannot reasonably expectthese radical ideas to he presented in the idiom and style that are the staplesof traditional philosophy.I should add that this introduction to Fowauft9s genealogr is not an ecumenicalexercsise, Tt is not my intent tu reconcile diverse traditions.53 That isfar too ambitious a project and almost certainly bound to fail, Neither isthis introduction a misguided attempt to present tbe ""real" bucault-aneffort Foucault would have despised"s4 I have no intention of trying to offereither a new interpretation or a comprehensive outline of a body of workthat ranges from the brilliant to the possibly incoherent.kThere are someexcellent comprehensive treatments of Foucault's wosk.5"~ indicated, myobjective is to introduce my targeted audience to the most central and productiveof Foucault% ideas, and in my view that is to ideas that are mostfully developed in his middle works.. T offer an introduction that concentrateson fioucault's genealogical analyeics, These are his investigations intohow the development of discursive practices produces truth and knowledgeand so shapes and defines subjects and subjectivity. These are the Foucauldianideas with the greatest epistemological import; these are also theideas most perplexing to those trained in analytic philosophy.Foucault's genealogical contentions represent an extreme point of contrastto the basically Cartesian assumptions and methods that still dominateepisremalagy, This is especially true with respect to the subject." FFUcaultdoes not offer the sort of ccmstructivist alternative to the Cartesianswbject that George Herbert Mead offered, Constmctiviscs such as &Meadregard the subject as a product of cognition rather than a condition of cognition,but that is basically an ontological thesis about the origin and natureof the subject, Taylor comments on the difirence between Ai"Mead7s andFoucault's conception of subjectivity He observes that Mead ""does notseem to take account of the constitutive role of language in the definition ofself."% In a sense, Fowcawlt7s subject is more emergem than conscrucred, AsI consider in Chapter 4, subjectivity for Foucaulr is a matter of saying andnot a matter of being. In short, his is not an ontological or metaphysicalthesis about the self,A caution is now necessary. The radicalness of Foucault's ideas shouldnot lead to counterproductive exaggeration of the differences between histhou& and more familiar philosophy, f disagree with those who anguishover "the demise of the tradition'" and construe Foucauft9s work as part ofsome alleged holistic displacen-tent of modernism by postmodernism.S"Fo~zcault explicitly dismisses the idea that postmodemism constitutes somesort of wholesale intellectual reorientation: "There is no sense at all to theproposition that reason is a long narrative which is now finished, and thatanother narrative is underway.""" Rorty admits similarities between his