portfolio : laurentharrington
Nietzche, Genealogy, History (2019)
The Question of Origin
Foucault elaborated on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals to frame a broader analysis of genealogy as counterhistory. Nietzsche abandoned his pursuit of searching for the origin of morality because he realized religious morality was a construct of suprahistorical narrative, and instead examined morality as an evolutionary process. This revealed the power relations from which the contemporary construct of religious morality was able to take form. Nietzche’s analysis was central to Foucault's perspective on the history of ideas. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault elaborated on Nietzsche’s notions of origin, descent, and emergence. We can contextualize these three ideas, and the genealogical perspective in general, to the concept of individualism.
The search for origins is point-less -- as in origin “points” don’t actually exist. The notion of origin presumes an objective and (paradoxically) timeless conception of Things. Foucault states that such a search is “an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.” Essences are deceptively transformative and involve a process of ‘piecemeal’ construction. The search for an origin of some event is contradictory because it assumes a coherent, static totality of an arbitrarily defined entity, yet necessarily operates by dissecting dynamic, indefinite ‘causal’ variables. By this logic, each of these causal variables possesses their own indeterminate lineage, origin. “The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss.”
Epistemological ruptures are to knowledge as ideological ‘turns’ are to emergence. Ideological forces steer in various directions as ‘angles’ generated by open and closed information feedback loops which refract ‘perspective’ to an internal or external agent, versus the process of internalized hegemony. Whereas knowledge involves vertical domination while erasing the unenlightened past, emergence is a field of confrontation. Foucault describes human individuation through the process of emergence: “...individual differences emerge at another stage of the relationship of forces, when the species has become victorious and when it is no longer threatened from outside.” Basically, after successfully overcoming confrontations with harsh environments and other species (domination), the field of confrontation for humans evolved into the interspecies level. As humans become more protected from external threats, or eliminate external variables in general, the ego continues to evolve and becomes confronted with other egos.
Descent refers to the physiological imprint of ancestral history on an individual’s body. We can think about a person’s genotype. This genotype is comprised of -- to use the term ‘piecemeal’ again, or fragmentary -- information threaded from the traits of ancestors. "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body."